Alternative hypothesis: you have been conditioned to click on discussion because it has a better reward schedule.

• raises hand *

Partially because it's much more active over here.

I'm more likely to find discussion topics and comments in my areas of interest, while Main seems to be mostly about AI, math, health, and productivity, none of which are particularly interesting for me.

I mainly skim http://lesswrong.com/topcomments/?t=day and http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/topcomments/?t=day, then when I see something interesting I look at where it comes from.

I generally find Main posts uninteresting, or overlong and based on some incorrect premise or other.

There seem to be perverse incentives in the dating industry. Most obviously: if you successfully create a forever-happy couple, you have lost your customers; but if you make people date many promissingly-looking-yet-disappointing partners, they will keep returning to your site.

Actualy, maybe your customers are completely hypocritical about their goals: maybe "finding a true love" is their official goal, but what they really want is plausible deniability for fucking dozens of attractive strangers while pretending to search for the perfect soulmate. You could create a website which displays the best one or two matches, instead of hundreds of recommendations, and despite having higher success rate for people who try it, most people will probably be unimpressed and give you some bullshit excuses if you ask them.

Also, if people are delusional about their "sexual market value", you probably won't make money by trying to fix their delusions. They will be offended by the types of "ordinary" people you offer them as their best matches, when the competing website offers them Prince Charming (whose real goal is to maximize his number of one night stands) or Princess Charming (who really is a prostitute using the website to find potential clients). They will look at the photos and profiles from your website, and from the competing website, and then decide your website isn't even worth trying. They may also post an offended blog review, and you bet it will be popular on social networks.

So you probably would need to do this as a non-profit philantropic activity.

EDIT: I have an idea about how to remove the perverse incentives, but it requires a lot of trust in users. Make them pay if they have a happy relationship. For example if the website finds you a date, set a regular payment of $5 each month for the next 10 years; if the relationship breaks, cancel the payment. The value of a good relationship is higher than $5 a month, but the total payment of $600 could be enough for the website.

I wonder to what extent the problems you describe (divorces, conflict, etc) are caused mainly by poor matching of the people having the problems, and to what extent they are caused by the people having poor relationship (or other) skills, relatively regardless of how well matched they are with their partner? For example, it could be that someone is only a little bit less likely to have dramatic arguments with their "ideal match" than with a random partner -- they just happen to be an argumentative person or haven't figured out better ways of resolving disagreements.

The problem with dating sites (like social network sites or internet messengers) is that the utility you can gain from it is VERY related to how many other people are actually using it. This means that there is a natural drift towards a monopoly. Nobody wants to join a dating site that only has 1000 people. If you do not have a really good reason to think that your dating site idea will get off the ground, it probably wont.

One way you could possibly get past this is to match people up who do not sign up or even know about this service.

For example, you could create bots that browse okcupid, for answers to questions, ignore okcupid's stupid algorithms in favor of our own much better ones, and then send two people a message that describes how our service works and introduces them to each other.

Is this legal? If so, I wonder if okcupid would take stop it anyway.

Forbidding anyone who hasn't read “The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence” from watching any Hollywood or Disney movies about romance would go a long way. ;-)

a dating site may be a fantastic thing to try

So how would it be different from OK Cupid, for example?

As an aside, wasn't the original motivation for Facebook Zuckerberg's desire to meet girls..? :-D

I've had ideas sort of like this at the back of my mind since seeing Paul Graham pointing out how broken online dating is in one of his essays. (Not so much analyzing all of someone's existing data, but analyzing IM transcripts to match people with IM buddies they'd be likely to make good friends with is a thing I considered doing.) Haven't gotten too far with any of them yet, but I'm glad you reminded me, since I was planning on playing with some of my own data soon just to see what I find.

Do you think that not having dated much would be much of a comparative disadvantage in working on this problem? That's one of the reasons I hesitate to make it my main project.

A possibly-related problem - why does every site I see that says it is for matching strangers who might like to be friends get full of people looking for a date? (Small sample size, but I've never seen one that didn't give me the sense that the vast majority of the members were looking for romance or a one night stand or something.)

If an altruistic group of numbers-inclined people was to start working together to improve the world in a non-existential risk reducing kind of way, it strikes me that a dating site may be a fantastic thing to try.

Why altruistic? If it's worth anything, it's worth money. If it won't even pay its creators for the time they'll put in to create it, where's the value?

It strikes me that it is much more plausible to argue that the dating market suffers from market failure through information asymmetry, market power and high search costs than to argue the same about economic activity. Yet although people search high and low to find (often non-existent) market failures to justify economic interventions, interventions in the dating market are greeted with near-uniform hostlility. I predict that, outside of LessWrong, your proposal will generate a high "Ick" factor as a taboo violation. "Rationality-based online dating will set you up with scientifically-chosen dates..." this is likely to be an anti-selling point to most users.

Have you seen this TED talk?

Viliam_Bur sort of said this, but it doesn't seem possible to outcompete the existing websites due to perverse incentives.

If I build a site optimizing for long term success, and another dating site optimizes for an intense honeymoon phase (which encourages people to come back and spread the word about the site) then I will lose. And optimizing for long term success is really hard since feedback occurs on the order of decades.

Of course I'm assuming that intense short term happiness and long term stability aren't very highly correlated and I could be wrong. I'm also assuming that stability is desirable - I'd be curious if anyone disagrees.

Companies are trying, unfortunately the incentives seem sort of messed up to me. Dating websites have an incentive to encourage people to use their service, not get into wonderful long term relationships. Hence I would expect them to optimize for relationships with an intense honeymoon phase, rather than relationships with a high chance of long term success and compatibility.

Since we're after long term success, feedback will occur on the order of decades - making this a very hard optimization problem.

If you have a high IQ and are good at math go into finance. If you have a high IQ, strong social skills but are bad at math go into law. If you have a high IQ, a good memory but weak social and math skills become a medical doctor. If you have a low IQ but are attractive marry someone rich. If you have a very low IQ get on government benefits for some disability and work at an under-the-table job.

"Career" is an unnatural bucket. You don't pick a career. You choose between concrete actions that lead to other actions. Imagine picking a path through a tree. This model can encompass the notion of a career as a set of similar paths. Your procedure is a good way to estimate the value of these paths, but doesn't reflect the tree-like structure of actual decisions. In other words, options are important under uncertainty, and the model you've listed doesn't seem to reflect this.

For example, I'm not choosing between (General Infantry) and (Mathematician). I'm choosing between (Enlist in the Military) and (Go to College). Even if the terminal state (General Infantry) had the same expected value as (Mathematician), going to college should more valuable because you will have many options besides (Mathematician) should your initial estimate prove wrong, while enlisting leads to much lower branching factor.

How should you weigh the value of having options? I have no clue.

Your goal is likely not to maximize your income. For one, you have to take cost of living into account - a $60k/yr job where you spend $10k/yr on housing is better than a $80k/yr (EDIT:$70k/yr, math was off) job where you spend $25k/yr on housing.

For another, the time and stress of the career field has a very big impact on quality-of-life. If you work sixty hour weeks, in order to get to the same kind of place as a forty hour week worker you have to spend money to free up twenty hours per week in high-quality time. That's a lot of money in cleaners, virtual personal assistants, etc.

As far as "how do I use the concept of comparative advantage to my advantage", here's how I'd do it:

1. Make a list of skills and preferences. It need not be exhaustive - in fact, I'd go for the first few things you can think of. The more obvious of a difference from the typical person, the more likely it is to be your comparative advantage. For instance, suppose you like being alone, do not get bored easily by monotonous work, and do not have any particular attachment to any one place.

2. Look at career options and ask yourself if that is something that fits your skills and preferences. Over-the-road trucking is a lot more attractive to people who can stand boredom and isolation, and don't feel a need to settle down in one place. Conversely, it's less attractive to people who are the opposite way, and so is likely to command a higher wage.

3. Now that you have a shorter list of things you're likely to face less competition for or be better at, use any sort of evaluation to pick among the narrower field.

In addition to maximizing income, maximizing savings/investments is very important. You can be poor off of a $500,000 salary and rich off of a $50,000 salary.

Offline practice: make a habit of writing down good questions you could have asked in a conversation you recently had. Reward yourself for thinking of questions, regardless of how slow you are at generating them. (H/T Dan of Charisma Tips, which has other good tips scattered around that blog).

I saw a speech pathologist for this. I was taught to ask boring questions I'm not really interested in asking on the hopes that they will lead to something interesting happening. "How was your weekend?", "What are some of your hobbies?", "How about this weather?", and all that mess.

In practice, it feels so forced I can't do it in real life.

V zrgntnzrq gur fbyhgvba. Gur nafjre "vss q vf engvbany" frrzrq gbb rnfl gb zr fb V thrffrq gung gur nafjre jnf npghnyyl "sbe nyy q" orpnhfr gung jbhyq or fhssvpvragyl gevpxl naq nyfb fbzrguvat fbzrguvat ersyrpgvbaf.

Why are these considered inappropriate for people without a google account?

Why not simply estimate it yourself? These sorts of things aren't very hard to do. For example, you can estimate typing as follows: peak at 120 WPM; words are average 4 characters; each character (per Shannon and other's research; see http://www.gwern.net/Notes#efficient-natural-language ) conveys ~1 bit; hence your typing bandwidth is 120 4 1 = <480 bits per minute or <8 bits per second.

Do that for a few modalities like speech, and sum.

As a baseline estimate for just the muscular system, the worlds faster drummer can play at about 20 beats per second. That's probably an upper limit on twitch speeds of human muscles, even with a arbitrarily fast mind running in the body. Assuming you had a system on the receiving end that could detect arbitrary muscle contractions, and could control each muscle in your body independently (again, this is an arbitrarily fast mind, so I'd think it should be able to), there are about 650 muscle groups in the body according to wikipedia, so I would say a good estimate for just the muscular system would be 650 x 20bits/s or about 13 Kb/s.

Once you get into things like EKGs, I think it all depends on how much control the mind actually has over processes that are largely subconscious, as well as how sensitive your receiving devices are. That could make the bandwidth much higher, but I don't know a good way to estimate that.

Don't you have to define the receiver as well as the transmitter, to have any idea about the channel bandwidth? I mean, if the "outside world" is the Dark Lords of the Matrix, the theoretical maximum output bandwidth is the processing speed of the mind.

Short of having a precise definition of “deliberate” I don't think it's possible to give a precise number, but for a Fermi estimate... Dammit! Gwern has already made the calculation I was thinking of!

Hold off on proposing solutions.

The other videos I've sampled from that channel have also been good.

If you have to ask...

Just kidding. It's a great question. Two thoughts: "Nothing is as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it." - Daniel Khaneman "If you want to buy something, wait two weeks and see if you still want to buy it." - my mom

This is a big open topic, but I'll talk about my top method.

I have a prior that our capitalist, semi-open market is thorough and that if an idea is economically feasible, someone else is doing it / working on it. So when I come up with a new good idea, I assume someone else has already thought of it and begin researching why it hasn't been done already. Once that research is done, I'll know not only if it is a good idea or a bad idea but why it is which, and a hint of what it would take to turn it from a bad idea into a good idea. Often these good ideas have been tried / considered before but we may have a local comparative advantage that makes it practical here were it was not elsewhere (legislation, better technology, cheaper labor, costlier labor... )

For example: inland, non-directional, shallow oil, drilling rigs use a very primitive method to survey their well bore. Daydreaming during my undergrad I came up with a alternative method that would provide results orders of magnitudes more accurate. I put together my hypothesis that this was not already in use because: this was a niche market and the components were too costly / poor quality before the smartphone boom. My hypothesis was wrong, a company had a fifteen year old patent on the method and it was being marketed (along with a highly synergistic product line) to offshore drilling rigs. It was a good idea, so good of an idea that it made someone a lot of money 15 years ago and made offshore drilling a lot safer, but it wasn't a good idea for me.

Maybe CfAR should invite him to a workshop.

(I suspect that if CfAR should invite him to a workshop they should do it themselves in some official capacity and don't think random Less Wrongers ought to contact Mr. Jacobs.)

ETA: Ah, rats, the article is from 2008. He's probably lost interest.

Well, I'm curious about the results. Especially, whether he manages to avoid some "hollywood rationality" memes. He already mentioned Spock...

Because you are breaking the law?

Because it signals "I am so wealthy that I can afford to tear up money" and blatantly signaling wealth is crass. And it also signals "I am so callous that I would rather tear up money than give it to the poor", which is also crass. And the argument that a one dollar bill really isn't very much money isn't enough to disrupt the signal.

Because money is heavily charged with symbolism in our society, much like that which lies beneath pants.

Of course, destroying the dollar bill also doesn't reduce societal wealth.

Because destroying money is viscerally aversive and surprising?

Another datapoint is the counterintuitiveness of searching a desk: with each drawer you open looking for something, the probability of finding it in the next drawer increases, but your probability of ever finding it decreases. The difference seems to whipsaw people; see http://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1994-falk

I think the monty hall problem very closely resembles a more natural one in which the probability is 1/2; namely, that where the host is your opponent and chose whether to offer you the chance to switch. So evolutionarily-optimized instincts tell us the probability is 1/2.

It's worth remembering that there is no single Guess/Hint culture. Such high-context cultures depend on everyone sharing a specific set of interpretation rules, allowing information to be conveyed through subtle signals (hints) rather than explicit messages.

For my own part, I absolutely endorse asking for confirmation in any interaction among peers, taking responses to such requests literally, and disengaging if you don't get a response. If a Guess/Hint-culture native can't step out of their preferred mode long enough to give you a "yes" or "no," and you can't reliably interpret their hints, you're unlikely to have a worthwhile interaction anyway.

With nonpeers, it gets trickier; disengaging (and asking in the first place) may have consequences you prefer to avoid. In which case I recommend talking to third parties who can navigate that particular Guess/Hint dialect, and getting some guidance from them. This can be as blatant as bringing them along to translate for you (or play Cyrano, online), or can be more like asking them for general pointers. (E.g. "I'm visiting a Chinese family for dinner. Is there anything I ought to know about how to offer compliments, ask for more food, turn down food I don't want, make specific requests about food? How do I know when I'm supposed to start eating, stop eating, leave? Are there rules I ought to know about who eats first? Etc. etc. etc.")

Some more Guess/Hint culture suggestions.

Consider:

B: working in the lab now
A: (suspecting, as you did, that perhaps B didn't want to chat) oh ok. give me a buzz when you're free?

This will typically communicate that you've understood that they're busy and don't want to chat, that you're OK with that, and that you want to talk to them.

That said, there exist Guess/Hint cultures in which it also communicates that you have something urgent to talk about, because if you didn't you would instead have said:

B: working in the lab now
A: oh, ok. bye!

...which in those cultures will communicate that the ball is in their court. (This depends on an implicit understanding that it is NOT OK to leave messages unresponded to, even if they don't explicitly request a response, so they are now obligated to contact you next... but since you didn't explicitly mention it (which would have suggested urgency) they are expected to know that they can do so when it's convenient for them.

EDIT: All of that being said, my inner Hint-culture native also wants to add that being visible in an online chat forum when I'm not free to chat is rude in the first place.

The general problem is real, but here's a solution to the specific problem of finding the latest open thread: just click the words "latest open thread," rather than the comment that displays below it.

There are some techniques that can be used with simulated annealing to deal with noise in the evaluation of the objective function. See Section 3 of Branke et al (2008) for a quick overview of proposed methods (they also propose new techniques in that paper). Most of these techniques come with the usual convergence guarantees that are associated with simulated annealing (but there are of course performance penalties in dealing with noise).

What is the dimensionality of your parameter space? What do you know about the noise? (e.g., if you know that the noise is mostly homoscedastic or if you can parameterize it, then you can probably use this to push the performance of some of the simulated annealing algorithms.)

That rather depends on the particulars, for example, do you know (or have good reasons to assume) the characteristics of your noise?

Basically you have a noisy sample and want some kind of an efficient estimator, right?

You may find better ideas under the phrase "stochastic optimization," but it's a pretty big field. My naive suggestion (not knowing the particulars of your problem) would be to do a stochastic version of Newton's algorithm. I.e. (1) sample some points (x,y) in the region around your current guess (with enough spread around it to get a slope and curvature estimate). Fit a locally weighted quadratic regression through the data. Subtract some constant times the identity matrix from the estimated Hessian to regularize it; you can choose the constant (just) big enough to enforce that the move won't exceed some maximum step size. Set your current guess to the maximizer of the regularized quadratic. Repeat re-using old data if convenient.

I actually lost my faith in MIRI because of Kruel's criticism, so I too would be glad if someone adressed it. I think his criticism is far more comprehensive that most of the other criticism on this page (well, this post has little bit of the same).

Personal opinion:

• MIRI are doing very interesting research regardless of the reality of AGI existential risk and feasibility of the FAI problem

• AGI existential risk is sufficiently founded to worry about, so even if it is not the most important thing, someone should be on it

Perhaps his server is underspecced? It's currently slowed to an absolute c r a w l. What little I have seen certainly looks worthwhile, though.

Get your questions answered for the low low price of $2.69!

How about you simply write where you live, and tell other LWers in the same area to contact you? It may or may not work, but the effort needed is extremely low. (You can also put that information in LW settings.)

Or write this: "I am interested in meeting LW readers in [insert place], so if you live near and would like to meet and talk, send me a private message".

As such, a sufficiently smart agent would apparently have a "DWIM" (do what the creator means) imperative built-in, which would even supersede its actually given goals -- being sufficiently smart, it would understand that its goals are "wrong" (from some other agent's point of view), and self-modify, or it would not be superintelligent.

Here is a description of a real-world AI by Microsoft's chief AI researcher:

Without any programming, we just had an ai system that watched what people did.

For about three months.

Over the three months, the system started to learn, this is how people behave when they want to enter an elevator.

This is the type of person that wants to go to the third floor as opposed to the fourth floor.

After that training.

Period, we switched off the learning period and said go ahead and control the leaders.

Without any programming at all, the system was able to understand people's intentions and act on their behalf.

Does it have a DWIM imperative? As far as I can tell, no. Does it have goals? As far as I can tell, no. Does it fail by absurdly misinterpreting what humans want? No.

This whole talk about goals and DWIM modules seems to miss how real world AI is developed and how natural intelligences like dogs work. Dogs can learn the owners goals and do what the owner wants. Sometimes they don't. But they rarely maul their owners when what the owner wants it to do is to scent out drugs.

Downvoted for being deliberately insulting. There's no call for that, and the toleration and encouragement of rationality-destroying maliciousness must be stamped out of LW culture. A symposium proceedings is not considered as selective as a journal, but it still counts as publication when it is a complete article.

The condescending tone with which he presents his arguments (which are, paraphrasing him, "slightly odd, to say the least") is amazing. Who is this guy and where did he come from? Does anyone care about what he has to say?

Downvoted for mentioning RL here. If you look through what he wrote here in the past, it is nearly always rambling, counterproductive, whiny and devoid of insight. Just leave him be.

Loosemore does not disagree with the orthogonality thesis. Loosemore's argument is basically that we should expect beliefs and goals to both be amenable to self-improvement and that turning the universe into smiley faces when told to make humans happy would be a model of the world failure and that an AI that makes such failures will not be able to take over the world.

There are arguments why you can't hard-code complex goals, so you need an AI that natively updates goals in a model-dependent way. Which means that an AI designed to kill humanity will do so and not turn into a pacifist due to an ambiguity in its goal description. An AI that does mistake "kill all humans" with "make humans happy" would do similar mistakes when trying to make humans happy and would therefore not succeed at doing so. This is because the same mechanisms it uses to improve its intelligence and capabilities are used to refine its goals. Thus if it fails on refining its goals it will fail on self-improvement in general.

I hope you can now see how wrong your description of what Loosemore claims is.

If your commentary had anything in it except for:

1) A disgraceful Ad Hominem insult, right out of the starting gate ("Richard Loosemore (score one for nominative determinism)..."). In other words, you believe in discrediting someone because you can make fun of their last name? That is the implication of "nominative determinism".

2) Gratuitous scorn ("Loosemore ... has a new, well, let's say "paper" which he has, well, let's say "published""). The paper has in fact been published by the AAAI.

3) Argument Ad Absurdum ("...So if you were to design a plain ol' garden-variety nuclear weapon intended for gardening purposes ("destroy the weed"), it would go off even if that's not what you actually wanted. However, if you made that weapon super-smart, it would be smart enough to abandon its given goal ("What am I doing with my life?"), consult its creators, and after some deliberation deactivate itself..."). In other words, caricature the argument and try to win by mocking the caricature

4) Inaccuracies. The argument in my paper has so much detail that you omitted, that it is hard to know where to start. The argument is that there is a clear logical contradiction if an agent takes action on the basis of the WORDING of a goal statement, when its entire UNDERSTANDING of the world is such that it knows the action will cause effects that contradict what the agent knows the goal statement was designed to achieve. That logical contradiction is really quite fundamental. However, you fail to perceive the real implication of that line of argument, which is: how come this contradiction only has an impact in the particular case where the agent is thinking about its supergoal (which, by assumption, is "be friendly to humans" or "try to maximize human pleasure")? Why does the agent magically NOT exhibit the same tendency to execute actions that in practice have the opposite effects than the goal statement wording was trying to achieve? If we posit that the agent does simply ignore the contradiction, then, fine: but you then have the problem of demonstrating that this agent is not the stupidest creature in existence, because it will be doing this on many other occasions, and getting devastatingly wrong results. THAT is the real argument.

5) Statements that contradict what others (including those on your side of the argument, btw) say about these systems: "There is no level of capability which magically leads to allowing for fundamental changes to its own goals, on the contrary, the more capable an agent, the more it can take precautions for its goals not to be altered." Au contraire, the whole point of these systems is that they are supposed to be capable of self-redesign.

6) Statements that patently answer themselves, if you actually read the paper, and if you understand the structure of an intelligent agent: "If "the goals the superintelligent agent pursues" and "the goals which the creators want the superintelligent agent to pursue, but which are not in fact part of the superintelligent agent's goals" clash, what possible reason would there be for the superintelligent agent to care, or to change itself......?" The answer is trivially simple: the posited agent is trying to be logically consistent in its reasoning, so if it KNOWS that the wording of a goal statement inside its own motivation engine will, in practice, cause effects that are opposite the effects that the goal statement was supposed to achieve, it will have to deal with that contradiction. What you fail to understand is that the imperative "Stay as logically consistent in your reasoning as you possibly can" is not an EXPLICIT goal statement in the hierarchy of goals, it is IMPLICITLY built into the design of the agent. Sorry, but that is what a logical AI does for a living. It is in its architecture, not in the goal stack.

7) Misdirection and self-contradiction. You constantly complain about the argument as if it had something to do with the wishes, desires, values or goals of OTHER agents. You do this in a mocking tone, too: the other agents you list include "squirrels, programmers, creators, Martians...". And yet, the argument in my paper specifically rejects any considerations about goals of other agents EXCEPT the goal inside the agent itself, which directs it to (e.g.) "maximize human pleasure". The agent is, by definition, being told to direct its attention toward the desires of other agents! That is the premise on which the whole paper is based (a premise not chosen by me: it was chosen by all the MIRI and FHI people I listed in the references). So, on the one hand, the premise is that the agent is driven by a supergoal that tells it to pay attention to the wishes of certain other creatures ..... but on the other hand, here are you, falling over yourself to criticise the argument in the paper because it assumes that the agent "cares" about other creatures. By definition it cares.

..... then I would give you some constructive responses to your thoughtful, polite, constructive critique of the paper. However, since you do not offer a thoughtful, polite, contructuve criticism, but only the seven categories of fallacy and insult listed above, I will not.

Textcelerator is another speedreading app by User:jimrandomh.

This has been suggested several times before, and is in my opinion VERY low priority compared to all the other things we should be doing to fix Less Wrong logistics.

Or to just display the number of upvotes and downvotes.

Of course, the most destructive wish is hiding under the red button.

Probably. Either that, or it'll have no effect whatsoever.

Get a third independent opinion.

Is there a family history of this? If so that would skew my assessment towards that of the first doctor. If not, seriously another opinion...

My impression is that glaucoma (which is, basically, too high intraocular pressure) is easy to diagnose. Two doctors disagreeing on it would worry me.

Don't get just a third independent opinion, get a fourth one as well.

Can you ask the second doctor to examine you to at least the same standard as the first one?

Maybe someone on Less Wrong who has access to UpToDate can send you a copy of their glaucoma page, for an authoritative list of pros and cons.

Laser iridotomy appears to be less risky:

http://www.surgeryencyclopedia.com/La-Pa/Laser-Iridotomy.html

http://www.surgeryencyclopedia.com/Fi-La/Iridectomy.html

As for the second question, I use coinbase. As to the first, never try to time these things. You will be beaten by people with more information. Instead just slowly trickle in and have pre-defined rules about when you will sell rather than trying to time an exit. Though I admit I broke my own advice and did an impulse-buy the other night when everyone was panicking over Gox and the price was $100 less than a day before and a day after.

And now Flexcoin goes under, and I see that two other exchanges, Poloniex and Inputs.io, recently suffered substantial thefts. Is the lesson to learn from this, "don't get into Bitcoin", or merely "keep your Bitcoins in your own wallet and only expose them online for the minimum time to make a transaction"?

It depends on if you're planning on selling soon or if you think bitcoins will gain value in the long term. If it's a longterm purchase, the difference in price between now and a few weeks ago is a lot less big than either of those prices will be from the theoretical heights bitcoin can reach.

Note that I’m not looking for PUA-type advice ... I want is advice on a) how not to fall so hard/so fast for (a very small minority of) women, and b)how to break the spell the current one has over me without giving up her friendship.

Seems to me like you want to overcome your "one-itis" and stop being a "beta orbiter", but you are not looking for an advice which would actually use words like "one-itis" and "beta orbiter". I know it's an exaggeration, but this is almost how it seems to me. Well, I'll try to comply:

1) You don't have to maximize the number of sexual partners. You still could try to increase a number of interesting women you had interesting conversation with. I believe that is perfectly morally okay, and still could reduce the feeling of scarcity.

Actually, any interesting activity would be helpful. Anything you can think about, instead of spending your time thinking about that one person.

2) Regularly interacting the person you are obsessed with is exactly how you maximize the length of obsession. It's like saying that you want to overcome your alcohol addiction, but you don't want to stop drinking regularly. Well, if one is not an alcoholic, they can manage to drink moderately without developing an addiction; but when one already is an alcoholic, the only way to quit is to stop drinking, completely, for a very long time. The reliable way to overcome the obsession with another person is to stop all contact for, I don't know, maybe three months. No talking, no phone calls, no e-mails, no checking her facebook page, no praying to her statue or a photograph, no asking mutual friends about how she lives, no composing poems about her... absolutely no new information about her and no imaginary interaction with her. And doing something meaningful instead.

When the obsession is over, then you can try the friendship. Until then, it's just an obsession rationalized as friendship; an addiction rationalized as not wanting to give up the good parts.

b. Self-invest with flow) activities.

I suggest self-investing because, right now, a large part of your identity is entangled with your feelings towards her. Self-investing means growing your identity means transcending your feelings.

I suggest flow because, if you pull off a flow state, you invest all your cognitive resources in the task you're working on. Meaning your brain is unable to think of anything else. This is incredibly valuable.

a. I'm coming out of a similar situation. A large contributor was the fact I wasn't meeting a lot of women. If your universe consists of two datable women, it's easy to obsess on one. If you're regularly meeting a lot of women who tend to have the traits you look for, that happens much less. May not be your problem, but what you've written sounds familiar enough that I'm going to go ahead and try other-optimizing.

If you haven't read it yet, this is generally helpful.

Infatuation seems to be fairly universal.

I wonder if the converse approach of "start by proposing lots and lots of solutions, even if they are bad" could be a good idea

This is commonly known as brainstorming, around since the 50s.

Apparently the evidence on whether it actually works is contradictory.

Read LessWrong? :)

A rather belated response, but hopefully still relevant: consider exploring fields of interest to you that are sufficiently different from compsci to give your brain a break while still being productive?

To explain by means of an example: I happen to have a strong interest in both historical philology and theoretical physics, and I've actively leveraged this to my advantage in that when my brain is fed up of thinking about conundrums of translation in Old Norse poetry, I'll switch gears completely and crack open a textbook on, say, subatomic physics or Lie algebras, and start reading/working problems. Similarly, if I've spent several hours trying to wrap my head around a mathematical concept and need a respite, I can go read an article or a book on some aspect of Anglo-Saxon literature. It's still a productive use of time, but it's also a refreshing break, because it requires a different type of thinking. (At least, in my experience?) Of course, if I'm exceptionally low on energy, I simply resort to burying myself in a good book (non-fiction or fiction, generally it doesn't matter).

Another example: a friend of mine is a computer scientist, but did a minor in philosophy and is an avid musician in his spare time. (And both reading philosophy and practicing music have the added advantage of being activities that do not involve staring at a computer screen!)

You can use pomodoros for leisure as well as work. If you worry about staying too long on the internet you can set a timer or a random alarm to kick you off.

What happened with the political threads?

Curious about current LW opinion. Do you think we should have political threads once in a while? [pollid:617]

A minimizer will fill the lightcone to make sure there aren't paperclips elsewhere it can reach. What if other civs are hiding? What if there is undiscovered science which implies natural processes create paperclips somewhere? What if there are "Boltzmann paperclips"? Minimizing means minimizing!

paperclip maximer is used because a factory that makes paperclips might imagine that a paperclip maximizing ai is exactly what it wants to make. There aren't that many anti-paperclip factories

I didn't see this formalization used on LW or the wiki, perhaps it is of interest.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?num=100&q=Kullback-Leibler%20OR%20surprisal%20site%3Alesswrong.com

Speaking of the LW wiki, how fundamental is it to LW compared to the sequences, discussion threads, Main articles, hpmor, etc?

Not very, unfortunately.

I've never used Beeminder, but I find social commitment works well instead. Even teling someone who has no way to check aside from asking me helps a lot. That might be less effective if you're willing to lie though.

An alternative would be to exchange commitments with a friend, proportional to your incomes...

Remember that it may work for you or it might not. Try and see.

Beeminder didn't work at all for me, I found it was all sticks and no carrot.

The family name of whoever came out on top of the squabble each time the civilization collapsed.

Did your psychologist describe the type of information that should not be known?

In any case, I'm not completely sure that accepting new information (never mind seeking it out) is always fully compatible with rationality-as-winning. Nick Bostrom for example has compiled a taxonomy of information hazards over on his site; any of them could potentially be severe enough to overcome the informational advantage of their underlying data. Of course, they do seem to be pretty rare, and I don't think a precautionary principle with regard to information is justified in the absence of fairly strong and specific reasoning.

what would happen if rationalists believed otherwise than what they believe

They wouldn't be rationalists anymore, duh.

Taboo "rationalists": What would happen if you stopped trying to change your map to better reflect the territory? It most probably would reflect the territory less.

Is the answer simply "they would be normal people, like my psychologist"?

"Normal people" are not all the same. (For example, many "normal people" are unlike your psychologist.) Which of the many subkinds of the "normal people" do you mean?

Some things are unrelated. For example, let's suppose that you are a rationalist, and you also have a broken leg. That's two things that make you different from the average human. But those two things are unrelated. It would be a mistake to think -- an average human doesn't have a broken leg; by giving up my rationality I will become more similar to the average human, therefore giving up my rationality will heal my leg.

Replace "broken leg" with whatever problem you are discussing with your psychologist. Do you have evidence that rational people are more likely to have this specific problem than irrational (but otherwise similar: same social background, same education, same character, same health problems) people?

(I'm still pondering if I should post my cogitations: they interesting, but somewhat private)

So information that shouldn't be known?

Your psychologist's job is to help you learn to live in the real world. Advocacy of selective ignorance is highly suspect.

Interesting. I noticed that in the first two, my subvocalization became disjointed, sounding as if each word was recorded separately like it would be in a simplistic text-to-speech program. In the 500 wpm one, this was less of a problem, and I'm not sure I was even entirely subvocalizing it. It ended up being easier and more comfortable to read than the slower speeds.

I like this idea, but am seriously concerned about its effect on eye health. Weak eye muscles are not a thing you want to have, even if you live in the safest place in the world.

I already made basically this exact comment in this open thread.