Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015

Be charitable; don't assume they're trying to present themselves as martyrs. Instead they could be outlining the peculiar challenges and difficulties of their particular positions.

Life is hard for everyone at times.

One kid, who had a younger sibling, picked the thesis statement: "Being an older sibling is hard." Another kid did "Being the youngest child is hard." Yet another did "Being the middle child is hard", and someone else did "Being an only child is hard." I find this as a rather humorous example of how people often make it look like they're being oppressed.

Taken at face value, the four statements aren't incompatible. Saying that being X is hard in an absolute sense isn't the same as saying that being X is harder than being Y in a relative sense, or that X people are being oppressed.

It is much easier to notice the things in your situation that don't go well than notice all the things that happen in someone else's situation.

I'm curious; have you pointed this out to the students? If so, how did they react?

The more you can blame whatever difficulties and frustrations you have on things outside your control, the less you have to think of them as your own fault. People like to think well of themselves.

Each experience has its own difficulties that are unknown unless you've lived it.

A lot of times different ways that people act are different ways of getting emotional needs, even if that isn't a conscious choice. In this case it is likely that they want recognition and sympathy for different pains they have have. Or, it's more likely the case that the different hurts they have (being lonely, being picked on, getting hand-me-downs, whatever) are easily brought to mind. But when the person tells someone else about the things in their life that bother them, it's possible that someone could say "hey, it sounds like you are really lonely being an only child" and they would feel better.

Some different example needs are things like attention, control, acceptance, trust, play, meaning. There is a psychological model of how humans work that thinks of emotional needs similar to physical needs like hunger, etc. So people have some need for attention, and will do different things for attention. They also have a need for emotional safety, just like physical safety. So just like if someone was sitting on an uncomfortable chair will move and complain about how their chair is uncomfortable, someone will do a similar thing if their big brother is picking on them.

Another reason people often make it look like they are being oppressed is that they feel oppressed. I don't know if you are mostly talking about people your age, or everyone, but it is not a surprise to me that lots of kids feel oppressed, since school and their parents prevent them from doing what they want. Plenty of adults express similar feelings though, i just expect not as many.

Maybe they are friends and discussed their thesis topics with each other. I find it unlikely that 4 out of 20 students would come up with sibling related topics independently.

If it's given how successful you were, it looks better if it was under worse circumstances. Thus, people benefit from overstating their challenges. Since people aren't perfect liars, they also overestimate their challenges.

Because running in the oppression olympics is the easiest way to gain status in most western societies. Looks like even children are starting to realise that, or maybe they're being indoctrinated to do so in other classes or at home.

Related post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/9b/help_help_im_being_oppressed/

Here's a month's worth:

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153041257924228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153033570824228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153030238814228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153021749629228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152977126839228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152972605814228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152972301299228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152964087234228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152957903859228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152947952344228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152946520029228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152945423789228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152941108249228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152940624254228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152938634304228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152937953959228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152933586294228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152929868929228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152919146569228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152918491764228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152915799124228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152912313154228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152908949454228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152904788444228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152902713609228

https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152900703339228

Why would you not create a sockpuppet facebook account for the purposes of reading posts you want to read?

Julia Galef, President and Co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, has video blogged on this twice. The first was How to Raise a Rationalist Kid, and the second is Wisdom from Our Mother, which might be a bit more relevant to you because, in that video, her brother Jesse specifically discusses what his mother did in situations where he wasn't enthusiastic about learning something. I should say that it has more to do with when your kids think that they're bad at things than with when they reject something out of hand. To that I would say, and I think many others would say: Kids are smart and curious, rationalism makes sense, and if they don't reject everything else kids have learned throughout history out of hand, then they probably won't reject rationalism out of hand.

I also am the father of 3yo and 1yo daughters. One of the things I try to do is let their critical thinking or rationality actually have a payoff in the real world. I think a lot of times critical thinking skills can be squashed by overly strict authority figures who do not take the child's reasoning into account when they make decisions. I try to give my daughters a chance to reason with me when we disagree on something, and will change my mind if they make a good point.

Another thing I try to do, is intentionally inject errors into what I say sometime, to make sure they are listening and paying attention. (e.g. This apple is purple, right? ) I think this helps to avoid them just automatically agreeing with parents/teachers and critically thinking through on their own what makes sense. Now my oldest is quick to call me out on any errors I may make when reading her stories, or talking in general, even when I didn't intentionally inject them.

Lastly, to help them learn in general, make their learning applicable to the real world. As an example, both of my daughters, when learning to count, got stuck at around 4. To help get them over that hurdle, I started asking them questions like, "How many fruit snacks do you want?" and then giving them that number. That quickly inspired them to learn bigger numbers.

[This isn't a direct response to Mark, but a reply to encourage more responses]

To add another helpful framing, if you don't have children, but think as an adult part of your attraction to LessWrong was based on how your parents raised you with an appreciation with rationality, how did that go? Obvious caveats about how memories of childhood are unreliable and fuzzy, and personal perspectives on how your parents raised you will be biased.

I was raised by secular parents, who didn't in particular put a special emphasis on rationality when raising me, compared to other parents. However, for example, Julia and Jesse Galef have written on their blog of how their father raised them with rationality in mind.

I am also father of four boys now 3, 6, 8 and 11. You can find some parenting resources linked on my user page.

I know of families who have used the "tooth fairy" as an opportunity to do critical thinking. I think it has gotten mentioned here before. Apparently sometimes children do this on their own. This post is relevant.

Apparently you don't want grandchildren, in other words. Religiosity in women correlates strongly with fecundity.

I think you're better off looking into theories of memetics; that is, a marketplace doesn't seem to be as good an analogy as an ecology. That makes the somewhat less cheery argument that 'good' doesn't mean 'true' so much as 'effective at spreading,' and in particular memes can win by poisoning their competitors through allelopathy, just like an oak tree.

This video is somewhat on topic: The New (and Old) Attacks on Free Thought: Jonathan Rauch on Kindly Inquisitors

Jonathan Rauch discusses the new edition of his book, Kindly Inquisitors, and presents a thoughtful and rational defense of free speech. I believe he makes some comparisons between the marketplace of ideas and economic markets and he certainly makes an argument similar to the one that you mention. It is an excellent video, IMO, and well worth watching.

There is a method of devalueing the weight of ones words by refering how them saying it doesn't have any actual implications to action. In a free speech environment people can become decoupled from their ideas implications. Epistemic authors are usually reliable because they have passed a filter for errors. If there is no filter on error there is no measure of quality. This can easily turn in that no public shared filter is wanted and everybody is supposed to use their own filter. This has one failure mode of everybody being entirely on their own when it comes to interpreting information, ie that education is not only not provided but it would be wrong to provide it.

One also has to realise that in a market place of ideas bad ideas lose out by going bankrupt. The united states is kind of the home of capitalism but it pansies out when the laws of market would require it's big banks to fail. So instead of natural death artificial economical support is provided. In the same way you would need to actually watch coolly when stupid people are being stupid and hurting themselfs. That is an idea either blooms or goes bust and if "goes bust" means results in injury to your health or sanity you are just supposed to live with it. Or rathet than giving or requiring each person a pretty basic but universally provided methodology of learnign about the world you rather rely on multiple biases canceling each other out or clustering the world into different audiences.

A market place phasing might also be about information control. Fox news has a bad name for coloring news and in general being stupid and with an agenda. However it might be worth it for americans to rather hear about the outside world than avoid the spin and not hear about it. The idea of a filter bubble is also relevant. There could also be stresses on meaning and communication. If no consistency of concepts is upkept the end result might be a tower of Babel islands of non-communicating schools of thought. This can already be seen in how terms of politics between america and europe is signfiicant enough that misunderstandings happen and one can genuinely ask whether the "talking of politics" is the same thing in both locales. There is a stress in highly specailized scientist using special lingo that is inpenetrable to a layman. You could for example think how "global warming" means somewhat differnt things to a scientist than a politician. It would be good to be aware on how technical results migth have impact on economies and policy. You would also want decision making to be informed about on what they are decising on. If you leave a scientist and a politician to work it out without guidelines on how to deal with the others stances there are some pretty destructive cooperation modes possible even if the indivudals beliefs could be of high fit to their individual lives. And the danger is that their lives remian individual. If they can't reach a common decision they basically split into two diffrenent nations. if they are free to speak different languages it will be very hard to have a common decision even if desired. Note that this could be solved if each were required to learn the other language. But then they lose the freedom of being lazy and not putting in the time. However if all of their time is spent learning the other language they will not have enough time to do the actual decision making. And in deciding what part of the others language they learn they implicitly decide on what things they can reach common ground on. If you predefine that certain areas are just off limits it frees up energy to have a better quality shared solution to the "on limits" part. A world of private property needs police to enforce against theft. Thus making "ownership" mandatory it frees up guarding your yard with a rifle in favour of organising the ownership relations. Having a forum enforcing against moderation you are guaranteed access to data but no promises to signal-to-noise ratio is given and it is up to the listener to be able to extract any (usefull) information (this includes things like defence against trolls and viruses).

Here's Scott Alexander discussing this concept in the context of lifehacks: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/03/do-life-hacks-ever-reach-fixation/

Assuming you just want people throwing ideas at you:

Make it illegal to communicate in cleartext? Add mandatory cryptography classes to schools? Requiring everyone to register a public key and having a government key server? Not compensating identity theft victims and the like if they didn't use good security?

Frame attempts to limit the use of encryption as unilateral disarmament, and name specific threats.

As in, if the government "has your password", how sure are you that your password isn't eventually going to be stolen by Chinese government hackers? Putin? Estonian scammers? Terrorists? Your ex-partner? And you know that your allies over in (Germany, United States, Israel, France) are going to get their hands on it too, right? And have you thought about when (hated political party) gets voted into power 5 years from now?

A second good framing is used by the ACLU representative in the Guardian article: You won't be able to use technologies X Y and Z, and you'll fall behind other countries technologically and economically.

To be a bit more specific than "we should encrypt everything all the time":

Mandatory full-disk encryption on all computer systems sold, by analogy to mandatory seat belts in cars — it used to be an optional extra, but in the modern world it's unsafe to operate without it.

The criminalization of all encryption in the U.S. is just one big terrorist attack away.

I meant to post something about my experience with armodafinil about a year ago, but I never got around to it. My overall experience was strongly negative. Looks like I did write a long post in a text file a day or so after taking armodafinil, so here's what I had to say back then:

Some background:

I'm a white male in my mid-20s. I have excessive daytime sleepiness, and I believe this is because I'm a long sleeper who has difficulty getting an adequate duration of sleep. There are several long sleepers in my family. My mother and I tend to not like how stimulants make us feel, e.g., pseudoephedrine makes us fairly nervous, though it will help our nasal congestion from allergies and help wake us up. I was interested in trying modafinil because I hear it has proportionally less of the negative effects compared against its wake-promoting effects.

My neurologist gave me a few samples of armodafinil, which is basically a variant of modafinil. I was busy in the month after I met my neurologist last and didn't think about taking it at all, but come mid-February I remembered to try it.

Saturday, Feb. 15, 2014:

I woke up at 8:30 am, as I usually did, and started eating a chocolate chip muffin for breakfast. During the breakfast I took 4000 IU of vitamin D and 150 mg of armodafinil. I took these at 8:37 am.

I started organizing files on my computer. I still felt fairly tired, and considered going back to sleep, but I did not because I try to keep a very regular sleep schedule. I will take naps in the afternoon (before 8 pm, or so, to avoid delaying my bedtime) if necessary, but I try to wait until then. Until around 10:30 am, I thought armodafinil was doing absolutely nothing. I know armodafinil takes some time to kick in, but I didn't expect that long. Maybe I'm one of the people for which modafinil doesn't work?

At around 11 am I realized that I felt weird. It was obvious that the armodafinil had kicked in fierce at that point. I checked my heart rate: 75 bpm, which is higher than normal, though not as high as other stimulants take me. I wouldn't quite describe how I felt as more awake, though I don't think I could involuntarily fall asleep now. It felt as if I could fall asleep if I wanted to, but I didn't want to. I felt a bit more nervous, perhaps, but that might just be the placebo effect. It certainly was not as strong as what 60 mg of pseudoephedrine does to me. I got a phone call from my apartment manager saying that they'll be showing my apartment today, so I (slowly) started sweeping and vacuuming to make my apartment a bit more presentable. I was pacing around like crazy while doing this.

At about 11:30 am I took a shower. I started realizing that I have no impulse control. Instead of washing myself, I'd start, get distracted by some thought, think about that for a while, realize I'm in the shower, forget where I was in my shower routine, etc. I started thinking that armodafinil might have given me ADHD, which is odd given that I've read it might be useful for the treatment of ADHD.

After the shower I consulted the note packet that came with the armodafinil. Given what these notes said, I think I was experiencing a side effect. The notes said to discontinue use of armodafinil if you experience these symptoms. "Okay, can do." is what I thought.

I went to the LessWrong meetup and told Vaniver that I think armodafinil is not doing nice things for me. Another LWer suggested that perhaps these effects go away with repeated use; I said that I didn't know, but I don't intend to find out. During the entire meetup I had a lot of difficulty sitting still. I got up a few times to get water, or a napkin, or a bag of chips, but I don't think I actually wanted any of those things; I guess I just didn't want to stay still.

The early afternoon is the hardest time for me to stay awake, and this meetup spanned that time entirely. I yawned a few times during the meetup, but I didn't become so drowsy that I had to take a nap, as I often do. I take this as evidence that armodafinil helps my EDS, though it's not that strong because I never really felt "awake" during this entire process. I felt really weird in a way that I can't quite describe.

After the meetup (about 4 pm), I rode my bike to the downtown library to return a book. Purely subjectively, I'd say armodafinil increased my endurance. I'm in reasonable shape now, but I felt that I could maintain 20+ mph easier today than a few days ago. Objectively, though, it doesn't seem that my average speed increased much if at all; it was about 13 mph on Saturday and 12 to 13 on most days.

When I got back to my apartment, I felt a little better. Still fidgety and easily distracted, but slightly better. Perhaps the exercise helps, or the armodafinil was wearing off? I go running around now usually anyway, so I hoped this would help more. I went on a run, but it didn't have quite the effect the bike ride did. I then started making dinner, but I was continually distracted by my computer through that.

I noticed that my tinnitus was much worse today. Not sure if this was due to the armodafinil, but it sounded at least 10 dB louder than usual. Ambient noises could not mask it.

Around 10 pm, I started feeling more tired, so I figured the armodafinil must be wearing off. I still felt odd and easily distracted, though. I read on my couch for a while until I felt as if I could fall asleep quickly, and I slept briefly on my couch. I woke up and moved to my bed, where it took me a while to fall asleep again, but I did. I woke up several times during the night and felt I had to try quite a few positions before I found something comfortable. This wasn't particularly restful. Otherwise, I don't think armodafinil did much to my nighttime sleep. I think if it hadn't caused some manic symptoms, I probably wouldn't have had any issues sleeping.

Sunday, Feb. 16, 2014:

I still felt a little odd when I woke up, but it was very obvious now that these effects were wearing off. I had read that armodafinil has a half-life of about 12 to 15 hours, so using a simple exponential decay with a conservative half-life, I saw that I still had the equivalent of about 45 mg of armodafinil in my system. Tomorrow morning that decrease to about 15 mg; after the third day it's down to 5 mg. I can't wait for this to be out of my system.

Overall, I'd say taking armodafinil was worthwhile as I learned something about myself, which is that I probably should avoid stimulants as much as possible.

(Not from my original intended post: I want to note that I'm doing much better now, after getting more sleep. No stimulants necessary. I haven't seen a neurologist since I wrote the post above and probably won't again.)

sox -c 2 --null out.wav synth 30:00 brownnoise vol -0.4dB fade t 3 30:00
lame --preset insane out.wav out.mp3

A month or two ago I started taking Modafinil occasionally; I've probably taken it fewer than a dozen times overall.

I think I'd expected it to give a kind of Ritalin-like focus and concentrate, but that isn't really how it affected me. I'd describe the effects less in terms of "focus" and more in terms of a variable I term "wherewithal". I've recently started using this term in my internal monologue to describe my levels of "ability to undertake tasks". E.g., "I'm hungry, but I definitely don't have the wherewithal to cook anything complicated tonight; better just get a pizza." Or, on waking up: "Hey, my wherewithal levels are unusually high today. Better not fritter that away." (Semantically, it's a bit like the SJ-originating concept of "spoons" but without that term's baggage.) It's this quantity which I think Modafinil targets, for me: it's a sort of "wherewithal boost". I don't know how well this accords with other people's experience. I do think I've heard some people describe it as a focus/concentration booster. (Perhaps I should try another nootropic to get that effect, or perhaps my brain is just beyond help on that front.)

I did, however, start to feel it suppressed my appetite to unhealthily, even dangerously, low levels. (After taking it for two days in a row, I felt dizzy after coming down a flight of stairs.) I realize that it's possible to compensate for this by making oneself eat when one doesn't feel hungry, but somehow this doesn't seem that pleasant. For this reason, I've been taking it less recently.

I'd be curious to know whether others experience the appetite suppression to the same extent; it's not something that I hear people talk about very much. Perhaps others are just better at dealing with it than I am or don't care.

It's also hard to say how much of its positive effects were placebo, given that I took it on days when I'd already determined I wanted to "get a lot of shit done".

I might still try armodafinil at some point.

Mixed feelings. If you need wakefullness it's available on tap, but with a side of anxiety and trouble going to sleep later if your dosage is not perfectly calibrated.

I took modafinil twice. I'd been having problems staying awake during the day -- it's hard for me to sleep before 2am -- and those completely disappeared. I had more energy then than I've had in a while. No negatives. The only reason I haven't gotten more is that I don't have a mailing address.

(Disclaimer: I drink a lot of coffee and tea, use a lot of snus, and drink like a relevant ethnic stereotype on weekends.)

I use newsblur and it's fine, but I don't use bookmarking or an app or basically anything interesting.

After Reader was shut down, instead of trusting my RSS feeds to another always-online provider I decided to use local clients. I use dropbox to maintain the feed list and read status synchronised between all devices I need it on.

I've found Feedly on a browser is much more manageable than the Android app.

I use rawdog. It runs on my computer and generates a single HTML file, which contains a nice unified list of articles (rather than the common alternative, a list of feeds which I then have to drill down into). It doesn't rely on any external services other than the feeds themselves. By diddling with the template it uses to generate the HTML, I have given it a little interactivity (e.g., I can tell it to "collapse" some feeds so that they show only article titles rather than content; I can then un-collapse individual articles).

Last I checked, it didn't work on Windows but could be coerced into doing so by fiddling with the source code (it's in Python).

There is a thing called Tiny Tiny RSS that, from what others have said, I suspect may offer kinda-similar functionality but better (with perhaps a bit more effort to get it set up initially). I keep meaning to check it out but failing to do so.

I tried using RSS readers, but I tended to forget to check their websites or apps. I could have trained myself to check them more often but I ended up using https://blogtrottr.com/ instead. It sends RSS feeds to your email inbox, so I can check blogs along with my email in the morning.

I haven't had any issues so far. They send you ads along with the feed to generate revenue. Having a revenue model is a solid plus in my book.

What I don't like about it: they don't have accounts so managing subscriptions is a little hard.

I've tried TheOldReader, which worked well, even when they had to handle the sudden influx of Google Reader refugees. I'm currently using InoReader, which works very well, and Bloglines, which seems to be broken (for nearly a week now IIRC, and not for the first time in the last year).

I switched to The Old Reader, which, as the name suggests, is pretty close to Google Reader in functionality.

I used Safari until Apple removed the RSS functionality, then switched to Vienna. OSX only.

I use Digg Reader. It does not have any social networking features, but otherwise it basically works like Google Reader did.

For a while I was also using The Old Reader, but I switched away when it briefly looked like they were going to shut down. Digg Reader and The Old Reader seem very similar.

I simply use the wordpress.com reader (I have a blog that I update through there, so it consolidates the tools I use). I notice it tends to have a bit of a delay in getting new posts, but I don't mind not being absolutely to-the-minute up to date.

Digg is good for me.

I use RSS Feed Reader(Chrome plugin). It's been fairly good to me, though I have noticed a couple of my feeds disappearing over time. Unsure if this is due to abandonment by the feed admins or due to software issues. I'd still recommend it as a decent option, but I'd believe that better ones exist elsewhere.

I use Vienna.

I use Firefox's built-in "live bookmarks".

Has anyone else gotten the same feel?

Yes. Oftentimes people who played lots of games will describe the feeling as "leveling up," and it's a normal and desirable part of growth. This quote is relevant: it's important to not say "well, I've leveled up, no more growth necessary!", but instead always be on the lookout for the way to get to the next level. But the path that got you from level n-1 to n and the path that gets you from level n to level n+1 may be very different, and the restlessness that comes with feeling like you know this stuff is useful for getting you to look elsewhere.

(I'm not saying that you're "done with LW," but I do think you're "done with lurking" and I think that you've done the right thing by registering; it makes for different kinds of interaction, which leads to different kinds of learning.)

I don't have a link, but something like this was already mentioned on LW... when you have already mastered some kind of thinking, it seems "obvious", even if it seemed original and awesome when you were reading it for the first time.

Although, this only proves that you have become more familiar with LW style of thinking. It does not automatically follow that "LW style of thinking" is "rationality". (Although I personally believe it is related.)

I haven't "come full-circle", but I've had a similar experience. I haven't read all of LessWrong Sequences, maybe not even half. Some old friends of mine got me into the meetup at a time when I was studying microeconomics, and started majoring in cognitive science. So, I was enthralled by discussion, and went around the Internet and life learning about related topics. Occasionally, I read Sequences essays I haven't read before, and I realize I get the gist halfway through reading it.

That's my "yeah, I know about this...". It works for me epistemically. It might have helped that I tried to rationalize the existence of the Christian God as a child, up to the point of deism not specific to any religion, and finally to virtual atheism. I found by the time I encountered arguments for or against the existence of God in theology or philosophy in university, I wasn't phased by any of them because I'd generated all of them on my own before. That's another "yeah, I know about this" set of experiences, rather than a series of "Aha!'s" I expected. These mental exercises may have prepared me for future thinking on LessWrong.

Sometimes I'm not as curious as I used to be, and I don't often automatically think of ways to optimize. Instrumentally, I don't believe I'm "on the right path" for fulfilling my own goals. However, that is confounded by other factors of my own life I'm not willing to discuss publicly. So, I'm unsure how instrumentally rational I may or may not be.

In my personal experience, what I thought was anxiety largely went away when I was treated for depression.

So I'm just gonna recommend what Scott has to say on that matter:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/16/things-that-sometimes-help-if-youre-depressed/

Do you do any sports? Martial arts classes for example gives you an environment where you face your anxiety head on.

I can offer at least two point of view.
The first is that what I thought was massive social anxiety was actually just social inexperience, that is a large part of my anxiety derived from not knowing what was the accepted social protocol in a given situation. Usually sitting quietly and observing what others did helped.
The second is that you need to subdivide and identify which steps of social interactions you are able to do and which you aren't. For example, instead of just throwing yourself into a social gathering, you can (for example) get ready and go out from your house, but not get in front of the place. Or you can get in front of the place but not enter. Or you can enter but you have a sense of urgency that prompts you to leave immediately after, etc. Instead of "just practice" the whole interactions, identify the smallest next step that you can practice, and if you can't practice that step, subdivide into even smaller units (e.g. literally just doing the next step).

I recommend reading section 19 (on the management of social anxiety disorder) in the recent treatment guidelines from the British Association for Psychopharmacology (pp. 17–19). A sample:

19.1. Recognition and diagnosis

Social anxiety disorder is often not recognised in primary medical care (Weiller et al., 1996) but detection can be enhanced through the use of screening questionnaires in psychologically distressed primary care patients (Donker et al., 2010; Terluin et al., 2009). Social anxiety disorder is often misconstrued as mere ‘shyness’ but can be distinguished from shyness by the higher levels of personal distress, more severe symptoms and greater impairment (Burstein et al., 2011; Heiser et al., 2009). The generalised sub-type (where anxiety is associated with many situations) is associated with greater disability and higher comorbidity, but patients with the non-generalised subtype (where anxiety is focused on a limited number of situations) can be substantially impaired (Aderka et al., 2012; Wong et al., 2012). Social anxiety disorder is hard to distinguish from avoidant personality disorder, which may represent a more severe form of the same condition (Reich, 2009). Patients with social anxiety disorder often present with symptoms arising from comorbid conditions (especially depression), rather than with anxiety symptoms and avoidance of social and performance situations (Stein et al., 1999). There are strong, and possibly two-way, associations between social anxiety disorder and dependence on alcohol and cannabis (Buckner et al., 2008; Robinson et al., 2011).

19.2. Acute treatment

The findings of meta-analyses and randomised placebocontrolled treatment studies indicate that a range of approaches are efficacious in acute treatment (Blanco et al., 2013). CBT [cognitive behavioral therapy] is efficacious in adults (Hofmann and Smits, 2008) and children (James et al., 2005): cognitive therapy appears superior to exposure therapy (Ougrin, 2011), but the evidence for the efficacy of social skills training is less strong (Ponniah and Hollon, 2008). Antidepressant drugs with proven efficacy include most SSRIs (escitalopram, fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, paroxetine, sertraline), the SNRI venlafaxine, the MAOI phenelzine, and the RIMA moclobemide.

[...]

19.4. Comparative efficacy of pharmacological, psychological and combination treatments

Pharmacological and psychological treatments, when delivered singly, have broadly similar efficacy in acute treatment (Canton et al., 2012). However, acute treatment with cognitive therapy (group or individual) is associated with a reduced risk of symptomatic relapse at follow-up (Canton et al., 2012). It is unlikely that the combination of pharmacological with psychological treatments is associated with greater overall efficacy than with either treatment, when given alone, as only one in four studies of the relative efficacy of combination treatment found evidence for superior efficacy (Blanco et al., 2010). The findings of small randomised placebo-controlled studies suggest that the efficacy of psychological treatment may be enhanced through prior administration of d-cycloserine (Guastella et al., 2008; Hofmann et al., 2006) or cannabidiol (Bergamaschi et al., 2011).

From a patient perspective, the guidelines suggest that each of the following four approaches should be similarly effective for the treatment of social anxiety as long as the care provider is adequately trained and up-to-date with current best practice:

• Pharmacotherapy
  • given by a psychiatrist.
  • given by a primary care physician.
• Psychotherapy
  • with a therapist.
  • in a group setting.

This is a nice paper, and is probably the sort of thing philosphers can really sink their teeth into. One thing I really wanted was some addressing of the basic "something that would cause much of what we value about the universe to be lost" definition of 'catastrophic', which you could probably even find Bostrom endorsing somewhere.

The homepage is controlled from the wiki here; it includes the template Lesswrong:FeaturedArticles that google tells me is here. From the history, the editor of three years tenure has wiki username Costanza and is probably the same as the LW user of the same name.

This is just a guesstimate, not an informed answer. The Featured Articles of the week seem topical to what's happening that week, such at recent events, a national date, or new developments in some organization. I'm guessing it's an administrator who pays attention to such things closely, so maybe lukeprog. That's just the availability heuristic at work, though. It could be an administrator who doesn't post very often, but still follows events closely.

I think you are thinking about this the wrong way. People become caffeine tolerant quickly, but tolerance goes away pretty quickly too. You would get more benefit out of the opposite approach - spending most of your time without caffeine, but drinking a cup of coffee rarely, when you really need it. You would effectively be caffeine naive most of the time, with brief breaks for caffeine use, and this never develop much of a tolerance. If it's been a long time since that first cup of coffee that you don't remember it, trust me, the effects of caffeine on a caffeine-naive brain are incredible.

I know I once read a study that says you can get back to caffeine naive in two weeks if you go cold turkey, but I can't find anything on it again for the life of me. I do remember distinctly that going cold turkey is a bad plan, as the withdrawal effects are pretty unpleasant - slowly lowering your dose is better.

On a more practical level, it is certainly possible to have relatively little caffeine, such that you aren't noticeably impaired on zero caffeine, while still having some caffeine. The average coffee drinker is far beyond this point. I would try to lower your daily dose over the course of a month or so until you are consuming less than a cup of coffee a day - ideally, a lot less, like no cups of coffee. Try substituting tea (herbal or otherwise) if you need something hot to drink to help kill the craving - herbal tea has no caffeine, black tea has about 1/4 of the caffeine per cup, and if you add cream and sugar the taste will be familiar.

EDIT: VincentYu's comment above is interesting in light of this. I am not going to perform my own meta analysis on this, but there are a great deal of studies that find that caffeine tolerance and caffeine withdrawal are real things - a quick Google Scholar search for "caffeine tolerance" will find them.

I am now very interested in a large study on this without the possible conflict of interest. Also, I find it odd that they choose to not include studies before 1992.

where when you're not on caffeine you're below baseline and caffeine just brings you back to normal

This is a hypothesized explanation for the acute performance-enhancing effects of caffeine that fits well with the Algernon argument, but it is not a conclusive result of the literature. For instance, the following recent review disputes that.

Einöther SJL, Giesbrecht T (2013). Caffeine as an attention enhancer: reviewing existing assumptions. Psychopharmacology, 225:251–74.

Abstract (emphasis mine):

Rationale: Despite the large number of studies on the behavioural effects of caffeine, an unequivocal conclusion had not been reached. In this review, we seek to disentangle a number of questions.

Objective: Whereas there is a general consensus that caffeine can improve performance on simple tasks, it is not clear whether complex tasks are also affected, or if caffeine affects performance of the three attention networks (alerting, orienting and executive control). Other questions being raised in this review are whether effects are more pronounced for higher levels of caffeine, are influenced by habitual caffeine use and whether there [sic] effects are due to withdrawal reversal.

Method: Literature review of double-blind placebo controlled studies that assessed acute effects of caffeine on attention tasks in healthy adult volunteers.

Results: Caffeine improves performance on simple and complex attention tasks, and affects the alerting, and executive control networks. Furthermore, there is inconclusive evidence on dose-related performance effects of caffeine, or the influence of habitual caffeine consumption on the performance effects of caffeine. Finally, caffeine’s effects cannot be attributed to withdrawal reversal.

Conclusions: Evidence shows that caffeine has clear beneficial effects on attention, and that the effects are even more widespread than previously assumed.

The authors' conclusions:

• Caffeine improves performance on both simple and complex attention tasks.
• Caffeine improves alerting, executive control and potentially also orienting.
• There is inconclusive evidence on dose-related performance effects of caffeine.
• There is inconclusive evidence on the influence of habitual caffeine consumption on the performance effects of caffeine.
• Caffeine’s effects cannot be attributed to withdrawal reversal.

Note the following conflict of interest:

The authors are employees of Unilever, which markets tea and tea-based beverages.

This is advance notice that unless your prediction is a short bit of plaintext that obviously doesn't have more than a few bits' worth of scope for massaging, your use of MD5 is likely to be taken as showing that you cheated.

Hash copy: 38bd807a6872f6a5622aa2b011fd8f03

I just realized that editing the grammar above was an issue since it doesn't show when the edit occurred so repeating the hash here in a comment which will remain unedited: 38bd807a6872f6a5622aa2b011fd8f03 .

Here are the papers:

• Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010
• Engel, Woolley, Jing, Chabris, & Malone, 2014

I wonder how all female groups compare to groups with just one male, and how all male groups compare to groups with just one female. It seems to me like it's harder for any one person to dominate whenever people feel the need to signal egalitarian values like a preference for gender or racial equality. I don't know anything about statistics yet, so maybe this is implausible, but I think part of the reason that diversity was an insignificant predictor was that poor theory of mind caused by (?) ingroup favoritism dominates the effect as diversity increases and it drowns out the effect of the need to signal egalitarian values, so I think it would be cool to see how the collective intelligence changes when you go from 'completely' homogenous to 'almost' homogenous in experimental groups composed of subjects from cultures that value egalitarianism highly. I would like to see this replicated by subjects from less egalitarian cultures as well, but that's hard sometimes.

My guess: People in the team need to communicate. This can be essentially achieved by two ways:

1) All team members voice their opinions openly.

2) Some team members don't voice their opinions, but other members are good at reading emotions, so the latter recognize when the former believe they know something relevant.

If this model is true, we would see that equal contribution (no one is silent) or emotional perceptiveness (other people recognize when the silent person wants to say something) increase the team output.

My experience of ADHD includes a tendency to become distracted by thought while moving between tasks or places. I have found that headphones with an audiobook help lock my attention down to two tracks instead of half a dozen: I'm either thinking about my task, or the words in my ear. Obviously your mileage may vary, but ADHD people develop all sorts of coping methods, so my broad advice is "experiment with lots of things to help get things done, even if other people are skeptical of their effectiveness."

use that information to my advantage

You can get accommodations for many academic activities if you are still a student.

You could dip a toe on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The best way to tell is to read the metaethics textbook and see what happens. If it turns out you need a crash course on (say) utilitarian thinking, you can always do that and then return to metaethics.

What is your reason for wanting to read a metaethics textbook? I ask because the most obvious reason (I think) is "because I want to live a good life, so I want to figure out what constitutes living a good life, and for that I need a coherent system of ethics" but I'd have thought that most people thinking in those terms and inclined to read philosophy textbooks would already have looked into (at least) whatever variety of ethics they find most congenial.

I found my own answer in the comments of the course recommendations for friendliness thread. Luke says:

It's really hard to find good writing on metaethics. My recommendation would be to read the chapter on ethical reductionism from Miller's [Contemporary Metaethics: An Introduction], my own unfinished sequence on metaethics, and Eliezer's new sequence (most of it's not metaethics, but it's required reading for understanding the explanation of his 2nd attempt to explain metaethics, which is more precise than his first attempt in the earlier Sequences).

On normative ethics, Luke says elsewhere:

I don't read much on normative ethics, but Smart & Williams' Utilitarianism: For and Against has some good back-and-forth on the major issues, at least up to 1973. The other advantage of this book is that it's really short.

But there are probably better books on the subject I'm just not aware of.

From what I see, he seems to attribute a similarly low significance to most of contemporary normative ethics.

Also, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been suggested twice, in case I do need to know anything in particular about normative ethics. I'll keep that in mind.

For posterity, as far as I can tell, the most popular undergraduate text on normative ethics is Rachels' The Elements of Moral Philosophy. The 7th edition has good reviews on Amazon. Apparently the 8th edition is too new to have reviews.

I was looking at this article as a starting point. I end up at either error theory or non-cognativism. Is there value in reading further down the tree or would it be like learning more phlogiston theory (at least for me)?

Does it matter? It's not very hard to get up to speed on ethics. Either skim an introductory textbook, or spend a few hours on the Stanford Philosophy encyclopedia.

Oxford's Rhetoric could be helpful in this area.

I spend time in hardware enthusiast communities and not so impressed with Backblaze. Even here, the Seagate failure rates seem suspiciously anomalous.

Also, SSDs, which are probably a better match for most people here (my rig has run a 256 GB SSD for the past 2.5 years and I'm yet to want for more storage). Especially for laptops; they use less power (= your battery lasts longer) and can stand up to shock (so your laptop doesn't break if you drop it).

I've found that modern hard drives tend to be quite reliable for consumer purposes; we've come a long way since the bad old days of the Click of Doom.

Their enclosures, not so much. I've had three backplanes for external hard drives, from three different manufacturers, fail in as many years. And one cable. But that table won't give you any information on how common this sort of thing is or how to mitigate your risk.

The two relevant questions here are:

• What's your ISP's upload speed and stated policy towards home servers? A lot of ISPs prohibit servers for residential customers, though actual enforcement is rare.

• Are you sure you're up to the task of handling security for your home server that will be exposed to the 'net?

You'll need to configure and run a web server on your computer. The most commonly used, publicly documented, free and accessible to people just trying stuff out is LAMP). You'll then need to point your domain at the IP address of your server.

Thing is, I have a computer that stays on 24/7

What kind of hardware are we talking about? How much traffic are you looking at supporting? What kind of internet connection do you have at home? Are you familiar with the concept of mathematical multiplication?

Acquiring hosting is straightforward. Pick a company with a good reputation, a reasonable price, and all the features you need, sign up, and pay. (I can't be of much help here, as I've used the same hosting company since 2004 or so, and I'm not sure if I could get a better deal elsewhere.)

The remainder is more specific, and that might be why you are having trouble finding tuturials. E.g., uploading and setting up a wiki could mean you read tutorials on SSH or FTP, tutorials on file permissions, and/or tutorials on the wiki-specific details of setting up a wiki. All of this depends on your experience level. When I started out, I knew none of this, and I basically figured it out as I went along.

Start by paying someone for hosting. That's enough to learn about. Maybe start by paying Amazon nothing for a year of EC2 hosting. Once you understand how to host a website, you can migrate it to your home computer, where you will run into additional difficulties, like installing a base webserver and automatically updating your DNS. But probably you should stick with paid hosting. For static files, Amazon S3 is extremely cheap. For a full-fledged webserver to install your wiki, Nearly Free Speech will do, and is probably cheaper than Amazon, especially at your usage level.

Why exactly would you like to avoid paying someone for hosting? It seems like a good candidate for a service to be outsourced.

Some kind of polyphasic sleep? E.g. from 9 PM to 1 AM (4 hours) and then from 4 AM to 8 AM (4 hours).

You could get your dad to wake you up at 1 pm every day if he's around For me, having a person wake me up is way more effective. Alternately, just do it the hard way and stay up for 30 hrs.

It's hard to see what scope there is for the problem to get all that much better if you are required to be awake from 1am to 3am (or later) every day. It seems like the best you can do is to try to establish a routine of always going straight to bed (and not reading, browsing the internet, etc., once there) after dealing with your mother, which might maybe get you a ~ 4am-12pm sleeping time on typical days.

What happens if you try to go to bed just ten minutes earlier each day than you did the day before, using an alarm clock? What about ten minutes later?

I would not recommend hormones. Beware of Algernon's law - if a simple biochemical tweak were always helpful, it'd probably already be that way. In particular a lot of things that try to work against 'aging' as opposed to specific dysfunctions will probably cause cancer. Thiel is a particular offender there, he recently started taking HGH with the justification "we'll probably have cancer licked in a decade or two". I read that statement to some people in my lab, where it provoked universal laughter.

Remember the 80/20 rule. Don't over-optimize; it could be expensive and dangerous.

At least get your diet in line before you worry too much about pharmaceuticals.

Start with medical tests for cholesterol, blood pressure, vitamin D, magnesium, diabetes and anything else your doctor recommends based on your age, family and disease history.

I don't know if this is what you meant by "summary", but Kurzweil's book (co-written with some homeopath) Transcend (Amazon) is his most up-to-date effort. I've read it mostly and it seems well researched and also explains the science behind its recommendations.

I also thought I'd mention that there are now certain compounds (Wikipedia) which show some evidence of initiating telomerase production in adult humans. If this drug works as well in humans as it has been shown to work in mice, it should significantly increase your healthspan.

error

A number of SSC posts have gone viral on Reddit or elsewhere. I'm sure he's picked up a fair number of readers from the greater internet. Also, for what it's worth, I've turned two of my friends on to SSC who were never much interested in LW.

But I'll second it being among my favourite websites.

SSC seems to have a pretty wide fanbase on Tumblr. I'm sure he's picked up a very large non-LW fanbase over the years; he's been blogging forever.

You could post this as a top level discussion post here, if you want to make it more available and reduce trivial inconveniences to those without access to facebook.

There are approximations in figuring entropy and thermal statistics that may be wrong in very nearly immeasurable ways. The one that used to stick in my head was the calculation of the probability of all the gas in a volume showing up briefly in one-half the volume. Without doing math I figured it is actually much less than the classic calculated result, because the classic result assumes zero correlation between where any two molecules are, and once any kind of significant density difference exists between the two sides of the volume this will break.

But entropy is still real in the sense that it is "out there." An entire civilization is powered (and cooled) by thermodynamic engines, engines which quite predictable provide useful functionalities in ways predictable in detail from calculations of entropy.

A glass of hot water burns your skin even if you know the water and the skin's precise characterization in parameter space before they come in contact. Fast moving (relative to the skin) molecules of water break the bonds of some bits of skin they come in contact with. On the micro scale it may look like a scene from the matrix with a lot of slow moving machine gun bullets. The details of the destruction may be quite beautiful and "feel" cold, but essentially thanks to the central limit theorem, a whole lot of what happens will be predictable in a quite useful, and quite unavoidable way without having to appeal to the detail.

I think the only sense in which you can extract energy from water with a specially built machine that is custom designed for the current parameter space of the water, it is the machine which is at 0 or at least low temperature. And so the fact that useful energy can be extracted from the interaction of finite temperature water and a cold machine is totally consistent with entropy being real, thermal differences can power machines. And they do, witness the cars, trucks, airplanes and electric grid that are essential for our economy. The good news is you can get all the energy you need without knowing the detailed parameter space of the hot water, which is helpful because you then don't have to redesign your cold machine every few microseconds as you bring in new hot water to it from which to extract the next bit of energy.

Entropy is as real as energy whether it feels that way or not, and that is why machines work even when left unattended by consciousnesses to perceive their entropy and its flows.

I made a post about this a month or so ago. Yay!

It's interesting to think about entropy from this perspective because it becomes related to the subjectivist interpretation of probability.

If you haven't already read Jaynes derivation of maxent, and the further derivation of much of statistical mechanics from those principles, that would be a good place to start.

In this way entropy is not much different from energy. The latter also depends on the model as much as on the physical system itself.

Isn't all this just punning on definitions? If the particle velocities in a gas are Maxwell-Boltzmann distributed for some parameter T, we can say that the gas has "Maxwell-Boltzmann temperature T". Then there is a separate Jaynes-style definition about "temperature" in terms of the knowledge someone has about the gas. If all you know is that the velocities follow a certain distribution, then the two definitions coincide. But if you happen to know more about it, it is still the case that almost all interesting properties follow from the coarse-grained velocity distribution (the gas will still melt icecubes and so on), so rather than saying that it has zero temperature, should we not just note that the information-based definition no longer captures the ordinary notion of temperate?

Evolving strategies through the Noisy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma has revealed all sorts of valuable insights into game theory and decision theory. Does anyone know of any similar tournaments where the payouts weren't constant, so that any particular round might or might not qualify as a classic Prisoner's Dilemma?

Do you have a link for the original tournament?

Can it be non-LW material? I found this to be an excellent no-background-needed introduction to AI. http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html

Currently, the backlog to changing the codebase here is so big and there's so little work going on it that even if there was a consensus for this change it would be unlikely to happen.

More specific to this proposal, there are at least two problems with this idea: First: it could easily lead to further group think: Suppose a bunch of Greens zero out all voting by certain people who have identified as Blues and a bunch of Blues do the same. Then each group will see a false consensus for their view based on the votes. Second, making votes public by default could easily influence how people vote if they are intimidated by repercussions for downvoting high-status users or popular arguments, or even just not downvoting because it could make enemies.

The B approach to Occam's razor is just a way to think carefully about your possible preference for simplicity. If you prefer simpler explanations, you can bias your prior appropriately, and then the B machinery will handle how you should change your mind with more evidence (which might possibly favor more complex explanations, since Nature isn't obligated to follow your preferences).

I don't think it's a good idea to use B in settings other than statistical inference, or probability puzzles. Arguing with people is an exercise in xenoanthropology, not an exercise in B.

Assuming your priors for each individual explanation is about equal, is there a Bayesian explanation for our intuition that we should bet on Explanation Set A?

Do you mean your prior for A is about your prior for B, or your priors for each element are about the same?

If you mean the first, then there is no reason to favor one over the other. Occam's razor just says the more complex explanation has a lower prior.

If you mean the second, then there is a very good reason to favor A. If A has n explanations, B has m, all explanations are independant and of probability p, then P(A) = p^n and P(B) = p^m. A is exponentially more likely than B. In real life, assuming independence tends to be a bad idea, so it won't be quite so extreme, but the simpler explanation is still favored.

I think you'll get somewhere by searching for the phrase "complexity penalty." The idea is that we have a prior probability for any explanation that depends on how many terms / free parameters are in the explanation. For your particular example, I think you need to argue that their prior probability should be different than it is.

I think it's easier to give a 'frequentist' explanation of why this makes sense, though, by looking at overfitting. If you look at the uncertainty in the parameter estimates, they roughly depend on the number of sample points per parameter. Thus the fewer parameters in a model, the more we think each of those parameters will generalize. One way to think about this is the more free parameters you have in a model, the more explanatory power you get "for free," and so we need to penalize the model to account for that. Consider the Akaike information criterion and Bayesian information criterion.

General question: I've read somewhere that there's a Bayesian approach to at least partially justifying simplicity arguments / Occam's Razor. Where can I find a good accessible explanation of this?

This is a good question, but not when applied to the origin of the Torah example. There a more appropriate discussion is of the motivated cognition of the original Talmudic authors, who would have happily attributed 100% of the Torah to the same source, were it not for the 8 verses which do not fit. For a Christian these authors are already suspect because they denied the first coming of the Messiah, so one's priors of their trustworthiness should be low to begin with.

I don't think this question is sufficiently well-defined to have a true answer. What does it mean to have/lack truth, what does it mean to have/lack happiness, and what are the extremes of both of these?

If I have all the happiness and none of the truth, do I get run over by a car that I didn't believe in?

If I have all the truth but no happiness, do I just wish I would get run over? Is there anything to stop me from using the truth to make myself happy again? Failing that is there anything that could motivate me to sit down for an hour with Eliezer and teach him the secrets of FAI before I kill myself? This option at least seems like it has more loopholes.

Great question! I'm glad you brought it up!

Personally, it's a bit of an ugh field for me. And is something I'm confused about, and really wish I had a good answer to.

To me, this get's at a more general question of, "what should your terminal values be?". It is my understanding that rationality can help you to achieve terminal values, but not to select them. I've thought about it a lot and have tried to think of a reason why one terminal value is "better" or "more rational" than another... but I've pretty much failed. I keep arriving at the conclusion that "what should your terminal values be?" is a Wrong Question, which becomes pretty obvious once it's dissolved.

But at the same time... it's such an important question that the slightest bit of uncertainty really bothers me. Think of it in terms of expected value - a huge magnitude multiplied by a small probability can still be huge. If I misunderstood something and I'm pursuing the wrong terminal goal(s)... well that'd be bad (how bad depends on how different my current goals are from "the real goals").

I'd love to hear others' takes on this. It appears that people live their lives as if things other than Your Happiness matter. Like Altruism and Truth. Ie, people pursue terminal values other than their own happiness. Is this true? I've really be interested in seeing a LW survey on terminal goals.

Truth is a tool. If it can't be used to fulfill my goal of happiness, what good is it? That being said, if you just meant my happiness, then I'd take truth and use it to increase net happiness.

Hey it's a good question. I'd pick Happiness.

When I was much younger I might have said Truth. I was a student of physics once and loved to repeat the quote that the end of man is knowledge. But since then I have been happy, and I have been unhappy, and the difference between the two is just too large.

It depends on why I'm making the list.

If I'm making a todo list for a project I'm working on, Workflowy is good because its simple and supports hierarchical lists.

For longer lived stuff where I add and delete stuff like grocery/shopping lists or books to read, I use wunderlist because they have an android app, a standalone windows app and it looks pretty. Browser-based apps annoy me so I like the windows app and the android app is nice to have when I'm actually in the grocery store.

When I'm making a list because I need to be productive and not as a way to plan, I use a paper todolist: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006HWLW2/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1. Checking things off on paper does wonders for productivity and having the printed thing helps set the mood.

I use a paper notebook, inspired by bullet journal and autofocus for daily/weekly goals when the list stays under 20 or so items. Recently a project started ballooning into more items than this system could handle, so I picked up todo.txt a month ago. I've been very happy with it so far. The system works with just a regular text editor and keeping all the lines in the file lexically sorted, but it's also a markup format that can be used with specific tools. I keep the project-specific list synced with a symbolic directory link from the project directory tree to Dropbox, and currently use the Simpletask app to update the list on my phone. Seems to work well for everything I need.

I've tried a bunch, but Todoist is the only one that's powerful, flexible, quick, and easy enough for me to want to use.

I like Complice for having a daily to-do that allows you to track how much time you've spent on each of your items (if you're using its pomodoro timer), and to see which goals you did (and didn't) meet on past days. However, I know the founder through CfAR so I may be biased.

I've found success with OmniFocus.

I'm using workflowy as well, and it's the only to-do list software I've ever actually used for more than a few days.

One feature that I've wanted for a while is dependencies. Let's say you need to print out a form, but you need to purchase printer ink first. Being able to hide "print out form for xyz" until "buy printer ink" is completed would be great.

My feeling is that gorillas are pretty important just because they are apes (for practical research purposes, although I think they have a fair degree of intrinsic value too). Seed dispersion seems the least of these benefits. (On the other hand, I suppose the existence of other apes poses a disease threat to humans).

We should really demand more funding for research, in general. Under-funding research may be the single most irrational thing we do as a society, considering the return on investment.

it provides some of those who advance it with a lucrative income stream.

Not me! As I fully expected, I've earned less than the minimum wage for my book on the singularity. And I get the impression that most people involved in the singularity movement are earning far less than they could given their skill set.

someone had to say it

You say that as if the point of view expressed by Dylan Evans here is one that hasn't been expressed before. It seems to me more like what until recently was the default reaction to any concerns about unfriendly AI.

It is worth noting, for example, that Give Well—a non-profit that evaluates the cost-effectiveness of organizations that rely on donations—refuses to endorse any of these self-proclaimed guardians of the galaxy.

GiveWell recommends extremely few charities. Unless you similarly write off the Red Cross, United Way, the Salvation Army, and everyone else GiveWell doesn't recommend, this looks like motivated skepticism.

It seems to me that there are two key points in Evans's argument where he makes a controversial claim and needs to justify it, and that at both he kinda cheats.

The first is where he goes from a description of the "Pascal's Mugging" scenario to saying that that's a good way to describe concerns over unfriendly AI. (Rather than, e.g., seeing them as analogous to insurance, where one pays a modest but annoying sum for alleged protection against various unlikely but potentially devastating events.) He doesn't make any attempt at all to justify this; I think he just hopes that the reader won't notice.

The second is where he suggests that "some of those who advance [UFAI arguments]" are getting a lucrative income stream from doing so. It seems to me that actually awfully few are, and most of those could have got richer faster and more reliably by other more normal means. So if he's saying about their motives what he seems to be, then again he really owes the reader some justification. Which, again, is not there.

(Maybe there's a third. I think his last paragraph is just repeating the one that precedes it. But maybe he's suggesting some other, more powerful "economic interests" at work; if so, it's not at all clear to me who he has in mind.)

I think the entire core of his argument is a sleight-of-hand between "improbable" and "the kind of absurd improbability involved in Pascal's wager", without even (as others have pointed out) giving any arguments for why it's improbable in the first place.

Why do some otherwise very smart people fall for this sleight of hand? I think it is because it panders to their narcissism. To regard oneself as one of a select few far-sighted thinkers who might turn out to be the saviors of mankind must be very rewarding.

I think this is a bad line of thought even before we get to the hypothesis that people are pushing UFAI risks for the money.

For one thing, people just get things wrong a lot-- it doesn't take bad motivations.

For another, it's very easy to jump to the conclusion that what seems to be correct to you is so obviously correct that other people must be getting it wrong on purpose.

For a third, even if you're right that other people are engaged in motivated thinking, you might be wrong about the motivation. For example, concern about UFAI might be driven by anxiety, or by "ooh, shiny! cool idea!" more than by narcissism or money.

advancedatheist, how sure are you of your motivations?

The idea that AI is a low probability risk is one that has some merit, but one doesn't need a Pascal's Mugging sort of scenario to consider it to be a problem. If it is only 5 or 10 percent of existential risk in the next century then it is already a serious problem. In general, all existential risks are underfunded by a lot. The only difference with AI is that for a long time it has been even more underfunded than other sources of existential risk.

A booster for getting AI values right is the 2 sidedness of the process. Existential risk and benefit.

To illustrate - You solve poverty, you still have to face climate change, you solve climate change, you still have to face biopathogens, you solve biopathogens, you still have to face nanotech, you solve nanotech, you still have to face SI. You solve SI correctly, the rest are all done. For people who use the cui bono argument, I think this answer is usually the best one to give.

As long as the probability of receiving money tomorrow decreases faster than the increase in the amount of promised money, you never have to hand over your wallet.