Open Thread May 30 - June 5, 2016

I suspect that Dunbar's number includes fictional characters and people you don't know in person but have many information about them (celebrities, politicians). In the past people also had a few examples in this category, for example Jesus, or the local king, but that is at least an order of magnitude less than all current movie characters, celebrities, and politicians people are familiar with. Also, watching someone on TV is a stronger stimulus than merely hearing or reading about them.

So it seems to me quite likely that modern media consume our "empathy points". (And the clickbait media make it even worse, because they burn all kinds of "giving-a-shit points" like a wildfire.)

A solution is spending time offline with other people (doing something else than watching media). Because people are not automatically strategic, someone has to organize an event and invite others. LW meetups, former classmates meeting at a cafe every Thursday, etc.

Consider how old and universal story-telling is. Humans felt empathy for fictional characters since forever.

Does that sound right?

As a fictional example of a prisoner's dilemma, it sounds fine. Solutions are the same as all PDs: out-of-game enforcement (social norms or the like), superrationality, repeated interactions and tit-for-tat, or accept the equilibrium.

Does that sound right?

As a description of actual choices made by individuals, no. Your assumptions and your reward scoring are nowhere near reasonable.

Let's assume that everyone has a fixed budget of attention and empathy.

This is a bad assumption. I could spend more time empathizing than I do -- for example, when I chose to read a nonfiction book, I am likely to emphasize less than when I read a fictional tear-jerker. Moreover, the media spends a lot of time trying to increase your attention and empathy budget, getting you very engaged (attentive and empathetic) to their characters, whether these be fictional or political personages or whatever. Anytime that you stay up late watching Football (rather than go to sleep) you have increased your attention and empathy for that day.

However, it is true that TV and internet have strong money-making incentives for gaming your attention and empathy, and your neighbors probably don't. So on the A&E market, it is reasonable to expect that large powerful players will often outperform small local players. The fact that the market is flexible rather than fixed is probably a factor that makes it worse.

Individuals can form pseudonymous groups and collaborate to perform tasks that they would be unable to perform as individuals while attributing the completion of the tasks to their collective pseudonymous identities, a la the Bourbaki group. The groups allow socialization and the identities allow admiration.

The main big thing to come from such a thing would be cheaper synthesis of long pieces of DNA. God I want that. The last three months in the lab would've been so much less painful. I'm mostly with the guy from Ginkgo Bioworks arguing that the ability to make tens of kilobases at a time is most interesting - chromosome sized DNA chunks are damn hard to move in and out of eukaryotic cells reliably.

Yes; I hear that he's the second largest donor to MIRI this year, and I've been working with him successfully on esports betting (with half of the proceeds earmarked for MIRI). I don't know if anyone has taken him up on the match offer.

He didn't contact me. I feel cheated.

I tend to read up on potential cures that may come in the future. Even ones that are far off or unlikely. Hope is a valuable coping mechanism.

I busy myself with tracking the parameters in my life that make me feel good or bad. I take care to track the things that make me feel good and I don't have a "Pain Journal" but rather a "Thriving Journal". The semantic distinction changes my attitude toward the process.

I consistently pursue every currently available medical treatment. This is part of keeping a positive mindset.

I try to fully and mindfully appreciate the good days. I hope you have good days, or at least better days, to focus on. On the worst days, I try to reflect on the fact that a better day will come around eventually. Maybe tomorrow, even!

I assiduously avoid letting myself dwell or ruminate on "how much my life sucks" in such terms. I focus more on how I'm doing pretty well, considering. I've learned that getting into a depression about it just makes everything a billion times worse. Call it stoicism or whatever, it's more like a mindset that depressive thinking is an addictive drug that I know I can't risk taking a single hit of or I'll be addicted.

Suicide is not really an option that bears much thought when you consider that literally tomorrow somebody could come out with the cure to whatever ails you. You never know. And once you're finally cured, physical pain that's in the past is not really real anymore.

Did you look at https://www.painscience.com/? That site had info that cured nasty chronic pain of mine that lasted >1 year. This tutorial in particular was extremely helpful: https://www.painscience.com/tutorials/trigger-points.php

To answer your original question: when I was dealing with chronic pain, I had issues with deep despair similar to what you describe. My chronic pain left me unemployed, and I was constantly in fear of doing things that would aggravate my condition and set back the (very slow and variable) progress it was making in resolving itself. Definitely an extremely miserable period.

Thoughts I had that I found helpful and I'll pass on to you: I decided there were basically 2 strategies for dealing with the pain I had: cure and mitigation. Cure refers to finding a way to roll back the root cause of the problem and return to being my pain-free self. Mitigation refers to accepting the pain and finding ways to work around it (for me--finding a job that doesn't require me to make use of my hands at all, and probably doing a lot more meditation). I decided that it was best to focus on 1 strategy at a time, and that I should focus on the "cure" strategy for at least several years before switching to "mitigation". (What's a few years when I had decades left to live?) I realized that any given "cure" had a pretty low probability of working out, and being in a state of deep despair was extremely non-conducive to trying things that individually had a small probability of working out. This observation was helpful for recalibrating my intuition, and I resolved to make the "list of things I had tried" as long as I could possibly make it. I also resolved to do more of a breadth-first search than a depth-first search, at least at first--I didn't want something that would gradually fix my pain over the course of many months in a way that I would need careful journaling to observe--I wanted a technique that would help things noticeably, that I could use at any time, if the issues came up in the future. Luckily I did manage to find such a technique, which was trigger point therapy (see above links). I've since helped a few others make progress on their pain using trigger point therapy, and I think it's potentially useful for many, perhaps almost all, people who suffer chronic pain.

Some more specific recommendations:

• If you're not already taking something, start taking SAMe. It's a supplement that you can buy over the counter that's anti-depressant and has been shown to be quite useful for arthritis (so who knows, maybe it will end up helping your condition somehow--it probably hasn't been studied for your condition and you may as well do an n=1 trial). Ideally it will improve your mood, which will give you the motivation to try low-probability treatments, and it might fix your issue on its own. Here's more info: http://www.lifeextension.com/Magazine/2007/4/report_same/Page-01

• Read this book: http://smile.amazon.com/How-Fail-Almost-Everything-Still/dp/1591847745/ Not only is it an great book in and of itself, the author covers mental strategies that are ideal for chronic medical condition sufferers. And he uses the story of his chronic medical condition as a motivating example through the book, so it gives you something to relate to.

I have chronic back pian.

Yes. This is a common problem: look up 'pain catastrophising'.

Then: Learn specific evidence-based strategies to deal with anxiety (relaxation techniques) and cognitive distortions like catastrophising (cognitive therapies).

When the pain gets intense, it helps to remind myself "Not all days are as bad as this." It can feel overwhelming in the moment, and it distorts the view of the future. So I remind myself of that too. "What I'm experiencing right now is a distorted view of the future. So I'm not going to make any major decisions based on it."

It can be hard to look forward to the future when I'm not enjoying the present, when it's so awful, and there's no known path or plan to make thing better. It can be extremely frustrating to just endure. It can feel so futile and pointless.

When I have a better day later, I notice and point it out to myself and remember the worse day when it felt like I wouldn't have anything to look forward to, and am glad that I stayed alive long enough to experience it. And then I can remember that little conversation with myself when it gets intensely worse again, even though I don't recapture the good feeling at that time.

Suicide can seem pretty attractive under conditions of intense pain. Thoughts of suicide can be something like a valve, or an escape fantasy, or a fantasy of having an off switch for the pain. Repetitive thoughts can be related to exhaustion or illness. I think a lot of these thoughts and feelings can have a physiological basis, and are not necessarily something to identify with. They are probably pretty good at signaling "something is wrong" but not very good at "this is an accurate and complete picture of my desires". Paying attention to what you physically did just before the thoughts sometimes could lead to insights.

Research suggests that promiscuity is not associated with increased happiness and, in fact, that the number of sexual partners needed to maximize happiness is exactly one ... People who cheat in marriage (10% of the married people in the sample have had sex with more than one person in the previous year) are less happy. Men who use prostitutes are also less happy. That is, promiscuous people are less happy

The obvious question: Which way does the correlation go?

One possible explanation is "cheating will make you unhappy, e.g. because it will ruin your relationship", other possible explanation is "people who are already unhappy in their relationship are more likely to cheat".

Money may bring you happiness, but it won’t buy you more sex.

Again, the obvious question is: Does this control for the time spent making money?

One possible explanation is "people are actually not influenced by the money you have when they consider whether to choose you as a sexual partner", other possible explanation is "the more time you spend at work making money, the more money you have, but the less time you have for finding and maintaining sexual relations".

Worried your worry is untreatable?

Untreatable and the average primary-care physician can't effectively treat it are two different categories.

We also don't have an incentive system whereby those who can effectively treat actually get to treat. Medicine is rewarded on a cost-plus basis instead of being payed by the outcome.

This is definitely not that, but might be interesting for similar reasons: Scott Alexander's post called Scientific Freud.

I think I posted that. It's not hard to find the study - it's not counselling, it's CBT specifically.

Why do you want to do the test?

There was a lot of research that tried to show that students can be better taught by adapting to their learning styles. The general outcome of it, is that nobody demonstrated that adapting to learning styles helps.

There are a few links on the wiki. If none of them is what you're after, could you possibly say a little more about what was in the article you're looking for? (Was it, e.g., making the same sort of point as Eliezer's "Fallacy of Gray", or disagreeing with it, or saying some completely different thing about "continuous thinking"?)

these ideas are still weird enough

It only looks weird when expressed in the language of computers.

The simulation hypothesis is better known as creationism.

My first thoughts reading your post are 1) You start WAY TOO LATE IN THE GAME. You are essentially talking about altruism as a conscious choice which means you are well into the higher mammals.

Virtually every sexually reproducing creature devotes resources to reproduction that could have been conserved for individual survival. As you move up in complexity, you have animals feeding their young and performing other services for them. As would be expected with all evolved cooperation, the energy and cost you expend raising your young produces a more survivable young and so is net cost effective at getting the next generation going, which is pretty much what spreads genes.

How big of a leap is it from a mama bird regurgitating food into her baby's mouth to you helping your neighbor hunt for wooly mammoth?

If you were the first organism to get the gene to feed your babies or do whatever expanded their survivability, then obviously that is how that gene propagates, your babies have the gene.

As you get to the more complex forms of altruism of primates and humans, you also get to strong feedback mechanisms against non-cooperators and free-riders. The system may not be perfect but I think it allows a path from feeding babies or burying eggs in the sand to modern altruism in humans where no wierd "how do we start this" behaviors bump up to stop things.

imagine that you are literally the first organism

If the immediate consequences of the genetic change in question aren't terribly deleterious then that first organism may very well have offspring, even without it conferring any particular advantage. And now those offspring do have siblings who share the gene.

[EDITED to add: oops, saw Viliam's comment in Recent Comments and replied to it without noticing others had also done so making the same point.]

If you have a gene that makes you help you siblings, your offspring are reasonably likely to get it too, which benefits their siblings (also your offspring).

Maybe it doesn't help when you're the only one, but that doesn't matter; your species is one that has multiple children, and the mutation was so small it occurred in multiple children? ... And if that's too high a complexity penalty, there could be an alternative: say it is a trait which got spread due to a resource boom in a population (the resource boom makes it likely for even disadvantaged mutations to survive), and then individuals with the trait managed to find each other and be more fit?

... Just conjecture, though.

Imagine that you are literally the first organism who by random mutation achieved a gene for "helping those who help you"

Not all information is encoded genetically. Many kinds of information have to be learned from the parents or from society.

Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene contains, among other things, some interesting discussions about how many altruistic behaviors might have arisen through natural selection.

Or imagine that you are literally the first organism who by random mutation achieved a gene for "helping your siblings". How specifically does this gene increase your fitness, or the fitness of the gene itself, if your siblings do not have a copy of this gene?

Or imagine that you are literally the first organism who by random mutation achieved a gene for "helping your siblings"

That's not how genes work. There isn't a single gene for "helping your siblings".

Imagine that you are literally the first organism who by random mutation achieved a gene for "helping those who help you". How specifically does this gene increase your fitness, if there is no one else to reciprocate?

Genes don't need to help the individual that carries it. Genes are as Richard Dawkins famously said selfish.

I suggest reading Henrich's book The Secret of our Success. It describes a path to increased altruism that doesn't depend on any interesting mutation. It involves selection pressures acting on culture.