I can confirm that you and gwern are my favourite reads on Google+ (though I don't visit neither Google+ nor Facebook very often).

Most Interesting quote I found in first 5 minutes of browsing your G+ feed:

Unfortunately, the bubble was to burst once again, following a series of attacks on connectionism’s representational capabilities and lack of grounding. Connectionist models were criticized for being incapable of capturing the compositionality and productivity characteristic of language processing and other cognitive representations (Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988); for being too opaque (e.g., in the distribution and dynamics of their weights) to offer insight into their own operation, much less that of the brain (Smolensky 1988); and for using learning rules that are biologically implausible and amount to little more than a generalized regression (Crick 1989). The theoretical position underlying connectionism was thus reduced to the vague claim that that the brain can learn through feedback to predict its environment, without a psychological explanation being offered of how it does so. As before, once the excitement over computational power was tempered, the shortage of theoretical substance was exposed.

"One reason that research in connectionism suffered such setbacks is that, although there were undeniably important theoretical contributions made during this time, overall there was insufficient critical evaluation of the nature and validity of the psychological claims underlying the approach. During the initial explosions of connectionist research, not enough effort was spent asking what it would mean for the brain to be fundamentally governed by distributed representations and tuning of association strengths, or which possible specific assumptions within this framework were most consistent with the data. Consequently, when the limitations of the metaphor were brought to light, the field was not prepared with an adequate answer. On the other hand, pointing out the shortcomings of the approach (e.g., Marcus 1998; Pinker & Prince 1988) was productive in the long run, because it focused research on the hard problems. Over the last two decades, attempts to answer these criticisms have led to numerous innovative approaches to computational problems such as object binding (Hummel & Biederman 1992), structured representation (Pollack 1990), recurrent dynamics (Elman 1990), and executive control (e.g., Miller & Cohen 2001; Rougier et al. 2005). At the same time, integration with knowledge of anatomy and physiology has led to much more biologically realistic networks capable of predicting neurological, pharmacological, and lesion data (e.g., Boucher et al. 2007; Frank et al. 2004). As a result, connectionist modeling of cognition has a much firmer grounding than before."

-- Matt Jones & Bradley C. Love, Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment? On the explanatory status and theoretical contributions of Bayesian models of cognition.

I would love more detailed/referenced high-level analyses of different approaches to AI (e.g. connectionism v. computationalism v. WBE).

I suppose this would be a good place to start at the very least:

I don't do G+, but can confirm the awesomeness of Kaj's Facebook feed.

I have a folder that I do my short term work in:

D:/stupid shit that I can't wait to get rid of

This is set to auto-delete everything in it weekly. I had a chronic problem where small files that were useful for some minor task or another from months or years ago would clutter up everything. This was my "elegant" solution to the problem and it's served me well for years, because it gave me an actual incentive to put my finished work in a sensible place.

Although now that I think about it, it would be a better idea for it to only delete files that haven't been touched for a week, rather than wiping everything all at once on a Saturday ..

If you're comfortable with command-line UIs, git-annex is worth a look for creating repositories of large static files (music, photos, pdfs) you sync between several computers.

I use regular git for pretty much anything I create myself, since I get mirroring and backups from it. Though it's mostly text, not audio or video. Large files that you change a lot probably need a different backup solution. I've been trying out Obnam as an actual backup system. Also bought an account at an off-site shell provider that also provides space for backups.

Use the same naming scheme for your reference article names and the BibTeX identifiers for them, if you're writing up some academic research.

GdMap or WinDirStat are great for getting a visualization of what's taking space on a drive.

If your computer ever gets stolen, you probably want it to have had a full-disk encryption. That way it's only a financial loss, and probably not a digital security breach.

It constantly fascinates me that you can name the exact contents of a file pretty much unambiguously with something like a SHA256 hash of it, but I haven't found much actual use for this yet. I keep envisioning schemes where your last-resort backup of your media archive is just a list of file names and content hashes, and if you lose your copies you can just use a cloud service to retrieve new files with those hashes. (These of course need to be files that you can reasonably assume other people will have bit-to-bit equal copies of.) Unfortunately, there don't seem to be very robust and comprehensive hash-based search and download engines yet.

checks for duplicate files, sorting them by file size (fdupes doesn't do that; my script is pretty crude and not yet worth sharing)

How can identical files be sorted by file size?

My first reflex is to exclaim that I don't organize my files in any way, but that is incorrect: I merely lack comphrehension of how my filing system works, it's inconsistent, patchy and arbitrary, but I do have some sort of automatic filing system which feels "right" and when my files are not in this system my computer feels "wrong".

The only thing that's worked for me in the long term is making things public on the internet. This generally means putting it on my website, though code goes on github and shared-editing things go in Google Docs. Everything else older than a couple years is either gone or not somewhere I can find anymore.

For the last couple of years I have used Google drive exclusively for all new documents and am finding it works pretty well.
I use a simple folder structure which makes it a bit easier when you want to browse docs, though the search obviously works really well. root - random docs, works in progress, other |-- AI - AI notes, research papers, ebooks

|-- business - books, invoices, marketing notes, plans

|-- dev - used as a dumping ground for code when transferring between PCs (my master dev folder lives on the PC)

|-- study -course notes, lectures

The best part is that I can access them from home, work or on the road (android app works very well), so backups and syncing is not an issue.

For files on the home PC I use a NAS which is pretty amazing, and allows access from any home PC or tablet/phone via a mapped drive. The folder structure there is:

|-- photos - all pictures, photos, videos,

|-- dev - master location for all source code

|-- docs - master location for all documents older than 2 years (rest is on google drive)

|-- info - with lots of subfolders, any downloaded ebook, webpage, dataset that I didn't create

I don't use the clients but I am annoyed there isn't a simple way to download all google docs to the computer in RTF/Word or even text format - you can do full backups , but it they only work with Google drive. I don't think Google will go out of business any day soon, so it is not an imminent risk at this stage.

Seems that tools like Google Drive take care of many issues you describe. Directory structure and symlinks are superseded by labels, version control is built-in, search is built-in and painless, synchronization is built-in, no viruses to worry about, etc.

If you live in a city, you can (and probably should) get away with not owning a car. Not only is it unnecessary to get where you want to go, but due to property prices, parking is a gigantic hassle and expense. Walking works well for anything within a mile, biking for anything within about 5, public transit or a cab for the metro area, and car rentals (or borrowing a friend's) can fill in for anything else that absolutely requires your own vehicle.

Not owning a car saves a significant amount of time and money and makes the math better for living in a more built-up area.

I would guess that it depends a lot of the particular city that you are talking about. That means it would be good if you make the estimation yourself.

I recall, but am unable to find, a small study that looked into living in typical American suburbs and driving vs. living in the center city and taking public transit, walking, or biking. As I recall, the authors concluded that either is comparable in total costs for the "average" city. If that's true, then I think it's a strong case for living in the city given that people underestimate how stressful their commutes are and that you'll save time.

Others, especially bicycle advocates, have made the same comparison. If you don't own a car, you can turn your savings into higher rent. In my experience, you'll easily save more money and time going the car-free route. I'd recommend the book How to Live Well Without Owning a Car for an introduction to this lifestyle. Note that this lifestyle is not for everyone, but I do think it's a good idea for a large segment of the population.

Edit: I think this is the "study" I referred to above. It's interesting to see how my memory distorted things; I thought of this as an academic study, and couldn't find it among the papers I saved. No wonder, as it was merely a newspaper column.

Some time in the past couple hours, I got karmassassinated. Somebody went through and downvoted about 30 or so comments I've made, including utterly uncontroversial entries like this one and this one. It's a trivial hit for me, but I mention it in case anyone is gathering data points to identify the source of the problem.

Curious, I was just now seeking the latest Open Thread so that I could make the same observation---with near the same wording. If my memory of previous vote counts is correct then the change for me was exactly -3 across the board, for uncontroversial posts as much as the controversial ones. I wonder if our interactions in the past day or so include any overlap with respect to who we were arguing with. That wouldn't be nearly enough evidence to be confident about the culprit(s?) but enough to prompt keeping an eye out. Like you the hit is trivial to me (it doesn't put a dent in the ~30k karma and even the last week karma remains distinctly positive).

Those karmassassains (and some others who share their ill-will but have different ethics) may be pleased to note that I'm likely to give them exactly what they want. This is a rare enough response for me that I can't help but share my surprise. I am candidly and highly averse to supplying an incentive structure whereby defective behaviour is rewarded with desired outcomes rather than worse outcomes. As a core aesthetic that pattern is abhorrent to me. Yet even for me the preference has limits and the opportunity cost for satisfying that preference can be too high.

There are many people on lesswrong that I respect and value discussing and exploring new concepts with. Yet by the very nature of internet forums the people who are most valuable to talk to aren't the ones you end up talking to the most. Simply because putting "I agree" all over the place is considered spam and it is hard to reply in a cooperative 'agree and elaborate to keep the ideas flowing' manner because people are so damn conditioned to consider all replies to be somewhere at the core arguments opposing them or to be condescension.

I decided six months ago that for me personally the impulses regarding people wrong on the internet are too much of a liability now that the demographic here has changed so drastically from when we seeded the site with the OvercomingBias migration. I might try back in another six months---or perhaps if I reconfigure my supplement regime more in the direction of things that I know increase my inclination towards navigating petty social games elegantly. For now, however, real world people are just so much more enjoyable to talk to than internet people.

To the various folk I've been chatting to over PM: I'm not snobbing you, I'm just not here.

The worst possible reaction to this phenomenon is to point it out publicly rather than to quietly report it to whoever cares (currently no one among the site admins), since you noticing it, even occasionally, is enough of a positive reinforcement for the culprit to continue. I also mentioned on occasion that unfairly downvoted comments tend to get upvoted back up over time, so no point sweating it. So I am downvoting your comment to encourage you to silently shrug off karma sniping in the future.

No, I don't.

I do, but it's mostly because doing it helps me focus. I rarely go back to read my notes. Here's an example, for a book about SQL query tuning.

I tend to go for notes chapter-by-chapter. Among other things, it takes long enough to read a chapter that I get to the point where I can remember any particular idea with ease but the flow of concepts has mostly been lost and all of the pieces have been shunted into long-term memory. If I can mostly reconstruct the chapter, great, if not, I go back and figure out what was where and why it was there. (It might be worthwhile to always go back and see what you missed / got wrong, but that would probably get close to doubling the necessary reading time.)

I tried doing this briefly when I was experimenting with Workflowy but I found it excruciatingly boring and couldn't keep it up; it was close to ruining reading non-fiction for me and I stopped immediately when I noticed that.

Yes, if I don't take notes on the first reading there won't be a second reading. Not much detail -- more than a page is a problem (this can be ameliorated though, see below). I make an effort to include points of particular agreement, disagreement and some projects to test the ideas (hopefully projects I actually want to do rather than mere 'toy' projects).

Now would be a good time to mention TreeSheets, which I feel solves a lot of the problems of more established note-taking methods (linear, wiki, mindmap). It can be summarized as 'infinitely nestable spreadsheet/database with infinite zoom'. I use it for anything that gets remotely complex, because of the way it allows you to fold away arbitrary levels of detail in a visually consistent way.

I'll usually:

• Use a piece of paper as a bookmark on which I take notes (noting page numbers of bits I don't understand, attempts to summarize/reorganize, interesting insights, notes while I work something out, random ideas the text gives me) - it's not rare that I end a book with two or three pages of notes stuffed into them. I'll then go over those notes and maybe enter some bits in Anki
• Directly enter stuff in Anki if it's atomic enough (it often isn't)
• Takes notes in Google docs (either if I'm near a computer at a time, or if I want to have "searchable" notes or look up related info on the internet)

Usually I'll read it in depth first, then once I know if it's worth taking notes, I'll return to it and scan through quickly for those points I know are worth grabbing.

I've fairly recently (over the past month or so) started taking notes on pretty much everything, as part of a drive to capture as much useful content in Evernote as possible. A lot of what I'm doing at the moment is probably quite wasteful, but I expect to figure out what is and isn't useful in fairly short order.

For ebooks I've been making judicious use of highlighting on the Kindle. Unfortunately the UK Kindle service isn't as feature-rich as the US counterpart, so I'm still looking into ways of parsing my clippings file into Evernote. For hardcopy books and lectures, I've taken to either writing bullet-pointed lists or mini-essays. This also seems to have the positive side-effects of forcing me to clearly elucidate on ideas I've just taken in, and stopping me ruminating on the areas in question.

For example, late last night I was reading about the concept of "burden of proof" in legal and rhetorical contexts. This is a bit of a personal bugbear, and I ended up writing several hundred words informed by what I was reading. Not only can I now reference this when necessary, but it stopped me from trying to sleep with a bunch of proactive burden-of-proof-related arguments running through my head.

I answered a similar question here.

As I read textbooks, I summarize the most important concepts (along with doing the exercises, if there are any) and write them in a notebook and then later (less than a week) enter the notes into Anki as cloze-delete flashcards. I don't have an objective measure of retention, but I believe that it has vastly improved relative to when I would simply read the book.

I constantly take notes on papers that I read. If the paper's topic is familiar to me, I just take summary notes and points of dispute. If the paper has math or lots of unfamiliar terminology (especially common in anatomy and biochemistry), then I copy paragraphs from the paper as I read them, and then reformat the copied sentences (usually breaking up clauses) or then work out the math for myself.

My notes for a typical CogSci paper on functional neuroanatomy of emotion regulation: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/35756423/emotion-regulation.txt

Notes for a math paper by Jaynes on maximum entropy statistical inference that I'm currently working through: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/35756423/jaynes%20-%20stand%20on%20max%20ent.txt

I take notes for two main reasons. One, my memory is poor, and if I didn't take notes I would just lose all of the research I do. I've completely forgotten the control theory I read a few months ago, but it doesn't feel like a loss because it's still in my exocortex. Second, I tend to hoard info, and if I didn't summarize and discard the papers I read, they would accumulate in my documents folder without limit. Even while taking notes, I gain about a thousand papers a year. Hard drives are cheap, but there's still a huge cost to not being able to find the paper you need when you need it.

Hope that helps.

That he fails at basic instrumental rationality. I would be very interested in seeing a valid cost-benefit analysis which can justify leaving dangerous broken glass around, eating only take-out, and ignoring the risk of STI...

What I make of it is that "rationalist" is getting to sound cool enough that there are going to be people who claim to be rationalists even though they aren't notably rational.

Lists of "how to identify a real rationalist" will presumably run up against Goodhart's Law, but it still might make sense to start working on them.

Just because a manipulative narcissistic asshole calls himself a rationalist, it doesn't make him rational in the meaning of the word coined by Eliezer and generally shared here.

He is a rationalist who is deeply against living by social norms and just sees them as defaults, and is “non-default” about pretty much everything

As soon as I read that, I thought "uh oh, this is bad...", long before getting to the part about the STI. And unfortunately, this first sentence describes too many people in the LessWrong community, even ones who are more careful about STIs. Maybe this will be a wakeup call to people to stop equating "rationalist" with "rejecting social norms."

What do we make of this?

The character described sounds dangerous to himself and others.

One serious issue we had was that he gave me an STI. He had rationalised that he had a very limited risk of having an STI so despite my repeated requests and despite being informed that a previous partner had been infected, did not get tested.

If only there was a simple magic word that transferred control of one's own sexual health into one's own hands. Like "No", for instance. For creative emphasis or in response to repeated attempts to initiate sex despite refusal to honour basic safety requests there are alternative expressions of refusal such as "You want to put that filthy, infested thing inside me? Eww, gross!"

The letter writer mentions her (ex-)boyfriend's OK Cupid account screenname in the comments. I looked at it and didn't recognize him. I checked the same screenname on Reddit, which she said he also used (no account under that name) and here (an account exists by that name, but I don't think it's the same person - in particular the OKC account has a characteristic punctuation error that the local account doesn't make). If anyone from Missouri wants to see if he looks familiar there are breadcrumbs to follow.

It's possible that the choice of the word "rationalist" was a coincidence and this is not a peripheral community member mistreating his Muggle girlfriend, but just some random guy. I think it is worth finding out if we can.

There is often mentioned "LW" in the comments, but it seems to be an abbreviation for Letter Writer (the person who wrote the letter about the "rationalist"), not LessWrong. It took me some time to realize this.

Well, I expected that making "rationality" popular would bring some problems. If we succeed to make the word "rationality" high-status, suddenly all kinds of people will start to self-identify as "rationalists", without complying with our definition. (And the next step will be them trying to prove they are the real "rationalists", and all the others are fakes.) But I didn't expect this kind of thing, and this soon.

On the other hand, there doesn't have to be any connection with us. (EDIT: I was wrong here.) I mean... LessWrong does not have a copyright on "rationality".

He ships a prescription anti-narcolepsy from overseas which allows him to stay awake for long stretches on little sleep

The only thing he is getting right. ;)

One serious issue we had was that he gave me an STI. He had rationalised that he had a very limited risk of having an STI so despite my repeated requests and despite being informed that a previous partner had been infected, did not get tested.

I thought accepted theory was that rationalists, are less credulous but better at taking ideas seriously, but what do I know, really? Maybe he needs to read more random blog posts about quantum physics and AI to aspire for LW level of rationality.

Play better games

Do you mean it was an insight which hit you hard enough that you stopped playing immediately and completely?

It's sort of darkly funny that my second Google autocomplete suggestion for "Progress Quest" is "progress quest cheats".

(The usual caveats about autocomplete apply, of course.)

Cookie Clicker!

That really depends on the game. Take Ninja Gaiden, or Super Mario Brothers, or Castlevania 1 - the difficulty ramps steeply but your characters' abilities do not ramp at all. Zelda levels generally get harder faster than you get tougher (with some exceptions).

In some games, choosing the right advancements is a major part of the game. It's seen most clearly in Epic Battle Fantasy 2: over the course of the game, you get 10 abilities (and only 10, out of a long lineup); picking the right ones (and ensuring that you qualify for them) is a lot of the challenge of the game. There is some of a 'numbers go up' element to it, but if you don't pick the right things, you are screwed - and there's no grinding to get 'em all. The other installments in the series unfortunately lack this.

That said, I play single-player games a whole lot less than I used to, partially due to this.

Ah, grasshopper, the point is the journey, not the end of it.

Besides, MMORGs take the number counter chasing to new levels (have you done your dailies, weeklies, and monthlies? X-D).

I haven't seen Her yet, but this reminds me of something I've been wondering about.... one of the things people do is supply company for each other.

A reasonably competent FAI should be able to give you better friends, lovers, and family members then the human race can. I'm not talking about catgirls, I'm talking about intellectual stimulation and a good mix of emotional comfort and challenge and whatever other complex things you want from people.

Is this a problem?

I mentioned it in the Media thread. I don't find the movie "fantastic", just solid, but this might be because none of the ideas were new to me, and some of the musings about "what it means to be a person" has been a settled question for me for years now. Still, it is a good way to get people thinking about some of the transhumanist ideas.

1 and 2 apply to entertainment in general. There's something to be said for cutting back on TV, aimless internet browsing, etc., but it makes more sense to focus on cutting back total time than eliminating one particular form of entertainment in particular.

As for 3, I'm not familiar with that particular study, but in my experience studies of "porn addiction" or "sex addiction" tend to rely on dubious definitions of "addiction." I'd advise against taking worries of porn addiction any more seriously than worries of "internet addiction" or "social media addiction" or "TV addiction" or whatever.

How about you make specific predictions (written) of what will happen if you abstain for a specific number of months, then abstain for the given number of months, and then evaluate the original predictions?

For things like "clarity of mind", find some way of measuring it. For things like "motivation" instead focus on what exactly you will be motivated to do.

Then compare with the same amount of time with porn.

It's still very little data, but better than no data at all.

Less meta -- I think it pretty much depends on what you replace it with. Which can be both someting better or something worse, and you probably don't know the exact answer unless you try.

Porn gets me off quicker. That is it's utility. When I'm self-pleasuring for enjoyment, I don't watch it, because it's more fun to use my imagination. However, when I'm sexually frustrated and can't focus on what I want to focus on, pornography allows me to cut masturbation time down from 10-20 minutes to under 5. This is a great time saver, and allows me to spend my time more productively.

It is superstimulation, and if you come to rely on it to come or develop an addiction (arguably the same thing), then you'll have a problem. But if it isn't having any negative affect on your life, then why drop it?

The anecdotes on there are the same sort of things you'd find when reading about homeopathy or juice fasts, though, so those can be mostly ignored.

Could you expand on what the red-flag qualities of these anecdotes are?

For example, reading fiction has the advantage that you can later talk about what you read with other people

So does porn... if you're young enough.

What is your goal? If you want to earn significantly more than (let's say) $20,000 a year then poker is probably not your best bet. I used to play during 2007-2010 and the game were getting progressively tougher (more regulars, less fish), the same way as they had been in the prior few years before I started playing online. I recently checked how things are going and the trend seems to still be in place. Additionally, the segregation of countries in online poker (americans not being able to play with non-americans for example) is making things worse and this is in fact what drove me away mid-2010.

TL;DR You are several years too late to have a decent chance of making good money with poker.

Aside: Poker and rationality aren't close to excellently correlated. (Poker and math is a stronger bond.) Poker players tend to be very good at probabilities, but their personal lives can show a striking lack of rationality.

To the point: I don't play poker online because it's illegal in the US. I play live four days a year in Las Vegas. (I did play more in the past.)

I'm significantly up. I am reasonably sure I could make a living wage playing poker professionally. Unfortunately, the benefits package isn't very good, I like my current job, and I am too old to play the 16-hour days of my youth.

General tips: Play a lot. To the extent that you can, keep track of your results. You need surprisingly large sample sizes to determine whether your really a winner unless you have a signature performance. (If you win three 70-person tournaments in a row, you are better than that class of player.) No-limit hold-'em (my game of choice) is a game where you can win or lose based on a luck a lot of the time. Skill will win out over very long periods of time, but don't get too cocky or depressed over a few days' work.

Try to keep track of those things you did that were wrong at the time. If you got all your chips in pre-flop with AA, you were right even if someone else hits something and those chips are now gone. This is the first-order approximation.

Play a lot, and try to get better. If you are regularly losing over a significant period of time, you are doing something wrong. Do not blame the stupid players for making random results. (That is a sign of the permaloser.)

Know the pot math. Know that all money in the pot is the same; your pot-money amount doesn't matter. Determine your goals: Do you want to fish-hunt (find weak games, kill them) or are you playing for some different goal? Maybe it's more fun to play stronger players. Plus, you can better faster against stronger players, if you have enough money.

Finally, don't be a jerk. Poker players are generally decent humans at the table in my experience. Being a jerk is unpleasant, and people will be gunning for you. It is almost always easier to take someone's money when they are not fully focused on beating you. Also, it's nicer. Don't (in live games) slow-roll, give lessons, chirp at people, bark at the dealer, or any of that. Poker is a fun hobby.

Well, it's quite unlikely that 40 hours/week is exactly the right value. I'd expect that what's going on involves researchers comparing the cultural default to a grab-bag of longer hours, probably with fairly coarse granularity, and concluding that the cultural default works better even though it might not be an absolute optimal.

There's also cultural factors to take into account, both local to the company and general to the society. If we've habituated ourselves to thinking that 40 hours/week is normal for people in general, it wouldn't be surprising to me if working longer hours acted as a stressor purely by comparison with others. Similarly, among companies, expecting employees to work longer hours than the default would probably correlate with putting high pressure on them in other ways, and this would probably be very hard to untangle from the productivity statistics.

Finally, if (salaried) employees working long hours is just them trying to signal how hard working they are, at the expense of real productivity, it's a bit surprising managers haven't clamped down on that kind of wasteful signaling more.

I'm not sure that "X is wasteful signaling and hurts productivity" is very strong evidence for "managers would minimize X".

One manager I used to work for got in some social trouble with his peers (other managers in the same organization) for tolerating staff publicly disagreeing with him on technical issues. In a different workplace and industry, I've heard managers explicitly discuss the conflicts between "managing up" (convincing your boss that your group do good work) and "managing down" (actually helping your group do good work) — with the understanding that if you do not manage up, you will not have the opportunity to manage down.

A lot of the role of managers seems to be best explained as ape behavior, not agent behavior.

I'm seeing a lot of things claiming that over the long run, people can't increase their output by working much more than 40 hours per week.

I think this is just false. It seems to me that lots of people work long hours throughout their entire career, with output much higher than if they only worked 40 hrs/wk. But I haven't looked into studies.

In accordance with what others say, I have seen plenty of smart managers who inexplicably value longer hours over better work output. My guess is that someone going home earlier offends their internal concept of fairness. That's one reason productive people do better on fixed price contracts than on a salary.

Based on personal experience AKA anecdotal evidence w/o even quantitative verification, for what it's worth:

• I think the optimal point depends (significantly) on the person, the job and the work environment
• For me, 45-50 hours a week seems efficient, most of the time
• Regarding managers not clamping down on wasteful signaling: I don't think it's strong evidence, because of course managers would want the opposite to be true. For them making employees work more hours feels like the simplest way to get the project back on schedule (and the project is always behind schedule).

The answer hugely depends on how intensely you work. Using hours as a measure of your productivity is a bit pointless I think. It also matters how the work is distributed in time and what kind of work we're talking about.

I can work all day without my productivity suffering if I take it easy enough, but I can exhaust myself in a few hours too if I work super intensely. Increasing work intensity produces diminishing marginal utility for me. Also the fact that I've accomplished much in the few hours isn't much solace if I'm too exhausted to enjoy anything for the rest of the day.

Personally I was impressed by http://www.geocities.jp/mickindex/wittgenstein/witt_lec_et_en.html

My preference is for politicians who I broadly ideologically agree with, who are capable of doing what you described.

I expect that if one I did not broadly ideologically agree with did what you describe, I would think of them as a weasel, or first consider the hypothesis they were preparing to fuck over all that was good and right in some manner I had not yet figured out. (I realise this is defective thinking in a number of ways, but that would in fact be my first reaction.)

Both. But they should change their mind before an election, not after. If they made the speech you quoted what I would hear is "X is the right thing to do, so I promised you X, but now that I have my mitts on some real power, not X is better for me, so I will do not X"

If I can trust them to actually be changing their mind when presented with evidence, and not just lying, and listening for any further arguments from the side they started on (presumably mine for purposes of this question), the former.

The relationship between alcohol use and cognitive function appears to be nonlinear, and indeed non-monotonic: light drinkers have better cognitive performance than nondrinkers. Reduction in cognitive performance for heavy drinkers is measured more in men than in women.

Source: Rodgers et al (2005), "Non-linear relationships between cognitive function and alcohol consumption in young, middle-aged and older adults: the PATH Through Life Project" — http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16128717

Chronic alcoholics do not have reduced numbers of neocortical neurons, but do have reductions in white matter volume.

Source: Jensen and Pakkenberg, "Do alcoholics drink their neurons away?" — http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/014067369392185V

Neither of these studies speaks about the specific measurement you're asking for, IQ, but they do address the general topic.

(Chronic alcoholism is also associated with specific neurological conditions such as Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, which is caused by thiamine deficiency — someone who's getting most of their calories from booze is not getting enough nutrition.)

I did a few Medline searches some time ago and the answer appeared to be no. Since then I've done enough self quantification (mostly with Anki) to know that sleepless nights and even slight hangovers severely damage my abilities for several days. I was unaware of this effect before measuring my performance. Even small amounts of alcohol damage my sleep, and you could probably find studies that conform to this observation. This knowledge slowly creeped on me to seem actionable enough that further searching for studies felt like a desperate attempt to rationalize self sabotage.

Measure your performance. Temporary effects are not a direct answer to your question, but might be sufficient knowledge for decision making.

Sean's goal to "make my point of view a little clearer to a group of people who don’t already agree with me" is certainly achievable. Whether it is a good one to strive for (by whatever metric of goodness) is less clear.

While it's about Nye-Ham rather than Carroll-Craig, anti-creationist activist Zack Copplin thinks the Nye-Ham debate is worth it for this. David McMillan, who was raised in fundamentalism and later learned science, considers that "In a debate like this one, demonstrating even the most elementary facts about evolution and the age of the universe would be a great success" in order to put cracks in the hermetic world view of the faithful.

Edit: As Jayson notes below, this comparison isn't quite fair - though an ardent apologist, Craig is not in fact a creationist.

In an attempt to simplify the various details of the cost-benefit calculations here:

If you spend:

• 1-2 hours on this chair per day: Might be worth spending some time shopping for a decent seat at Staples, but once you find something that fits and feels comfortable (with some warnings to take in consideration), pretty much go with that. You should find something below 100$ for sure, and can probably get away with <60$ spent if you get good sales.

• 3-4 hours / day: If you're shopping at Staples, be more careful and check the engineering of the chair if you've got any knowledge there. Stuff below 60$ will probably break down and bend and become all other sorts of uncomfortable after a few months of use. If your body mass is high, you might need to go for solidity over comfort, or accept the unfair hand you're dealt and spend more than 150$ for something that mixes enough comfort, ergonomy and solid reliability.

• More than 4 hours / day on average: This is where the gains become nonlinear, and you will want to seriously test and examine anything you're buying under 150$. At this point, you need to consider ergonomics, long-term comfort (which can't be reliably "tested in store" at all, IME), reliability, a very solid frame for extended use that can handle the body's natural jiggling and squirming without deforming itself (this includes checking the "frame" itself, but also any cushions, since those can "deflate" very rapidly if the manufacturer skimped there, and therefore become hard and just as uncomfortable as a bent chair), and so on. At this point, the same advice applies as shopping for mattresses, work boots, or any other sort of tool that you're using all day every day. It's only at this point where the differences between more relaxed postures, "work" postures and "gaming" postures starts really mattering, and I'd say if you actually spend 6-8 hours per day on average on this chair, you definitely want to go for the best you can get. How much that needs to cost, unfortunately, isn't a known quantity; it depends very heavily on your body size, shape, mass, leg/torso ratio, how you normally move and a bunch of other things... so there's a lot of hit-and-miss, unfortunately, unless you have access to the services of a professional in office ergonomics. Even then, I can't myself speak for how much a professional would help.

It makes a difference - I now have a good, high quality chair that cost over 250€ (not from my own pocket) and it's close to perfect - I can recline it to a comfortable position that is not possible with an "ordinary office" chair (I used to break them down on a regular basis). Despite being advertised as "super-resistant", this one already broke twice (covered by warranty). And when I had to sit on an "ordinary office" chair, I found out that I cannot work for more than an hour or two before I get serious pain in my back - this seems to be related to the monitor being beneath the eyes and the inability to recline - I (like to) have the monitor exactly at the eye level and looking slightly upwards.

I want to extend this to mattresses. About a third of my time is spent sleeping, how much can I spend before marginal returns kick in?

Not an answer, but I did discover kneeling chairs, because I am also in the market for a new chair. I'd try one with back support, but none of the reviews of the products on amazon compel me to make any purchases.

http://www.amazon.com/Office-Star-Ergonomically-Designed-Casters/dp/B002L15NSK/ref=nosim?tag=vglnk-c319-20

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18810008

Do you spend a lot of time in front of the computer at home? (I assume this is for home use..) It might be worth it to optimize: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

I have always been able to find a comfortable computer (arm)chair for $100 or less, usually on sale at Staples.

Right. Many people use the word "utilitarianism" to refer to what is properly named "consequentialism". This annoys me to no end, because I strongly feel that true utilitarianism is a decoherent idea (it doesn't really work mathematically, if anyone wants me to explain further, I'll write a post on it.)

But when these terms are used interchangeably, it gives the impression that consequentialism is tightly bound to utilitarianism, which is strictly false. Consequentialism is a very useful and elegant moral meta-system. It should not be shouldered out by utilitarianism.

Drat. I just came here to post that. Still, at least this time I only missed by hours.

Off the top of my head, some good top-level posts touching on this area: How to understand people better (plus isaacschlueter's particularly good comment) and Alicorn's Luminosity sequence. Searching gives maybe a partial match for How to Be Happy, which cites some studies on training empathy and concludes that little is scientifically known about it--still, I think a top-level post on what is known would be welcome. Swimmer963's post on emotional-regulation research is nice.

Mindfulness is something else that comes up pretty regularly. Meditation trains metacognition and Overcoming suffering are pretty good examples.

CFAR also places more explicit emphasis on emotional awareness, and that sometimes comes up in the group rationality diaries.

I think one reason that these topics are relatively neglected is that people seem to develop social skills and emotional awareness in pretty idiosyncratic ways. Still, LW seems to accept more personal accounts, like this post on a variation on the CBT technique of labeling. So it seems worthwhile to post things along those lines.

Who does not want to be rational?

People for whom rationality is an applause light or a club with which to bash enemies, but who balk at actually applying it to themselves.

People who have been taught that rationality is evil.

Emotional Intelligence has no predictive value beyond IQ and the Big Five, so that's a dead end. (citations 42-44 here).

But that whole topic is what Living Luminously is about, and tends to be a theme in most of Alicorn's other posts.

I agree, there is alot of talk about mathematics and formal systems. There is big love for Epistemic Rationality, and this is shown in the topics below. Some exceptions exist of course, a thread about what type of chair to buy stands out.

But I agree, Emotional Intelligence is a large set of skills underappreciated here, and I admit though I have some knowledge to share on the subject, I do not feel particularly qualified to write a post on it.

I got a lot better at empathy from actively trying to understand people in contexts that 1) I wasn't emotionally tied up in, 2) were challenging, and 3) had concrete success/failure criteria. It is a fun game for me.

The way I did this was to gather up a group of online contacts and when they'd have issues like "I want to be more confident with women" or "I want to not be afraid of speaking in class" I'd try to understand it well enough that I could say things that would dissolve the problem. If the problem went away I won. If it didn't then I failed. No excuses.

I've gotten a lot better and it has been a pretty perspective changing thing. I'm quite glad I did it.

I don't really see the point. On the first page of Discussion there currently "On Straw Vulcan Rationality" with is about the relation of rationality to emotions which has a lot to do with emotional intelligence.

There also "Applying reinforcement learning theory to reduce felt temporal distance", "Beware Trivial Fears", "How can I spend money to improve my life?" and "How to become a PC?".

I think "On Straw Vulcan Rationality" illustrates the issue well. Here on Lesswrong there are people who actually think that Vulcans do things quite alright. In an environment where it's not clear that one shouldn't be a Vulcan it's difficult to communicate about some aspects of emotional intelligence.

Recently asked for ways to find a career for himself but it it all in the third person instead of the first. My post suggesting that he should change to first person was voted down because it was to far out of LW culture. If I'm around people who do a lot of coaching changing someone who speaks in third person about his own life to first person to increase his agentship is straightforward advice. It's a basic.

I had experience where encouraging a person to make that change produced bodylanguage changes that are visible to me because the person is more associated with themselves. On the other hand I'm hardpressed if you ask me for peer reviewed research to back up my claim that it's highly useful to use the first person when speaking about what one wants to do with his life.

Not being able to rely on basics makes it hard to talk when on Lesswrong we usually do talk about advanced stuff.

Who does not want to be rational?

Girlfriends :-P

Another clip:

Filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s... had to rely on propane tanks to mimic the exhaust coming off a rocket in space. When gas leaves the tank it “curls” as the atmosphere causes it to form vortices. In a vacuum gas does not behave in this manner, so these films were inaccurate in this respect. During production for Deep Impact, Chris Luchini explained this to the propmakers regarding the rocket exhaust as well as the comet ’ s outgassing. Liquid nitrogen helped them get around this problem for the rocket exhaust, but for safety reasons they were unable to utilize this for outgassing jets. When Luchini saw a rough cut of the film he noticed the curling of the gas off these jets. He mentioned this error to a special effects technician who used a CGI wipe effect to remove the curling days before the film’s premiere. Such a fix would have been impossible prior to the development of CGI technologies. Although CGI work can be expensive and difficult, it is often easier and cheaper to fix scientific inaccuracies during postproduction than it would be to struggle with them during production. In this case, they were able to rectify an error days before the release of the film.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/8qd/link_a_short_film_based_on_eliezer_yudkowskys_ai/ comes to mind.

To be a Bayesian in the purest sense is very demanding. One need not only articulate a basic model for the structure of the data and the distribution of the errors around that data (as in a regression model), but all your further uncertainty about each of those parts. If you have some sliver of doubt that maybe the errors have a slight serial correlation, that has to be expressed as a part of your prior before you look at any data. If you think that maybe the model for the structure might not be a line, but might be better expressed as an ordinary differential equation with a somewhat exotic expression for dy/dx then that had better be built in with appropriate prior mass too. And you'd better not do this just for the 3 or 4 leading possible modifications, but for every one that you assign prior mass to, and don't forget uncertainty about that uncertainty, up the hierarchy. Only then can the posterior computation, which is now rather computationally demanding, compute your true posterior.

Since this is so difficult, practitioners often fall short somewhere. Maybe they compute the posterior from the simple form of their prior, then build in one complication and compute a posterior for that and compare and, if these two look similar enough, conclude that building in more complications is unnecessary. Or maybe... gasp... they look at residuals. Such behavior is often going to be a violation of the (full) likelihood principle b/c the principle demands that the probability densities all be laid out explicitly and that we only obtain information from ratios of those.

So pragmatic Bayesians will still look at the residuals Box 1980.

As a counterargument to my previous post, if anyone wants an exposition of the likelihood principle, here is reasonably neutral presentation by Birnbaum 1962. For coherence and Bayesianism see Lindley 1990.

Edited to add: As Lindley points out (section 2.6), the consideration of the adequacy of a small model can be tested in a Bayesian way through consideration of a larger model, which includes the smaller. Fair enough. But is the process of starting with a small model, thinking, and then considering, possibly, a succession of larger models, some of which reject the smaller one and some of which do not, actually a process that is true to the likelihood principle? I don't think so.

I very much hope mankind eagerly embraces eugenics for intelligence enhancement.

Keep in mind that many people will read this as "I hope we start killing inferior people".

(And note that your first use of "eugenics" in the piece is before any sort of discussion about methods, or anything that would rule out coercion.)

That's rather like a premise from Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon, which is not an argument against it, just a historical note.

The idea seems plausible enough to be worth testing in animals. I don't feel very sure about how much it would contribute to a positive Singularity, but it also doesn't sound like it would increase risk significantly.

Approximately how long do you think it will take for reducing mutational load to come into common use?

There is a mismatch when you cite Shulman-Bostrom for 1 in 10 selection raising IQ by 10 points. Most of your article is about mutational load and how you don't need to understand the role of any particular mutation to know how to correct it, but that paper assumes knowledge of how genes affect IQ.

As I mentioned to you when you asked on PredictionBook, look to the media threads. These are threads specifically intended for the purpose you want: to find/share media, including podcasts/audiobooks.

I also would like to reiterate what I said on PredictionBook: I don't think PredictionBook is really meant for this kind of question. Asking it here is fine, even good. It gives us a chance to direct you to the correct place without clogging up PredictionBook with nonpredictions.

I ride in the bike lane most of the time, in the left half of it to be out of range of car doors. Depending on traffic, I often take the lane before intersections to avoid right-hook collisions. (My state's driver's handbook is pretty clear on drivers being required to merge into the rightmost (bike) lane before turning right but hardly anyone actually does this.) I also take the lane when making a left turn, and when there isn't actually room for someone to pass me safely on the left but there might be room for a poor driver to think he can do so.

I don't use bike paths much because (a) separate bike infrastructure doesn't go most places I want to go and (b) when it does go where I want to go, separate bike infrastructure is often infested with headphone-wearing joggers who can't hear my bell so I have to go very slowly or weave between them. When the joggers aren't too numerous (e.g. if it's raining) I do enjoy bike paths for recreation though.

I started biking for transportation when a friend gave me a bike that had been sitting in her basement for a year gathering dust. It turned out to be as fast as taking the bus and also a lot cheaper. I had a low income at the time, so frugality was a huge motivation, but it turned out to be fun as well. There's also a great feeling of freedom in not having to check the bus schedule before you go somewhere. (For various reasons car ownership is not a viable option for me, though I'm thinking of getting a zipcar membership.)

My first transportation bike was a 40lb mountain bike, but when I moved to a hilly city this year the weight was a problem. I didn't shop around much for a replacement, just got the first road-bike-like-thing I found at a garage sale. It has upright handlebars but otherwise appears to be a standard road bike (except for being 40 years old and French and having nonstandard bolt sizes, but what do you expect from a yard sale?) and I'm very happy with it. I can go straight up hills where I used to have to get off and walk.

I suppose I am getting health benefits from biking, or at least it seems to be getting easier with time, but exercise isn't really a goal for me. I rarely bike fast enough to get tired or out of breath.

I cycle as my main form of transport around where I live (in the UK, so a bunch of this may be weird to you US people). Most common journey is to work and back (~1.5 miles, takes me about 10 minutes on the way there and 15 or so on the way back due to hills). I do this every weekday and also cycle to leisure/hobby locations, supermarket, etc.

Reasons for choosing cycling:

• Habit. It's been my main form of transport for about 6 years now and I cycled a fair bit before that too.

• It's free other than the initial cost of the bike (and I would want to own a bike even if it wasn't my main form of transportation) and occasional maintenance costs. Overall, over the lifetime of the bike, unbeatably cheap.

• It's a lot quicker than walking (especially downhill!). It's also a lot quicker than driving over the short distances that I mostly cover, on roads that are often blocked up with traffic that I can easily cycle around. On most of the routes I regularly cycle, it's far quicker than any of the public transport options too, especially if you count waiting time.

• It's a lot better for the environment than driving.

• It's a good way to incorporate a little bit of extra activity into my day.

• It's easy to park a bike, virtually anywhere, for free. Most places I cycle to are in the middle of a city and parking the car there would be either prohibitively expensive or, more likely, impossible.

• It's flexible. I can jump on my bike at a moment's notice and go from door to door rather than having to faff around defrosting the car, checking that it has petrol, finding somewhere to park, etc etc, or waiting for a bus.

• If I'm lost, it's dead easy to stop at the side of the road and check where I'm trying to get to, and I can walk back along the pavement if it turns out I'm on the wrong track. These things are often not easy when driving!

• I enjoy the opportunity to spend a little bit of time outdoors just about every day; I feel it creates a nice gap between activities/work/etc. Of course I moan like crazy about this when it rains heavily, but I still do it.

I certainly do cycle on bike paths where they're available, but nearly all my regular routes are just on primarily residential streets. Sometimes there are bike lanes in the road, which is fine and obviously I ride in them, but it doesn't make me feel that much safer as they are shared with buses and often contain parked cars that are liable to open their doors without warning. Depending on the type of road, the situation, and the turn I'm about to take next, I either ride most of the way over to the left (staying out of cars' way but not rubbing right up against the kerb, and looking ahead to pull out around a parked car if necessary) or take the lane (if there's not room for a car to reasonably overtake me, if I'm riding at/near the speed limit on a steep downhill, if I'm about to turn right).

I generally feel fairly safe while cycling. I wear a helmet 95% of the time, and use lights at night (which cyclists legally must here). I'm normally a fairly defensive/paranoid cyclist: I slow down if I'm not sure what a car is doing, I practically insist on eye contact with the driver before I will cycle across someone waiting to turn out of a side street, I always look over my shoulder, I don't run through red lights, etc. I've had about 3 "near misses" in the last 6 years of cycling virtually every day, all caused by cars that looked straight at me but did not see me. No actual accidents.

If you are going to naively follow a system in America,* vehicular cycling is safer than naive use of car lanes, which is safer than bike lanes, but far better than these systems is to understand the source of the danger, to know when bike lanes help you and when they hurt you, to know when it's important to draw attention to yourself and how to do it.

I think that there is some very important context missing from that critical article you cited. "Bicycle lanes" means something very different in the author's Denmark than Forester's America. Bike lanes in America are better than they used to be, but in the past their main effect was to kill cyclists. As a bicyclist or pedestrian, it is very important to learn to disobey traffic laws. They are of value to you only as they predict the actions of the cars. What is important it to pay attention to the cars and to know how the markings will affect them. The closest I have come to collisions, as a pedestrian, as a bicyclist, and even as driver, is by being distracted from the real danger of cars by the instructions of lane markings and traffic signals.

* and probably the vast majority of the world. The Netherlands and Denmark are obvious exceptions. Perhaps there are lots of countries where basic bike lanes are better than nothing.

I cycle as my main form of transportation. I chose cycling partly to save money and partly for exercise. I ride a flat bar touring bike with internal hub gears. I ride in a vehicular style, following the recommendations of "Cyclecraft" by John Franklin. This helps acheive the exercise goal, because vehicular cycling is impossible without a good level of fitness.

I'll use high quality infrastructure when it's available, but here in the UK most cycle infrastructure is worse than useless. We have "advisary cycle lines" in which cars can freely drive and park, so their only function is to promote conflict between cyclists and drivers. We have "advanced stop lines" at junctions which can only be legally entered through a narrow left-side feeder lane, placing the cyclist at the worst place posible for negotiating the junction. We have large numbers of shared use cycle paths which are hated by both cyclists and pedestrians.

I'd prefer to live in the Netherlands where high quality infrastructure is common. I have no confidence that the UK government can provide similar infrastructure here. Most politicians have no understanding of utility cycling and design facilities only considering leisure cycling. There's a big risk that if some minor upgrades are provided cyclists will be compelled to use them, resulting in a network that's less useful than the existing roads.

I had no idea vehicular cycling was a thing, but most of the recommendations on the wikipedia page are commonly accepted as good cycling safety when there's no bike lanes - and around here bike lanes are rare. I'll use bike lanes if they're available and clear of obstructions, and I won't take a lane unless the lane's too narrow to share (like on a bridge or in construction) or unless I can keep up with traffic. I always signal, use turning lanes, stop at lights and stop signs, etc, as expected by the MTO guidelines. I ride a hybrid bicycle instead of a road bike because of cost, posture, and the condition of the roads.

As for why? Health benefits, pleasure, and I arrive at work more awake and alert.

Adaptation to environments, including social environments, through natural and sexual selection is the linchpin of evolution. Remembering this means knowing why scientific racism is ridiculous. To argue that races or ethnic groups differ innately in intelligence, however defined, is exactly equal to an assertion that intelligence has proven less adaptive for some people than for others. This at minimum requires an explanation, a specifically evolutionary explanation, beyond mere statistical assertion; without that it can be assumed to be bias or noise. Since most human intelligence is in fact social intelligence -- the main thing the human mind is built for is networking in human societies -- a moment's reflection should demonstrate why this is an unlikely scenario.

(bolded part mine)

Shouldn't this part be uncontroversial? Brains are expensive.

They might have a small point in that evolution assumes that human beings, no more than any other individual animal, are not fungible: they each carry different genes that express as varying traits. The latest euphemism, "human biodiversity", is particularly galling gibberish. Biodiversity has an established meaning that you don't get to usurp. Last time I looked, humans were not facing any obvious genetic bottlenecks. There aren't really many that count as relict cultivars of tomatoes or goats. Efforts to preserve diversity in human genomes seem.... unnecessary. When they go extinct, it won't be for lack of genetic diversity; just that intelligent life is a self-limiting phenomenon.

As with much on rationalwiki, it's just dismissive rather than a logical argument or evidence. We have clear evidence of relatively recent genetic influences on human evolution in Lactose Tolerance and both Tibetan and Andean adaptations for high altitude. Not to mention HBD isn't an attempt to "preserve" the diversity but to actually acknowledge it.

I don't think that knowing someone is an altruist tells you much about his moral framework.

The phrase "in our current situation" is also weird given that there are plenty of readers who are in substantial different situations from each other.

Let's be more narrow and talk about middle-class professional Americans. And lets take a pass on the "pure altruist" angle, and just talk about how much altruistic good you do by having a child (compared to the next best option).

For having a child, it's roughly 70 QALYs that they get to directly experience. Plus, you get whatever fraction of their productive output that's directed towards altruistic good. There's also the personal enjoyment you get out of raising children, which absorbs part of the cost out of a separate budget.

As far as costs go, a quick google search brings up the number $241,000. And that's just the monetary costs - there are more opportunity costs for time spent with your children. Let's simplify things by taking the time commitment entirely out of the time you spend recreationally on yourself, and the money cost entirely out of your altruism budget.

So, divide the 70 QALYs by the $241k, and you wind up with a rough cost of $3,400 per QALY. That completely ignores the roughly $1M in current-value of your child's earnings (number is also pulled completely out of my ass based on 40 years at $60k inflation-adjusted dollars).

So, the bottom line is whether or not you enjoy raising children, and whether or not you can buy QALYs at below $3,400 each. There's also risks involved - not enjoying raising children and having to reduce your charity time and money budget to get the same quality of life, children turning out with below-expectation quality of life and/or economic output, and probably others as well.

There's also the question of whether you're better off adopting or having your own, but that's a separate analysis.

Previous discussion: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ive/is_it_immoral_to_have_children/

Doubtful. The pure altruist would concentrate all their efforts on the single activity with the highest marginal social return. Several times per day that activity would be eating, because eating prevents a socially beneficial organism from dying. Eating has poor substitutes, but there are excellent substitutes for personally having a child (e.g. convincing a less altruistic couple to have another child).

Depends on the utility function the altruist uses.

I agree with christian that the question is poorly formed. For one thing, it depends on if the altruist believes in eugenics and has good genes, or does but has bad genes, or doesn't etc. An altruist who was healthy and smart and believed in eugenics might try to spread their genes as far and wide as possible, which could result in lots of unprotected sex and kids that don't have a parent! Another question is, what if they're an anti-natalist? Anti-natalism can be a fundamentally altruistic position.

No. The mythical creature consults the Magic 8 ball of "Think a minute" which says "Consequences fundamentally not amenable to calculation, costs quite high" and goes and takes soil samples/inspects old paint to map out lead pollution in the neighborhood instead. Removing lead pollution being far more certain to improve the world.

Having kids is not an instrumental decision. One does not have kids for "the sake of the future" or any such nonsense - trying that on would likely lead to monumental failure at parenting. One has kids because one is in a situation in which one believes one can do a good job of parenting, and one wishes to do so.

You'll want to give it as little data as possible, in order to be able to analyze how it is processing it. What Deepmind are doing is put their AI prototypes into computer game environments and see if and how they learn to play the game.

In the context of a costs-benefits analysis, what are your costs in trying another career?