Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014

One thing I might start experimenting with is a version of morning contemplation. Ancient stoicism seems to suggest to reflect on one's principles in the morning, christian tradition has morning prayers and Benjamin Franklin reviewed his virtues every morning, so why not do a little personalised version of it? Things like the serenity prayer or Tarski's litany.

I have a terrible problem where I wake up from my alarm, turn off the alarm, then go back to sleep (I've missed several morning lectures this way). The solution I've been trialing is to put a glass of water and some caffeine pills on my bedside table when I go to sleep. That way, when I wake up I can turn off the alarm, take the pill and give in to the urge to put my head back on the pillow, confident that the caffeine will wake me up again a few minutes later. This has worked every time I've remembered to put out the pills.

I got this idea from someone else on LW but I've forgotten who, so credit to whomever it was.

I exercise for 5 minutes within 5 minutes of getting up.

Before I did this, I sometimes had the habit of checking e-mail for like an hour before getting out of bed. After adding this to my routine, I never did that again.

I think the best thing is to start implementing it as soon as you get up, to not give yourself time/opportunity to sabotage it. Also, get up as soon as you wake up.

I forget who suggested it, but I actually needed 2 alarm clocks to get my sleep schedule under control.

One wakes me up. It is across the room, on my computer chair. When I goes off I move it up to the shelf. Something about doing a task makes me loathe to go back to bed.

One makes me go to sleep. When it goes off, I stand up and put it on the computer chair. That way I can't keep browsing the net, because I'm stuck standing up.

This was only necessary for like a week. Once I was going to bed at the same time every day I didn't need alarms to wake up then. Nowadays I wake up almost automatically.

The key for me was going to bed at a set hour every day.

I have gotten myself a manual coffee grinder. Using this device it takes me about 4 minutes to grind enough beans for a large Melitta pot. Attending to this repetitive task gives me a small but regular block of time during which I find it easy to practice mindfullness. And when I am done, I make a pot of coffee.

I get my shower the night to keep my bed clean and reduce morning prep time, allowing me to wake up later. Then just wet my hair with water in the morning for combing. I also have an Ensure as soon as I wake up, even if I'm going to have a more substantial breakfast shortly thereafter, because otherwise I'm a zombie.

I don't know how unusual these are, but some of the components of my routine are:

• putting the alarm on the other side of the room, so I get sure I don't snooze;
• workout with a 10 min torcher;
• cold shower after workout;
• a brief five minutes meditation before leaving.

Shower first. Then make breakfast/coffee.

One part is writing down whatever dreams I can remember right upon awaking. This has led to me occasionally experiencing lucid dreams without really trying.

Also since I am writing dreams anyway, this makes it easy to do the other writing which I find beneficial. Namely, writing the major plan of the day and gratitude stuff.

You might be interested in this, if you haven't already seen it.

[Meta] I often see threads like this where people recommend things that require a very high level of conscientiousness or planning ability to start with, (e.g. if you are tired in the mornings get out of bed immediately and do x, requirs you to be capable of forcing yourself to do x when you are tired.)

Yeah, I watch this series and this season in particular makes me feel like the writers read LessWrong.

Like any technical subject I'm familiar with, I get a little weirded out by the treatment it receives in the mass media as there's always little (or big) bits that are just dumb for the stories sake, but Person of Interest seems to do a better job talking about AI than most shows do talking about whatever other technical subject.

My subscriptions: GQ Vogue Popular Science Time New York Times Vanity Fair Rolling Stone

I use Feedly + IFTTT for things like this. Try here or here.

I'm not aware of such a catalog but there are definitely resources that fit into this category. One good one is You Are Not So Smart.

I haven't looked into it much myself, but a couple of people have mentioned RibbonFarm as being something like that.

There is an undocumented way: all posts, all comments. But those URLs are not linked from anywhere.

I wouldn't make a restricted donation to a charity unless there was a cause I really cared about but I didn't think the charity behind it was well-run and I didn't know a better way of helping that cause.

I do not consider money to keep a good charity running as "wasted"--if anything I am deeply dubious of any charity which claims to have minimal to no administration costs, because it's either untrue (the resources to manage it effectively must come from somewhere, maybe from the founders' own personal resources) or a likely sign of bad management (they think that skimping on the funds needed to manage it effectively in the name of maximizing the basket of "program expenses" is a good organizational strategy). An organization that I think is well-run wants to spend on its cause as much as possible, but is mindful of needing to spend on itself also. If it cannot spend on itself--to hire good staff, to have good training, to use resources that cost money and save time, to plan its strategy and maintain regulatory compliance, to do whatever else an efficient organization needs to do--how can it possibly have the capacity to spend well on its programs? The money to sustain that charity is providing for its cause to be effectively addressed now and into the future.

"Unrestricted" says that you believe GiveWell is competent to make these allocations correctly between itself and its recommended charities. For GiveWell in particular, if you do not believe they can do this, why do you think they can evaluate other charities' effectiveness? Presumably you want to give to the other charities because GiveWell has told you they are worth it, because you think GiveWell is competent at assessing organizational effectiveness. (For other charities, I would have lower expectations for assessment ability--but still I expect that I want to give to one in particular because it is effective at spending for its cause. There are few causes where you do not have much choice of how to direct your money to affect it. An effective one will be competent at running itself--not perfect surely, but competent enough that I don't think I will do a better job at allocating its funds than it will by giving a restricted donation.)

Also, many people's gut feelings direct them to give restricted donations to avoid "wasting" their money; it's a feel-good option but one that does not help the charity stay around in the long term. People who are more considered should compensate for that by allowing the charity to use their funds unrestricted. I have no idea if GiveWell gets grants or not, but grant support from foundations is often restricted as well; it's much harder to get grants for general operating support. But I won't start that rant here.

(For background, I've been heavily involved in nonprofits for the past 10 years, as volunteer, staff, and board.)

There's a big difference between trusting someone about a third party and trusting someone about themselves.

Maybe this would be a coherent position:

• You trust GiveWell's judgement on which charities are the best choices
• You think they've done enough work to establish this, at least for the time being
• You don't plan to give more money in the immediate future
• Therefore, you want your money go to to the charities, not to a decision-making process that you now see as having diminishing returns

I'm not sure I'd buy it myself... it seems like it really only makes sense if you don't think anybody else is going to be giving money to GiveWell in the immediate future either (or perhaps ever?).

Holden has written about donation restrictions on the GiveWell blog back in 2009 (bold and italics in original):

• We would guess that cases fitting the conditions for “meaningful restricted funding” are rare – i.e., when you give to a multiprogram organization, your donation usually will expand what they want to expand, regardless of how you restrict it.
• We have a general aversion to restricting donations. It seems like “micromanaging” an organization in this way is asking for trouble: the charity may avoid your intentions using technicalities or spend the “extra money” allocated to a program badly, and in any case, you are creating an extra headache for the charity.

Thus, our current rule of thumb is to find an organization whose existing priorities you are comfortable with – and give unrestricted.

See also the following on the GiveWell blog:

• The comments by GiveWell analysts Alexander Berger and Timothy Telleen-Lawton on giving to GiveWell in this recent post.
• Holden's post on GiveWell's funding needs in 2013 where he asked more donors to donate unrestricted to GiveWell. (For their latest budget and revenue forecasts, see this document from September.)

for why the wavelength of red feels from the inside like a built-in quality of the world rather than a perception generated by a mind in response to a stimulus.

For any agent, self-reflection has to bottom out somewhere, since working memory and cognitive capacity are finite.

That said, some meditation practitioners report being able to notice "the arising and passing away" of individual sensations, so it may be that this is just a matter of training rather than an essential feature of consciousness.

for why the wavelength of red feels from the inside like a built-in quality of the world rather than a perception generated by a mind in response to a stimulus

That insight would be an additional layer of processing requiring energy that could be used for other things. How would such an insight increase the brain's reproductive success? We don't have insight to our outputs either, you don't intuitively understand how your muscles work in response to stimuli, which is part of the reason why it feels like we have free will and are agents in the world instead of parts of the world.

The true quality of stimuli is already lost and grossly simplified at receptor level, in the case of light the photoreceptive rod and cone cells of the retina.

I believe one phrase for it is the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis

Not exactly a match, but Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness makes a variant of this claim, putting an arms race concerning prediction of third-party reactions to hypothetical actions as the driving force of human self-awareness.

I suggest Geoffrey Miller's book The Mating Mind. Or search for sexual selection.

Yet many of the really smart humans seem to have trouble with social interactions. Dark Triad people who excel at getting others to do their bidding might have higher than average IQ's, but they generally don't go into STEM fields where having high IQ's can pay off.

People don't change their views about fundamental issues such as how they deal with knowledge quickly.

As far as articles go, Yvain's article http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/06/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-pop-bayesianism/ is good.

I find it hard to do that without then having to explain what "update your beliefs" actually means.

"Change your mind"? "Take that on board"?

One the hardest things for people to do is change the way they believe the world is structured because psychologically there lies an aspect of death or non-existence. It is very hard for most people to do.

Norms of politeness will be a confounding variable.

This is an interesting idea, but it may be very difficult to do in practice. At many major universities the students' evaluations are fully anonymous-their names are never on them at all. And I suspect that the universities may be uncomfortable changing that even for a few classes just to help answer this question.

As far as long-term consequences go, my ability to digest carbs without getting gassy or stomach achey seems to have been seriously damaged by my diet.

I'm afraid that it largely depends on your initial diet. For me, paleo was a net disaster (3 months with quality of life substantially reduced, and 3 kgs gained), but probably because I came from an already healthier diet.
If you factor in that in a high proteic diet you have higher than normal insuline spikes and you may lose the ability to process gluten, then you might actually gain some benefit.

In my admittedly small social circle, I've seen though more people benifit from a vegetarian diet than from paleo.

Link to the podcast, with transcript.

The mention of MIRI, about (bad) AI forecasts :

Russ Roberts : [It] seems to me that there are a lot of people in AI who think [strong AI development is] only a matter of time, and that the consequences are going to be enormous. They're not going to just be like a marginal improvement or marginal challenge. They "threaten the human race."

Gary Marcus : Before we get to those consequences, which I actually do think are important, I'll just say that there's this very interesting [?] by a place called MIRI in Berkeley, MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute). And what they found is that they traced people's prediction of how far away AI is. And the first thing to know is what they found is, the central prediction, I believe it was the modal prediction, close to the median prediction, was 20 years away. But what's really interesting is that they then went back and divided the data by year, and it turns out that people have always been saying it's 20 years away. And they were saying it was 20 years away in 1955 and they're saying it now. And so people always think it's just around the corner. The joke in the field is that if you say it's 20 years away, you can get a grant to do it. If you said it was 5 years away, you'd have to deliver it; and if 100 years, nobody's going to talk to you.

Reminds me of a Gregory Bateson quote:

"If the hangover preceded the binge, drunkenness would be considered a virtue & not a vice."

Hm, a drug where the negative effects are first... Well, almost all medicines fit this category: unpleasant taste is common.

Illegal drugs that people want to take? Ayahuasca comes to mind:

Author Don Jose Campos claims that people may experience profound positive life changes subsequent to consuming ayahuasca.[5] Vomiting can follow ayahuasca ingestion; this purging is considered by many shamans and experienced users of ayahuasca to be an essential part of the experience, as it represents the release of negative energy and emotions built up over the course of one's life.[6] Others report purging in the form of nausea, diarrhea, and hot/cold flashes.

Exercise.

But more seriously, try asking this again in the next open thread, this one seems flooded.

There are drugs for alcoholics that make you sick if you drink, so it makes you feel miserable short-run but may help you to be stable/functional/productive long run.

In my experience Salvia divinorum works very much like this.

There are other ways of taking Pascal's mugging into account. You shouldn't do that based on lack of computing power. And if you aren't doing it based on lack of computing power, why involve randomness at all? Why not work out what an agent would probably do after N samples, or something like that?

I think emr, above, makes some very good points, but I think you guys are all missing some crucial aspects of the situation.

The places where a distinctively Islamic terrorism has taken off (Algeria, Chechnya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria) are all areas that have been ravaged by civil war or foreign occupation, leading to the breakdown of co-operative mechanisms in the wider society. In other words, the only move is defect. Yet at the same time, these societies (or sections of them) retain a distinctively Muslim identity and aspiration, so the natural way of forming new, co-operative institutions is to base them on that shared Muslim identity. Those participating in these movements no doubt see themselves as conducting a new Abbasid Revolution. This also draws in sympathisers from outside the country. Yet the outcome often becomes terrorism, because:

• There are non-Islamic, or non-Sunni counter-currents within that society
• Islamic regimes arouse massive hostility in the West
• Precisely because these movements arise in the context of existing civil war/violence, it leads to a Hayekian "Worst Get On Top" dynamic, where more moderate groups get forced out.

In other words, suppose you're a Sunni in Eastern Syria or Central/Northern Iraq, and you want to co-operate to protect your friends and family from, say, being kidnapped and tortured by the police. You tried voting for al-Iraqiyya, and indeed they won the election, but half their candidates got thrown out of Parliament, so they can't legally stop the state machinery from persecuting you. And those guys aren't gangsters, so they can't use extra-legal means to protect you. So maybe the co-operative move, at least in a lesser-of-two-evils sense, is to join ISIS. And hey, maybe that worked, because ISIS's success caused Maliki's government to collapse, and maybe the new government in Baghdad will govern in a non-sectarian way, at least for a while, in the same way that al-Qaeda-in-Iraq's initial successes gained concessions and allowed the 'Sunni Awakening.'

As for why these organisations are able to recruit worldwide - I don't know why you consider it so surprising that they should get "anyone at all." It's like medieval Christians signing up for the Teutonic Knights, or Georgian Hellenophiles going to fight for Greek independence. These people are ignorant and idiotic, with a notion of what they're doing that's utterly divorced from reality, but there's never been a shortage of romantic fools.

I think the linked article hits a few common themes about why this might happen:

• Sunni Islamist groups manage to convince some Sunni Kurds that the "Sunni" part overrides the "Kurd" part, at least while there's a good opportunity to gang up on a more-hated outgroup.
• Broadly, an Islamist group will claim that they represent the larger and true community of cooperators, and so defection is presented as the true cooperative move.
• The defining feature of culturally foreign recruits has been low-status, while only a weak Islamic heritage seems to be required. It's possible that literally no mainstream group wants some of these people, while a terrorist group will promise them status. Radical groups are often unwittingly assisted in this by a foreign media which dramatically exaggerates the seriousness of these groups. (This is connected to the oft-cited effect that media coverage has on encouraging school shootings).
• The community is unable or unwilling to punish defection. Bluntly, most recruits come from communities where they can expect at least ambivalence, if not some support, for actions we would describe as terrorism. Think of Saudi Arabia. Given the official ideologies, one has to resort to game theory (signaling) to explain why there aren't more recruits, and to things like Reason as a memetic immune disorder to explain who acts and who doesn't.
• The few recruits who can genuinely be described as defecting from the entire local community are more puzzling. My best guess still involves low status, the law or large numbers, and (at least sometimes) a pathological inability of the host society to respond to defectors who don't defect in culturally familiar ways, as in the recent Australian terrorist attack.

It's all about motivation. One of the biggest driver's to join a terrorist group is a sense of powerlessness over a situation or being gullible to wider teachings. I recommend reading, "Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife." Not only does it have great bits about counter-insurgency strategy it gives you a picture of the people involved.

why are they getting anyone at all?

Because people are different and in a sufficiently large population you can find outliers (don't forget people are not rational).

I have two pieces of advice for you. Please take them with a grain of salt - this is merely my opinion and I am by no means an expert in the matter. Note that I can't really recommend that you do things one way or another, but I thought I would bring up some points that could be salient.

1) When thinking about the coding job, don't put a lot of emphasis on the monetary component unless you seriously need the money. You are probably earning less than you would be in a full time job, and your time is really valuable at the moment. On the other hand, if you need the money immediately or are interested in the job primarily because of networking opportunities or career advancement, then it is a different matter.

2) Keeping up a good GPA is not equivalent to learning the material well. There are certainly corners you could cut which would reduce the amount of work you need to do without losing much of the educational benefit. As the saying goes, 20% of the effort gives 80% of the results. If you are pressed for time, you may need to accept that some of your work will have to be "good enough" and not your personal best. Having said that, be very careful here, cause this is also an easy way to undermine yourself. "This isn't really the important stuff" is a fully general excuse.

A high GPA is somewhat helpful when you're looking for your first full-time programming job, but probably not as helpful as how prestigious a school you went to, and definitely not as helpful as industry experience or actual nuts-and-bolts engineering skill. This latter is not to be underestimated; a lot of new CS grads can't quickly write accurate pseudocode, for example, and you will be asked to do that at some point during any half-decent interview. If you can't do it, that's going to be a deal-breaker, but having a 3.2 instead of a 3.5 GPA almost certainly won't be.

After a couple years of full-time experience, almost no one will ask about your GPA (they will, however, ask where you went to school and what degree you got), meaning that GPA is important to your long-term career prospects almost entirely insofar as it affects your standing right out of college. It'll also affect your prospects for grad school, if you're interested in going that direction at some point.

Before you do anything else, reconsider your class schedule. A higher GPA will probably mean more to your future career prospects than keeping the math major. Also, balance your schedule so you have a mix of lower-work/more-gently-graded classes and harder classes every semester.

Consider dropping the job depending on the criteria ChaosMote noted.

Your lifestyle sounds pretty sterile. You should make an effort to socialize more. College can be a place you make friends who last a lifetime, if you put some effort in.

Could you join a fraternity? Best decision I made while in college.

How many hours is your coding job? If it's 10+ and they'll allow you to reduce them, you could go for that - you'll still get to list having x months of experience there on your CV, will still get that experience and network from it, but will have a bit more time.

Don't cut into the basic time you need for the essentials of life - being stressed or sleep deprived etc. will only make you less productive and exacerbate the problem. You also don't mention any hobbies - do you get regular exercise? I know this means more time spent, but if you don't get much already even 20mins every other day will make you more alert and productive.

There are easier courses and harder courses - try to take easier ones (still meeting requirements) as long as they don't conflict with your interests. You can ask classmates about which are easier/have better lecturers.

Prep for your classes in the holidays - before each year I'll look at the syllabus of the courses I'm taking and look up each of the terms there, spending maybe 30mins on each getting a general idea of what's involved. This means you're not seeing it for the first time in class, which makes it way easier to learn and retain (less overall effort).

Also ask why is the work harder now? I often find work hard for one of a few reasons: either I don't have the background, I'm tuning out of the lectures (because the lecturer is boring, because I already know most of it, or because I feel like I don't know enough to understand it even if I tune in), the work is actually time-consuming but not hard and this registers as 'hard' because I don't want to start it, or I have just a few problems/knowledge gaps and don't have the resources (friends, lecturers, example problems) to turn to to fix them. Each one of these has a different way of fixing it - for example the last one, having friends in that class helps with immensely, because you can each fill in those little gaps for eachother. I find it useful in math particularly.

Finally, there will be people at your college that also hate partying/drinking/etc. I've been lucky, having a solid group of 7 friends pretty much since I started college, all of whom aren't interesting in drinking or partying, have similar majors (a lot in IT) and are happy to just hang out between classes and chat/study with eachother. I'm not entirely sure how you can find these people other then persistence - if you're looking to go flatting, perhaps look at flats that say they are 'quiet', if you're doing group projects try to group up with the harder working members of your class etc. and then follow up with this - ask where they hang out when they're not in class and if you can join them. If you find one or two people with similar outlook to you, you'll tend to find a whole bunch, because their friends will be similar to them.

I recently posted a discussion post on a similar topic, albeit for archival reasons, rather than regular community support. Either way, I'd encourage you try it out. There seems to be a cautious attitude on LessWrong that if one asks about starting a regular or periodic type of thread, a consensus will come forth giving great reasons either for or against the thread's institution. This doesn't really seem to happen. If you start this thread, include for the first one a note like 'If this is used lots, or well-received, then we can make it a monthly thread". If it gets lots of comments, or gets lots of upvotes, or even gets a few upvotes with a decent upvote:downvote ratio, I figure that's grounds for posting the thread a second time. The group rationality diary encourages people to report mistakes and failure modes, but trying a thread explicitly and only about reporting failures and mistakes might work.

I wouldn't mind a new monthly thread for that topic, but I think it's (in theory) already covered by the Group Rationality Diary series, at least in the sense of trying to do something rationally and failing. There's also the Mistakes repository for major life mistakes.

People who don't use Predictionbook, why don't you?

I'm not really sure how to answer this. Predictionbook is just one of thousands of websites I don't use.

I use predition book from time to time.

A huge issue of why I'm not using it more is that it's often hard to find interesting predictions to vote on. The Recent prediction page for example doesn't allow you to show a second page.

It doesn't seem to be possible to simply look at all the predictions on Tag X. I think the way stack-exchange works with tags functions quite well.

I think commenting should be separated from individual prediction making. There's no reason why the website shouldn't allow full threaded comments.

I used to use prediction book, but stopped because the interface was awful and the site was full of bad predictions that should have been private but weren't (e.g., I'm going to pass my exam tomorrow -- just like that, without any context).

I use it when linked to it on interesting questions, usually HPMOR. But the site is too thinly used and too poorly designed to have a really robust use for me.

Disclaimer: This application was designed for the sole purpose of helping me obtain employment in software development and is not yet production ready. Use at your own risk (of data loss)!

Still, having said that: let me know if you have any ideas.

I recently wrote a small (python, command-line) program for prediction tracking. Above all, I wanted something that allowed very quick entry, that stored everything in a single plain-text human-readable file on my own computer, and that I could easily customize.

As far as features go, I also wanted a tagging system and to be able to do more sophisticated analysis. For example, I wanted to classify predictions as e.g."work" or "politics" when looking at accuracy, or to see how my calibration changed over different times or with how far in advance I had made a prediction.

Since the predictions that I care most about aren't very interesting to other people, I don't miss the social aspect. Nor do I want to obscure a prediction that contains personal details or store it separately.

An example:

If you wanted to predict that it will rain today, with 50% confidence, and tag the prediction with the "weather" and "external" tags, and be reminded to judge the prediction 2 days from now, you'd type this on the command line:

predict 'rain today' 50 -t weather external -d 2

The created entry in the log will look something like this:

{
    "prediction": "rain today",
    "confidence": 50,
    "notes": null,
    "tags": [
        "weather",
        "external"
    ],
    "date_created": "2014-12-14T20:17:26",
    "date_due": "2014-12-16T20:17:26",
    "state": "open"
}

Running "predict --due" will either ask you about any predictions that are ready to be judged and update the corresponding log entry, or just change "state" to "due" so you can ctrl-f and edit the log directly. (Since the log is just text, you can manually edit any entry, like changing a prediction from "open" to "true" or "false").

Running "predict --stats" will dump statistics.

I'm very happy with this work flow, and I'm hoping to clean up the code and share it when I get a moment. It's all of ~250 lines, but I couldn't find what I wanted out there already.

I don't like design and usability of the site. I think topics should be somehow divided, because not everyone is interested in soccer or currencies which are the most trivial things to predict

I've occasionally used it, but I often want to make a prediction while I'm not near a computer and doing it on a smartphone is a bit of a pain. I also don't have enough friends using it, so using it to prove I was right isn't all that possible.

I used to use it, but as I shifted to doing more on my mobile device I found it was a pain to use and so stopped. If it had a good app then I would use it again.

It seems sort of pointless. Why do I need to know how accurate my predictions are? How would that benefit me?

I once found some graphs of CPU speed and storage per dollar per year

https://intelligence.org/2014/05/12/exponential-and-non-exponential/ ?

I'm not sure if it'll keep going, but the Flynn effect(rising IQ over time) is mysterious enough that continuation is possible, and might be interesting.

I am not familiar with that organization. However, psychologist Carol Dweck, the author of the book "Mindset", claims that it is better to praise children for their hard work instead of their innate intelligence, because this way one encourages them to develop "growth" mindset instead of "fixed" mindset, since the latter is less useful. On a similar note, I guess that organizations that are based on the "fixed" mindset are probably less useful than organizations or clubs that are based on some goal that could help you to develop "growth" mindset. Therefore it is probably better to join an organization that is working to achieve something and it is the result of your efforts that is measured, instead of unchanging abilities. Of course, being unfamiliar with International High IQ Society, I might be wrong about them. Perhaps instead of trying to find an organization that would help your personal growth you are simply trying to find a new place to meet new people and/or network. In that case I have very little idea whether this organization is useful for that goal, therefore I will not say anything about that.

Free online IQ tests mean nothing. Don't take them more seriously than you would take a horoscope.

I don't have an experience with the organization you linked, but if it is similar to Mensa, my advice would be: don't worry about anything, just go there and take the test. If they are a serious organization, the test will probably be very different from the online tests you took. If you pass the test, there is a high probability you will be disappointed with the organization. Also, try the Mensa test.

My experience with Mensa is that it collects smart people (on the other hand, not that smart -- if you had a decent university, most of your classmates would be on that level; also most of the LW meetup participants) but then it does... pretty much nothing. You will find there also people who technically have high IQ, but otherwise are boring and/or irrational. My advice would be to pick the few individuals who seem better than the rest of the crowd, and focus on those individuals. Mensa can give you contact to these few cool people, but that's pretty much all it can do.

A world simulating itself would be highly unlikely. It's theoretically possible to have a universe simulate itself, since it can do things like just read from records instead of simulating the computer itself, but it's not really feasible. You have to simulate a smaller or more coarse-grained universe than the one you're in.

The one you refer to was mentioned in http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/:

Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group.

Link is dead, but the article is here http://foreignpolicy.com/2007/03/13/numbed-by-numbers/.

The original study seems to be Kogut and Ritov, 2005. I found a pdf through Google scholar search (always a good way to find studies) over here.

Keep lot of slips of paper on a clipboard next to the bed. Give each idea its own slip (so they can easily be sorted later). Lay down on the bed 25 minutes early, which will give you time for the thoughts to arise, then you'll get your full sleep time.

I occasionally remember to keep pencil + paper by my bed for this reason, so that I can write such things down in the dark without having to get up or turn on a light. Even if the results aren't legible in the usual sense, I've almost always been able to remember what they were about in the morning.

I usually try forming a picture to remember all the things, then focusing on it very hard. You can locate a picture in a specific location to help remember it (method of loci.) As soon as you get up, write everything down. (You can "locate" it in your closet or somewhere you go right after waking, and that may help you remember.) This may have the added benefit of improving your memory.

You could also try to find a time earlier that you're not doing anything requiring thinking (like walking, or transportation, or eating, or whatever), and try to think of these things during that time, then write them down before you go to sleep.

I use my phone which I keep charged next to the bed.

We updated on the fact that we exist. SSA does this a little too: specifically, the fact that you exist means that there is at least one observer. One way to look at it is that there is initially a constant number of souls that get used to fill in the observers of a universe. In this formulation, SIA is the result of the normal Bayesian update on the fact that soul-you woke up in a body.

Fanfiction writers are generally prohibited from making money without the original author's permission. This includes charging for prints.

If you just want a printed copy, you can order one printed from a PDF yourself (search terms: PDF bound book). It is likely to cost you upwards from $100 for the currently released chapters and come in 4-5 volumes.

If you want to thank Eliezer for writing the story, donate to MIRI the amount you find appropriate.

I've always thought of the MU hypothesis as a derivative of Plato's theory of forms, expressed in a modern way.

Chickens produce more meat than eggs in a given time-period. I originally encountered this when reading about animal cruelty, but I would expect the same would apply to saving money and lowering the demand for food. If anything, you should be replacing eggs with meat.

Stirfries can be cheap, fast, convenient, and healthy. Dahl (lentil stew) is slow to make, but cheap and convenient.

Austrian economics has consistently made bad predictions. It doesn't give you the right answers for rates, fx, gdp or inflation.

Saudi Arabia old oil and the US frackers are currently in a price war. Oil is cheaper for every importer, not just for those who happen to use the U.S. dollar as their domestic currency.

Now it looks like the U.S. dollar has gone into the opposite of a "collapse" because a dollar can buy a lot more oil today than it could a few months back.

Like chaosmage said, oil is getting cheaper in all currencies (at least the ones not experiencing hyperinflation). Thus it isn't related to the country's economic policy.

Also if you update against "Austrianism" every time the price of oil drops, do you update in it's favor every time it rises?

As a general rule, doomsayers are rather silly. Doom not coming to pass is the expected result, and shouldn't surprise you.

1. Your utility function need not be completely linear, just locally linear. If your utility function measures against the total good done in the world, your effect on the world will be small enough to be locally linear

2. Most people don't want to optimize the total good done, but instead care about the amount of good they do. People donate to charity until the marginal utility they derive from purchasing moral satisfaction falls below the marginal utility they derive from purchasing other things. In this case, diversification makes sense, because utility you assign to good you're responsible for is very non-linear.

3. If you're giving to charity at all, that's awesome. Do what motivates you.

"if everyone thought like this"

...then, what? Every dollar of charity would be most efficiently invested and we'd solve the highest impact problems before moving on to others?

What happens if everyone thinks like this?

I believe donating to the best charity is essentially correct, for the reason you state. You won't find much disagreement on Less Wrong or from GiveWell. Whether that's obvious or not is a matter of opinion, I suppose. Note that in GiveWell's latest top charity recommendations, they suggest splitting one's donation among the very best charities for contingent reasons not having to do with risk aversion.

If you had some kind of donor advised fund that could grow to produce an arbitrarily large amount of good given enough time, that would present a conundrum. It would be exactly the same conundrum as the following puzzle: Suppose you can say a number, and get that much money; which number do you say? In practice, however, our choices are limited. The rule against perpetuities prevents you from donating long after your lifetime; and opportunities to do good with your money may dry up faster than your money grows. Holden Karnofsky has some somewhat more practical considerations.

So if we agree that we should invest our donations and donate them later it seems like there is no reason to actually donate them at any time since at any such time we could follow the same reasoning and push the donation even further. Is the conlcusion then to either donate now or not at all?

This depends on what someone believes the worthiest target for their donations is. If they're trying to optimize for goals that require the continuance of Earth-originating intelligence, or humanity, than they'll probably want to prevent human extinction. If they believe humanity faces a Great Filter or an existential risk in the coming decades, they'll want to donate eventually. Supposedly they'd drive money to organizations will decrease the chances of humanity being destroyed. Of course, this still leaves the consideration that if they invest very well, or invest at the right time, (and know how to identify those things), such that money invested now for period t, increased to value n(x), will be worth more to the target organization at the end of period t, than the original value of money, x, is worth to the organization now.

However, its been argued from within effective altruism that the longer you wait to do good, the less the good you do will be worth. A donation is worth more now than later; effort applied at a later time will result in less value than the same level of effort applied now. This is called the haste consideration. Over time, the marginal increase in value of an investment over time comes up against the (presumed) marginal decrease of donation at any given time. I figure one could try measuring or calculating the rates of change here, and then figuring out some point at which the curves of them cross which would provide the optimum time to withdraw money from investment and donate it for maximum impact. However, that seems difficult. I'm not aware of something like this previously being done, and I follow effective altruism closely. So, if this has all been quantified, that report hasn't been widely circulated.

This seems all the more important on LessWrong, because users on this site are more likely to care about existential risk reduction, whether they identify with effective altruism or not. Also, one could estimate a time past which investing rather than donating would be pointless, because that is beyond the point at which one expects humanity to preserve anything worth either investing in or donating to.

you should split your donations just as you split your investments, because of risk.

Isn't it the case that most investment opportunities have essentially the same expected returns, due to market efficiency? In that case you want to diversify, since you can lower the variance without lowering the expected return. But if you can identify a single giving opportunity that has a significantly higher expected return than the alternatives, then it seems like you'd want to concentrate on that one opportunity.

Most people give to charity because it makes them feel good - knowing you're helping people is a warm fuzzy feeling that most people enjoy. Obviously this can lead to irrationality pretty easily - look at the ineffective charities kept alive by nice narratives - but if we take that as the base reason, then standard human loss aversion can explain splitting. Your goal isn't to improve the world per se, but instead to have your money improve the world. In other words, the argument about linearity of utility disappears, because one bad decision will destroy all the value you get from charity, and since that value is partially independent of the expected value of the good done in the world, this can happen even if you're investing in the charity with the highest EV.

I don't 100% agree with this, but it's fairly close to my gut feeling - I split my political donations, but not my humanitarian donations.

No idea, but you certainly should have enough.

We've known for some time that Titan has plenty of organic molecules.

This only means that the great filter is not due to the difficulty of creating organic compounds. (In fact, creating organic compounds was already very low on a list of things that might be the cause of an early filter, or maybe even already effectively ruled out.).

It still could be a step between this and where we are now. For example, it could be the creation of Eukaryotes. Or it could be intelligence. Or other things.

The article says:

There are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock.

There's also matter exchange from earth to mars that could have brought life that originated on earth to mars.

In addition to the point made by ChristianKI that this may be non-biological, the origin of life is not the only possible Great Filter aspect which could be in our past. Other candidates for example include the rise of multicellular life, the development of complex brain systems (this one is not that likely since it seems to have developed multiple times in different lineages), the development of fire and the development of language.

What's horrible about that?

Anything other than methane which is the simplest organic molecule there is (CH4) and, as far as I remember, has been detected in interstellar gas..?

You've chosen a strange grouping to represent American libertarianism. When I think of American libertarian intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s, the first name that springs to my mind is Milton Friedman.

Predictions are hard, especially about the future, but I doubt that the names and works of the likes of Friedman, Buchanan, Coase, Becker, Fama and Lucas (and, yes, Rand) are going to be forgotten or fall into disrepute any time soon. They have given birth to entire schools of thought (e.g. 'Chicago School' economics, Law & Economics movement) and institutions (e.g. GMU). There also appears to be no shortage of current libertarian intellectuals, and there appear to be more libertarian or libertarian-influenced politicians than ever, at least in the Anglosphere.

You appear to give no reasons for your predictions of decline for libertarianism or transhumanism. That is unfortunate.

fringe writers and intellectuals like ... Ayn Rand

This passage from Wikipedia makes me doubt your description of Ayn Rand as a "fringe writer":

In 1991, a survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club asked club members what the most influential book in the respondent's life was. Rand's Atlas Shrugged was the second most popular choice, after the Bible. Rand's books continue to be widely sold and read, with over 29 million copies sold as of 2013 (with about 10% of that total purchased for free distribution to schools by the Ayn Rand Institute).

The American political order in the 1970s was very different from the present day's. Nixon's wage and price controls were the straw that broke the camel's back, in this regard. It's not surprising that a classically liberal party would be founded in response to them, although ultimately this was a minor factor, if one at all, in shifting prevailing views in such matters.

Hardly anyone remembers those wage and price controls now, and they certainly didn't cause an economic disaster that required forming a new political party.

The issue isn't economic disaster but not acting according to certain ideals.

Franklin Roosevelt's presidency imposed far more strenuous controls on the American economy during the Second World War, and the country seems to have recovered well from them after the war ended without radicalizing people into libertarians.

Roosevelt was a Democrat. Anybody who wanted less price controls then Roosevelt could go to the Republicans. Richard Nixon was a Republican. Going to the Democrats wouldn't helped, so he needed a new party.

I'd say the wage and price controls were more important as evidence that the Republican party had abandoned capitalism. Unlike with Roosevelt, that left no major party for capitalists to support.

Oh, don't be daft. Executive assistants are a completely normal XXI century job. Basically, he wants a secretary and there's nothing unusual about it.