Stupid Questions (10/27/2014)

I want to point out that this question doesn't quite test for the right thing. One way an organization like CFAR can cause extreme life improvements is by encouraging participants to do extreme things generally in order to increase the variance of alumni outcomes after the workshops. That leads to potentially many extreme improvements but also potentially many extreme... disimprovements? And the latter are harder to notice because of survivorship bias. (There's also regression to the mean to watch out for: you expect the population of CFAR workshop attendees to be somewhat selected for having life problems and those could just randomly improve afterwards.)

I expect the main benefit of CFAR training should be that it improves median outcomes; that is, that it improves alumni ability to consistently win. But this is hard to test for by asking for anecdotes: it would be better to do statistics.

Within 3 months of attending a CFAR workshop I had left my job for one that I preferred and that paid 15% more. Within 6 months I had started exercising daily (previously once every few weeks), waking up consistently at 6am (previously varied anywhere from 8-10am), and eating significantly healthier (I also started eating vegetarian meals 2-3 times a week, previously 0). Independent of any of these concrete behaviors, I now have a very strong belief that I can intentionally construct/change my life and behavior in ways that will actually work.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc. I have a fairly strong belief that attending a CFAR workshop and interacting with the alumni community has been at least partially causal in me improving my life, but I don't think any of what I've said constitutes good evidence of that claim.

The first time I read the sequences, they were earth-shattering revelations that upset my entire life. The second time I read them, I could only make it few a few posts, because everything they said was obvious. So one gain for me is that existential/religious questions no longer bother me. I got answers that satisfied me, and I've moved on with my life. I suppose you could argue that I could have found the same answers somewhere else, but honestly, I doubt it.

Another big change is how I argue with people. One of my favorite Less Wrong ideas is the Taboo a word sequence. I use this all time. Whenever I encounter some vague statement like "Freewill is nonsense" or "We should live in a more just society" or something like that, I taboo the word and try something else. I approach words differently. I don't know if this has improved my life, but I no longer feel as though I am incapable of expressing myself and my position.

I think I may be more rational. I know, without a doubt, that participating in LessWrong has caused me to self-identify as a rationalist, more than I would have if I had not come here. I feel that this self-identity is enriching and has made me a better person.

I try and do something I have never done before every other week. This habit was inspired and reinforced by Less Wrong. This has made me less afraid to do new things.

I often catch myself rationalizing. This didn't used to happen, I think.

I've installed various mental habits from my time on Less Wrong. My habit of trying to notice rationalization as it happens, in combination with the "Tsuyoku Naritai" attitude, led me to become much more serious about physical fitness. In the last fourteen months, I've gone from moderately overweight and sedentary to lean, fit, and strong, with a minimum of the motivation issues that had previously prevented me.

I've never attended CFAR and am not especially deeply involved with LW, so this may not really be the kind of example you're looking for.

Search "Rationality Diaries" on LW to see a huge archive of examples from recent years. (Those are places where users upload recent stories of victory from their lives.)

I worked as a neuroscience research assistant for 5 years. For the latter 3 of those years, I had wanted to leave that job and move on to something better, but had been unable to make a decision about what to pursue and to actually pursue it.

7 months after my first CFAR workshop, I started a new job making 25% more. There were other causal factors. Part of the motivation to do job searching was due to the fact that my research position would be ending, and part of the salary increase was due to the fact that I left academia. But I also credit CFAR training, including the follow-ups and the support I got from the community, as a significant cause of this success.

Other semi-quantifiable changes: -I keep a budget now. -I'm investing money for retirement each month. I was not investing any before. -I've learned 1.5 new programming languages, and have learned several new statistical analysis methods (consider that I was doing almost nothing in terms of job-relevant skill development prior to CFAR). -I've started a biweekly productivity meeting at my apartment (before I did not organize events other than the occasional party).

I've made many other changes in my life regarding habits, learning and practicing new things, and pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone. Perhaps the most important thing for me is that I no longer have the sense of being overwhelmed by life, or of there being large categories of things that I just can't do. I'd say this is mostly the result of a cascade of changes that occurred in my life due to attending CFAR. And to repeat what nbouscal said, I feel like I can change my life in ways that will both work and feel good.

Most benefits (that I can recognize) aren't particularly concrete. Some things (like the length of my relationship) could be in part of internalizing LW concepts but I have no way to measure it.

The biggest concrete impact is that I've grown more social. Not just within the aspiring rationalist community (also that's also a big part of it) but by slowly expanding my comfort zone and having a bigger understanding on what I find important in different kinds of social encounters.

Not a very satisfactory answer, I assume. I think that's because of two reasons:

1. My life wasn't in a good spot the last year (or even two years) due to things that were more or less out of my direct control. Not the best circumstances to execute big life-changing plans.

2. A lot of the benefits I've gotten from hanging out on LW are relatively small. They do add up to larger increases in my wellbeing, but nothing particularly concrete.

Maybe I've got a better answer in a year.

If you want marketing materials or want to estimate the upper bound, the question is useful. If you think you'll get some sort of a representative sample, um, sorry to disappoint you...

I went from being single to being in a relationship that's still going 2ish years later but who knows if going to a CFAR thing was at all responsible.

Could a psychological payoff be specific enough as well? Would e.g. "an embellished sense of intellectual superiority" be too vague for the purpose of your question?

that's... not a stupid question.

You might be interested in the book Getting Things Done. It was written before smartphones and cloud syncing calendars but it can easily be adapted to To-Do lists and managing your life in the modern age.

A basic summary is thus: Every action you need to do but haven't yet done is an open loop in your mind. You have to keep thinking about it until you do it, and close the loop. However, lots of things can't be done except at specific times and places. You can maintain seperate to-do lists for things that can be done anywhere (Call a friend to schedule a movie, tie your shoe, etc.), and things that need you to be at your desk, at work, or at a grocery store. Storing all the myriad things that you need to do in life in your head is stressful and difficult to successfully accomplish. If you offload this information to contextual to-do lists, you can forget about the open loop and rely on your general system to remind you if it only if you can actually do something about it. This allows you focus on things you're doing in the moment, without worrying that you're forgetting a bunch of things you still need to do.

I'll share my system in case it's helpful as a reference point.

Mint.com does a great job of tracking expenses, if you primarily use a credit card. (Which you should for the 1% discount on everything, unless you have bad self-control issues with money). It also lets you set budgets, which are fine for rough estimates but it's strength is in recording all your transactions and I just use Excel for planning out a yearly budget. For tax record keeping, all my pay stubs and tax-deductible donations go in a 'Fiscal Year 2014-2015' folder on my computer, which I keep backed up on google drive and on a hard drive every two weeks.

I've had great success with google calendar for managing my schedule, since it syncs with my phone and I get alerts 15min before an event happens. (For example, the biweekly backups are on here as an event, as are yearly 'time to set a budget' reminders, work schedules, gym visits, etc). A tip if you're overloaded with work and constantly busy is to block in some relaxation or 'hang out with friends' time so that those do not get pushed to the wayside.

For notes and to-do lists, I carry a small notebook and pen in my back pocket, which works well for me. (I use something similar to the getting things done method for the lists).

A lot of household supplies and food are totally fine to get as 'just in time' inventory, and they just go on the to-do list when I run out of the stored supplies (toilet paper, etc). The exception of course is a plunger, a fire extinguisher, and a first aid kit, which you should always have on hand. Every weekend I usually go on a grocery/supplies trip, do laundry, and clean the apartment.

For emergency preparedness, it's not something you have to constantly think about - you could take a day this weekend and figure out how much food and water you'd need for 3 weeks of power outage, go buy that, and forget about it. You might also want a 'go bag' in case you need to make a flight quickly.

I also feel like I'm fairly organized compared to my peers, but I don't actually know what their personal management systems look like. In general though, a lot of life is take-it-as-you-go, and I would not feel comfortable with a system that I can't afford to totally ignore if I need to.

I have a similar vision to this but since my life ran smoothly for a couple of months, I did not put my thoughts onto paper.

Generally it seems that any organisation system is highly personal as there are many individual kinks to be worked out such that there is almost no way to have a holistic system apply to everyone. Also, the vast majority of people are not interested in these kind of things, I think.

The phrase "run your life / yourself / your family like a business" sometimes pops up but does not take the principle very far.

Also the whole thing is overwhelming. When I tried to do stuff like track my budget I ran into the problem that I would need to type in every damn receipt I got. Or be content with knowing that I spent any given sum at a grocery store, but then I wouldn't know on what products. When I buy some food on the go I needed to take note. When I get digital receipts the date on the receipt did not match the date the money disappeared from my account. And so on. The whole thing was not to be trusted and instead of helping me it bothered me, so I abandoned it for casually taking a look at my accounts and estimating how long it could last.

Nitpick: would have or would've, not would of.

I'm a big believer in Agile; professionally I've found that minimal management and especially minimal process works best. I use Trello to keep track of things that I need to do at some point in the future, or want to spend some time on (in a manner similar to the Getting Things Done advice, if I'm understanding that correctly), and that's plenty.

If you do something more complex, remember to reevaluate your processes regularly, and prune any that aren't pulling their weight.

Look into quantified self stuff, for management tracking ability. some tracking I find useful: Pocketbook RescueTime Fitbit (other activity trackers exist) for sleep tracking, to help estimate time left in the 168 hour week. Keeping lists in an easy to check location. Each year I have a home folder for that year. any project started or worked on in that year has a folder for it. Keep nesting folders limited, sometimes nesting happens, clutter happens too, try not to clutter the home folder for that year. So far this works well for me.

Maybe too obvious but: Ask around. Ask your friends, family, acquaintances... Your personal network is a key factor to finding a job (especially if you're not picky about what job you want).

As for rounding out your CV, create a category called: skills. Skills your probably have: Fluent in MS Office, research (you're at university right now, no?), out-of-the-box thinking (you're on LW, after all, you'll be better than average at this), works well in team (if you did any sort of team sport or online game)...

If you can't come up with anything for the "skills" category, ask your friends and family. They should be able to help you out.

I got my first real job by summing up all the volunteer work and major personal projects I'd ever done and putting them on my resume. It turns out that at least at the entry level, people don't actually much care if you've gotten paid for doing something before -- they just want to be able to verify that you know enough not to flail around wasting money for months or years while you learn the basics of process.

(I'm in tech.)

You never sacked groceries in a supermarket during your teen years, as I did?

I can see why you might want to avoid having to do that in today's economy, however, where you have to invest your time in the most efficient work experiences you can get to position yourself for higher wages quickly.

Your school might have useful resources. If there is a career center, go there and see what kind of resources and help are available. There could be a student internship program, student job boards, career fairs, etc. Professors sometimes have work opportunities as well (they might announce these, or you may have to ask).

Informational interviews let you get an insider perspective and some connections and pointers. I've known people who got offers this way. People love giving advice. Also consider volunteering in your area of expertise to both gain experience and build your networks.

Were you involved in any activities in high school? (Sports, clubs, volunteering, etc.) Are there any interesting projects you've completed on your own? (E.g. do you have a blog?) Do you have any hobbies? Personal qualities to highlight? How do you spend your time?

I found my first job using this tool http://mappedinny.com/. It's specific to tech jobs in New York City. I have no idea how anyone ever gets a job in other places/sectors.

You said you did some programming. Having your Django play money prediction market on github for people to see that you can program is likely valuable.

You can go to meetup.com and search for for local meetups where programmers go. Then you go there and tell everyone that you speak with that you are searching for a job as a programmer.

I'm not sure if it's the same where you live, but I found using the phone much more effective than sending applications all over the place. I first sent the application, then called. A good personal first impression, if you manage to squeeze it in, seems to beat a well written application any time.

What skills do you have?

The phrase "Non-Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" seems to be nearly unique despite being a straightforward perturbation of a pop culture reference.

I'd call it "Smart Answers to Stupid Questions Repository".

To your privacy concern, I'd say it's a non-issue. If you post in a thread like this, the assumption is that you're putting your post out in the open for The Entire World to read, link to, quote, rebut, etcetera (largely because this is, in fact, the case.)

Privacy can sometimes be a tricky issue. I don't think this is here a problem as long as you stay within LW.

As far as copyright goes content on LW get's licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Coding + stats skills + some biology = the world is your oyster (pharma, research labs/institutes, postdocing if you aren't sick of academia yet, bio startups if you feel you can get invested in something again, etc). I am sorry you had a toxic experience in graduate school. I know this does not help, but I can tell you these are very common, especially in your field.

Just wanted to say good job for realizing the problem was probably with this job, not with you. You may find it helpful, motivationally, to talk to friends/acquaintances and ask them what they like best about their job, so that "a job that doesn't make you miserable" feels more achievable and you feel more hopeful/driven about pursuing it.

I say this b/c a friend of mine was miserable at his job, and I realized how miserable when I told one funny story about my workplace, and he wondered if he could work there, specifically, because I didn't seem unhappy. It was clear he didn't alieve that you could be less unhappy than he was (throwing up every day) at most jobs. In that state of mind, it's hard to get excited about applying!

Also, try to do nice things for yourself, generally. Being as unhappy as you sound in your job is kind of like having walking pneumonia -- it's a big energy drain on everything else you're doing. You may find it helpful to ask "What would I do to be kind to a friend who had walking pneumonia?" and then do those things for yourself. You'll wind up in a new job eventually, but, in the interim, you may want to make sure you treat the symptoms, as well as the root problem.

Ask your professors and school career services and fellow students what are some good non-academia career options. Most people who get a PhD in your field aren't going into academia, so where are they going?

Research Labs and Pharma/other medical companies (which I imagine are your major prospective employers), or some bio-oriented software companies will have wildly varying work environments. Do your best to choose one that seems to have a friendly, lower-pressure environment. Cultivate your life outside of work, and make friends inside. Save some money.

There's good odds that the professional world will treat you better and demand less than your PhD program.

Then figure out where you want to go from there.

As a fellow biology PhD student with a somewhat different experience (with you on the work hours, but I'm really glad I'm here), I hope you don't mind me asking what has been so draining about the experience?

From what I've seen people who have been wasting away in academia and described their position much like yours have become WAY happier when transitioning to the private sector.

A response from someone, who is happy in research of biosciences:

The personality of your boss is very important. I always payed a lot of attention to my emotional responses to potential bosses during interviews. Privately asking for the opinions of their subordinates can also help. As you write below, your boss "is widely regarded as a bit of a tyrant". There must be a way to find out in advance next time. For me, the meaningful topic is not enough to save the job, if the boss is a toxic person. On the other hand, the less sexy topic can become meaningful, if the boss lets you follow your curiosity and your ideas (within the constraints of the budget). The working hours are also boss-dependent.

However, I must make one point - I am not saving the world or hitting for the Nobel price. My goal is to play and be somewhat useful to society while doing that. None of my papers is a dramatic thing, it rather feels like a tiny drop into the ocean of knowledge. Some people at lesswrong say: if you do not perceive your topic as the most important issue of the world, change the topic. This is the test I would not pass. I just hope to be a little helpful.

I don't know what the academic job market is like in genomic science, but if you would take pleasure in teaching you might enjoy working at a liberal arts college, which would likely be a very different environment then being in a PhD program.

/r/sex is pretty good

we already know you are sick, feel free to ask!

xkcd forums.

You can make another account or just ask as Username, but I'm not sure LW is.. um... err... competent to answer questions about sex X-D

Empty Closets.

/r/RedPill

Whether this feeling is irrational depends on what causes it. It makes sense to worry about a community you like becoming popular, since it means that an increasing number of people would join it, potentially reducing its quality.

If the only thing that makes you special is your choice of blogs that you read, you aren't very special.

It's like people who think that just because they change a few superficial things about their clothing and violate societal clothing norms, they are rebels. They are not. That kind of being a rebel feels a bit pathetic to me. Being a rebel actually means doing something that has an effect. That shakes up society. Don't optimize for superficial appearance. Dare to go deeper.

If you go deep than superficial issues such as how many people read your favorite blog won't really concern you anymore.

You should nurture that feeling if it drives you to push ahead to the next level of excellence that is beyond what is common today.

If it means you are just trying to be different for the sake of social signaling, then it is not quite so useful a feeling.

Tentative advice: Try exploring what you actually like and dislike, and distinguishing that from what you expect other people will think of your tastes. Also, you may need both privacy and thinking about how other people don't necessarily know enough about you to judge you.

(I'd be remiss if I didn't link this Mr. Money Mustache post on index funds that explains why they are a good idea)

To buy an index fund, you buy shares of a mutual fund. That mutual fund invests in every stock in the chosen index, balanced based on whatever criteria they choose. Each share of the mutual fund is worth a portion of the underlying investment. At no point do you own separate stocks - you own shares of the fund, instead.

Toy example: You have an index fund that invests in every stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The fund invests in $1,000,000 of stock split evenly among every stock on the NYSE, then issues a thousand shares of the fund itself. You buy one share. Your share is worth $1,000. You can sell your shares back to the fund and they will give you $1,000. Over the next year, some stocks go up and some stocks go down. The fund doesn't buy any more stock or sell any more shares. On average, the nominal value of the NYSE will go up by about 7%. The fund now owns $1,070,000 of stocks. Your one share is now worth $1,070.

The dividends go wherever you want them to. The one share of a thousand you bought above entitles you to 1/1000 of the dividends for the underlying stocks in the fund's entire investment. If you're smart, they go to buy more shares of the fund because compound interest will make you rich. You can have them disbursed to you as money you can exchange for good and services, though.

Investing in an index fund is very easy. You will pay by direct withdrawal from a bank account, so you will have to do something to confirm you own the account, but other than that it's like buying anything else online.

Index funds cover costs - which are low, because buying more stock and re-balancing existing stock can be done by a not-that-sophisticated computer program - by charging you a small percentage of your investment. This is reflected by your shares (and dividends) not being worth quite 100% of the fund's value. Index funds are good because they have a very low expense ratio. Many normal mutual funds charge upwards of 1% annually. A good index fund can charge about 0.20%-0.05%. That means you pay your fund about $20 for the privilege of making you about $700, every year.

Opinion time: I own shares in index funds. They are amazing. For a few hours work setting up an automatic transfer and filling out paperwork, I am slowly getting rich. I don't need the money any time this decade, so even if the market crashes tomorrow in a 2008-level event, overall the occasional 1990s-style rises cancel that out, leaving real growth at about 5% assuming you use any dividends to purchase more shares.

I will let you skip the next part of this process and recommend a specific fund: The Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, VTSMX. It invests in every stock listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ. If you have $10k invested in it, the expense ratio is a super-low 0.05, and American stocks are very broad and exposed to world conditions as a whole (this is good - you want to spread out your portfolio as much as possible to reduce risk). Go to vanguard.com , you can figure it out online.

I think I could talk about the minutiae of investing all day. It's fascinating. I should write that post about investing and the Singularity one day.

There are two typical ways to invest in an index fund, plus one way that isn't.

1. Buy a mutual fund that mimics the index you want to buy. You technically own shares in the mutual fund, which is an undivided right to a tiny percent of the whole pool. To get your money out, you have to redeem your shares, which happens at the fair market value. (It used to be that redemptions happened at fair market value at market closing price; I don't know if that is still true.) To fund redemptions, the fund has to keep some cash on hand, so some small percent of your money isn't actually invested. If you invest in mutual funds in a taxable account, the churn in fund holders' redemptions create trades that cause capital gains, which creates taxable income for the fund as a whole. It will be a small percent, but it will still be there (on top of taxation of any dividends). This is because the legal model applied to your investment is like you are a partner in a partnership, where you get an allocation of profits and losses that are separate from your receipt of cash.

2. Buy an exchange traded fund that mimics the index you want to buy. These are still mutual funds in operation. The main difference here is that the shares in the fund are themselves tradable. Theoretically, I think this means that the fund does not have to redeem as much, so it can hold much less cash. It would do redemptions if people were bailing out of the market generally, so that sellers outnumber buyers. But the issuer can essentially make money by arbitraging any difference, which means effectively redemptions pay for themselves. Being exchange traded means that the mutual funds have to make some additional SEC filings, but these have become routine once EFT's became popular, and the costs are spread over a truly vast number of people. The other main difference is that you only pay taxes on capital gains when you sell your ETF shares. That is because the legal model treats an ETF like an investment in a corporation, where the corporation's profits and losses are not attributed to you, and you only get something when you get cash.

3. You can also buy all the shares yourself, which is something called a "synthetic" fund sometimes in rarefied circles. It eliminates all of the potential capital gains taxes until you sell the underlying assets, but it means that you have to buy a set of shares that would be really expensive and only comes in oddly sized chunks. For example, if you want to buy the stocks in the Dow Jones, that is 30 different stocks, any you would have to buy one of each. That might cost you $1,531.72. Who wants to buy investments at a price of $1,531.72 per unit? What do you do if you have $1,500 or $1,600?That is why ETF's are so attractive. They get all of the convenience of the mutual fund, the capital gains tax treatment of owning shares directly. Index funds, whether regular mutual funds or exchange traded funds, also have the benefit of spreading fixed costs over huge numbers of people, so the expenses are usually very low.

Anyone know how much this is applicable to the UK?

I think it depends on your goals.

• Have you already decided you want the job? "Based on this interview and the information I have given you, what do you see as my strengths compared to other candidates?" Same question for weaknesses but think about not highlighting them unless you are pretty sure you can defeat them by addressing them. One way to ask about them would be to ask something more leading, like "what are you unsure about, where you would like to hear more from me about the topic?"

• Are you really just thinking about the job, where you already have adequate employment? Then ask about what matters to you in a job.

• Listening to a talk for fun or learning? I think contextualized questions about application of ideas are good to bring the abstract down to the concrete and sometime reveal more. So, you might start a question with, "I am a ___ and in that work I see a lot of ___ . How do you think your idea of ___ applies to a ___ where ___ is usually the case?" I think the key there is not to focus on the introduction. Most people like to talk about themselves, so it is easy to fall into that trap and forget about asking a question.

Definitely a good thing to look up beforehand. I might recommend the Manager Tools interviewing series. The key point is that even this point of the interview is NOT about you learning anything. The entire interview is you selling yourself. There's a view about that "you're interviewing them too," and you should hope you're competing against other candidates who think that.

Anyway, bit of a tangent as that wasn't specifically about just job interviews, but nonetheless the interviewing series addresses that insanely well. Probably want a link I think it's www.manager-tools.com.

If you develop a reputation for not finishing your stories, men who value closure are going to be reluctant to read them. Consider that you have already abandoned Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me.

Novel writing is almost never a good use of one's time, as can be seen from how much one is usually paid for it. If you're enjoying it then carry on; if not, don't.

I don't think it's the sunk cost fallacy - if you're having fun, you should keep going. Your best work is still in your future.

Unsolicited silly advice: you're probably going to have to revise more in that future.

Exposure worked great for me. I used to be scared of all sizes of cockroaches. After living in an apartment which was absolutely filled with small German cockroaches for a couple of years, I have lost all fear of roaches that size and smaller, while still retaining fear of the larger American cockroaches. I predict that if I were to move into Joe's apartment, my fear of large roaches would likewise be cured in due time.

I have also slowly lost my fear of spiders (and other long-legged critters such as crane flies) by virtue of encountering and examining them from ever closer distances. My usual response to seeing a spider in the bathroom these days is to grab a generous amount of toilet paper and squash the disgusting thing, whereas a few years ago they would forced me to flee the scene. I like to think of it as having leveled up to the point where I can now defeat my house's random encounters.

Deliberate self-directed exposure therapy reduced my fear of certain types of bugs. It isn't pleasant, but I think you can be quite optimistic about the odds of success.

There actually is a way! Exposure therapy works on phobias and apparently something like 90 percent of people have significantly reduced fear even 4 years after the therapy. There's even an app for it!

I used to be creeped out by house centipedes, but I decided to get along with them after reading that they are generally harmless to humans and useful to have around because they kill all sorts of other household pests.

I think just remembering that they are a good thing and thinking of them as being on my team was helpful. I also gave cool names to the ones living in my basement (e.g. Zeus, Odin, Xerxes) and talked to them e.g. "Hi, centipedes. Keep up the good work, but please do try to stay away from me during the day, and remember our deal: you can live here, but my species has an ingrained fear of you guys, so if you drop down onto me from the ceiling or something I'm probably going to instinctively smash you."

I keep wrapping paper around, both for wrapping presents and to give me a tool for killing bugs at a can't-jump-on-me-from-here distance.

how can it be that it matters if the amount of positive value and negative value in the universe is infinite.

Not sure if infinities really exist. Pretty sure it's important to not be a dick.

In math, "measure" is a way of assigning a "volume" (or length, area, probability) to infinite sets. The "cardinality" of the set of numbers between 0 and 1 is the same infinity as that of the set of numbers between 0 and 2, but the standard "measure" of the latter set is twice as big. You can sum up certain types of functions defined on a continuum by "integrating" those functions values using the appropriate measure.

If there turns out to be a continuum of possible universes created by, say, a particle decay, then there's also a natural physical measure that corresponds to the probabilities we observe; the set of universes in which the particle decays before 1 half-life would be "twice as big" in some sense as the set of universes created in which the decay occurs between one half-life and two half-lifes. If someone offers to do something for you if-and-only-if a particle decays before one half life elapses, you should figure out the expected utility of a 50-50 bet, even if the reality might be that your decision is affecting two different infinities of subsequent universes.

There's a lot I'm glossing over and/or don't understand myself here (why is the probability measure the only ethical measure? lots of different-but-self-consistent measures can always be mathematically well-defined) but hopefully that at least explains the vocabulary a bit.

Bostrom suggests the "domain rule" to discount unobservable infinities. Seems pretty reasonable.

all we can do is a finite amount of good or evil (which has no impact on an infinite value)

If the universe is infinite, then there are infinitely many copies of me, following the same algorithm, so my decisions create infinite amounts of good or evil (through my copies which decide the same way).

Or, to see it from another angle, if the universe is literally infinite, then it is more or less infinitely repetitive. So let's take a part of universe containing a copy of approximately everything, and treat this part as a finite universe, which is just replicated infinitely many times.

Your "measure" is the proportion of your copies to the infinite universe.

It sounds much like a defensive argument for evil behavior. Obviously Good and Evil are just abstractions which only humans can measure, and at the level of the universe these things don't exist and don't matter

My first thought is that that kind of argument is exactly the kind that even a highly rational person would be wise to respond to with epistemic learned helplessness. It involves putting infinities into a calculation about real-world decisions, and it's an argument that all ethical actions are meaningless.

Also, if one values amount of good accomplished instead of amount of good in the universe, the infinite universe doesn't change anything.

That said, I don't think the multiverse interpretation implies an infinite number of universes unless the universe is also infinite in space or time, so people discussing the multiverse may not believe in an infinite universe.

Are you trying to find the probability of B given all n events, that is, Pr[B|A1, A2, ..., An]? In that case, none of the calculations Pr[B|A1], Pr[B|A2], ..., Pr[B|An] are useful, necessarily. In fact, even if each Ai individually makes B more likely, together they may make B less likely.

(For example, suppose we are rolling a fair 6-sided die, and take A1 = "We get 1 or 3", A2 = "We get 2 or 3", and B = "We get 1 or 2". Then Pr[B] = 1/3 before we condition, since 2 out of 6 outcomes satisfy B. If we learn either A1 or A2, then Pr[B|A1] = Pr[B|A2] = 1/2, since 1 out of the remaining 2 outcomes satisfies B. However, if we learn both A1 and A2, then Pr[B|A1,A2] = 0, because then we know that the outcome must be 3.)

If this is not what you mean, please elaborate.

You might get more answers to this question if it was more easily understandable. I can tell that you're trying to communicate through metaphor, but it's so opaque that it's more like a riddle than a question. Do you think you could restate your question in more direct language (or with another metaphor to give us something to triangulate with, if you're more comfortable with that)?

No, I'd say it's more annoying. I enjoy helping people with their problems (it's why I spend so much time on Stack Overflow, even though it's probably not the best use of my time). I hate playing bad RPGs.

I'm not sure if I understand the question, either. But, if there's someone whose brain you've already asked to borrow before, asking them whether it's annoying is probably a thing you should do (assuming you're similar to me).

I tend to feel like I'm asking for free stuff and offering nothing in return when I ask for advice, especially from people who I don't know well (or don't know at all - like forums I've just joined). But, most people who I ask for advice don't act like I'm wasting their time, and the times I've asked whether they mind, they usually say they don't mind or they like being helpful for the sake of it. And when other people ask me for advice, I tend to enjoy the conversation if it's a topic I have any knowledge/experience in, and sometimes it's sort of flattering to be asked. So, it looks to me like mentoring people is something that most humans enjoy doing, but some humans don't ask for it as often as we should because we mistakenly think it's a burdensome request.

(Also, as a data point, straightforward brain borrowing feels like a better offer than RPG playing. Probably because lending brains feels like building social capital and doing something useful, but RPG format registers as self-indulgent thing that I don't have time for, and unlikely to be as fun as just talking about it would be.)

Having at least a friendly acquaintanceship with the person to begin with does make it easier to ask, though. Getting to know intimidating people who seem like they're a level above yours, and possibly actually are, is a difficult thing that I don't know much about myself. Though it's probably more about dealing with one's own nervousness and awkwardness than anything - the higher level person will probably see it as ordinary making friends. And some people don't mind strangers asking them for help, so even if you don't know the person you want to talk to, it could still be worth asking. Or you can ask in a group context, like a forum, and see who shows up.

Speaking of which, I'm gonna make myself ask the bootstrap startup forum for help by the end of the day today, because your post reminded me that I really need the advice and really shouldn't be so scared of offending them by being too new and unknowable to reciprocate right away.

how do people notice them?

They pop up on top of the "recent comments" list. Enough people read LW comments via this list (there are actually two, one for Main and one for Discussion).

The reason for calling it stupid questions is to reassure people that they won't lose reputation or be insulted for asking questions that might be obvious to other people.

For being Respectable, I liked the older thread's title 'Procedural Knowledge Gaps' (1) (2). That is a narrower topic, though (but it's the topic I'm reading this thread for anyway).

I believe Google has an AI ethics board due to MIRI/FHI/&c. influence. If you are correct about their long game, then MIRI&c almost certainly knows of it, and perhaps you could test out the hypothesis by looking for shadows in those organizations' strategy reports or something if you're truly interested. May or may not be a great idea to shout the results from the rooftops, however.

When Google acquired DeepMind part of the deal was that Google get's an ethics boards. The impression I got, was that the purpose of that board is that DeepMind doesn't evolve into a UFAI.

Jaan Tallinn who made his fortune in Skype is one of the big donors for MIRI and was also a huge investor in DeepMind. I would imagine that he and a few other people who are less public are responsible for demanding the board.

I think every MIRI workshop did include someone from Google.

Luke did write somewhere that MIRI got six-figures in it's lifetime from Google matching funds for employee donations.

On the other hand Google is a big corporation. "well aware" is not precise term when thinking about giant companies.

The most straightforward explanation of Google's behavior is:

1. As you say, they have considered very thoroughly whether there is imminent danger from AI, and are running their business accordingly.
2. The conclusion of their consideration is that there is no imminent danger from AI.

You can't assume that the danger from AI is so definitely true that anyone competent who considers it will come out agreeing that there is danger.

I break the project down into small sections (I hate writing long things, and if I had written my book as a book, rather than as chapters, each divided into ~1k word sections, I would not have written it). So, the first question is how it makes sense to start divvying up.

For the book, I knew what the different chapters would be (Rosary, Divine Office, Examen, etc), so I made a Freemind diagram of all the points/ideas/etc I expected to use in each of those sections. (And that just needed to be enough of a handle for me to remember what I was talking about. Seeing a sub-bullet under "Confession" that said "Tam Lin" probably wouldn't be much help to anyone else!).

So, when I worked on the book, I wasn't working on the whole book. I just needed to turn "Confession -> Tam Lin" from notation into text.

I did a similar thing with my college thesis, where I started by grabbing references, dumped them all into a doc, moved them around so they were grouped together in categories like "Human Flesh Search" "Gov't Using Collective Score-Settling" etc, and then worked on individual sections.

I thought of what I was doing as a very small task, just filling in connective tissue between citations and examples. This tends to help me a lot.

I think the other benefit of the "break it down" approach is that you don't wind up with a blank document thinking "What will I do?" You sit down saying "Ok, today, I need to explain why we should approach Confession in the same spirit as Janet did her rescue of Tam Lin." Writing and choosing what to write work better for me if they are two separate tasks.

I do this sort of thing by starting as broadly as possible. Assuming you already have the majority of the information you need (ie, the research phase is more or less over), you should be able to sit for 15 minutes or so and make an albeit disorganised list of broad themes that you want to include in the paper. Concentrate during this phase on making the list, not evaluating what you put on it (some things will turn out to be irrelevant, some will be duplicates or link closely with each other or spark new interesting ideas - but make an effort to ignore all this at this point).

Once you've got your list, you can spend some time ordering it (so that closely linked items follow each other), discarding items that turn out not to fit in, and so on. Try and stay broad at this point (though you can jot down elsewhere more detailed points that you might want to make, if they occur to you; and it's fine to add new items that get sparked). This process should help you figure out what your "narrative arc" might be, what conclusion you're working towards, and so on. If something seems important but confusing, it might mean you need to do more research for that section.

Now you've got an outline that essentially consists of chapter or section headings, and some ideas for what's going in your introduction and conclusion. Depending on the length of the paper, you might want to do another outlining step in greater detail (listing your points in each section, but still not actually filling out the writing), or you could start writing now. I tend to work on writing the sections that seem easiest first, and then join up the more difficult bits afterwards.

Inevitably, it turns out during this phase that some of the links are weak or disjointed, some of the arguments I originally intended to make are poor, and the conclusion I thought I was heading for is actually not quite where I end up going. So lots of adjustments to the outline take place and the whole thing needs a good rejig at the end. But editing is straightforward enough when you have an already extant text to work on!

That's the sort of process that works (usually, well enough) for me: I'm sure others do it completely differently. Maybe you can pick out some stuff that seems useful in there, though.

Have you found any good solutions besides the ones already mentioned?

Animals that matter may be better off not existing than living in suffering. Cows having greater moral worth might be exactly that which means you would rather not create and torment them, as opposed to insects.

See also: http://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2013/07/vegan-advocacy-and-pessimism-about-wild.html

Do we know what the relative moral worth of cows and insects is? No. But we can make a best guess based on the available evidence, the same way we do with any other kind of uncertainty. It seems to me like this argument is just "we can't be certain about anything, therefore we have no basis on which to choose one action over another", dressed up a little.

The New York Times has a pretty good rent-buy calculator with 21 variables.

Khan Academy has a pretty good introductory rent vs own video. As has been mentioned above, the answer depends heavily on your career and preferences, as well as a bunch of values specific to your circumstance (Khan notes he rigged the numbers so renting came out ahead economically, but he could've just as easily come to the opposite conclusion by changing some values. I count something like 7 free variables (rent, house cost, down payment, loan interest, property tax, upkeep, investing returns), not counting the intangibles.)

An argument relevant to men interested in women: to my knowledge, women find men who own homes more attractive than men who rent (who, I'm guessing, are more attractive than couch surfers. According to Mark Manson's model (which is on empirically sketchier grounds, although he's the only guy whose dating advice I've seen unanimously recommended in the LWsphere), being a couch surfer will do little to impair a man's ability to have one-night stands, but will greatly impair his ability for anything longer-term.)

Depends wildly on your career and preferences. This is too big a stupid question to give one stupid answer to.

Pro: long-term stability for oneself or the family, if you have one, more control over your living space, real estate is potentially a good (and a more disciplined) investment, mortgage interest tax deduction (in the US).

Con: flip-sides: tied to a specific area, illiquidity of your capital, being forced to sell or rent out, possibly at a loss, if you cannot afford to pay the mortgage or have to move for other reasons.

The standard rule of thumb "buy a place when preparing to start a family" probably still works 80% of the time.

To further clarify: I mostly meant non-monetary arguments. EG: If you own a house you will have to do upkeep on it vs if you rent an apartment the landlord will be in charge of it. Quality of Life things.

I've got over 1000 and pretty much feel like an observer that periodically gets massively upvoted for injecting biology and astronomy information and analysis, which just happens to more than cancel out my negative karma from frequent jibes at local phenomena I find amusing or troubling.

http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php

I have ~200 Karma and feel like a 'real' (albeit quiet) member of LW, so... no? Also, this is the first time I've heard of the 1,000 threshold, and I've been at least lurking a bit more than a year.

I run meetups in my city, which I guess probably makes me a 'real' member, and only have ~200 karma (in fact, I only broke that threshold by getting karma for taking the census).

I remember that it used to be 100 Karma, although this was when the community was much smaller. Also, it was mostly used as a rule of thumb/heuristic for the personal accountability of one's posts (e.g. some people would withold a downvote the person posting it was new to the community).

For what it's worth, I don't recall ever seeing karma=1000 as a threshold of any importance, either for myself or for others. I'm not sure the idea of a "real" member makes much sense either.

I suppose I make some distinction between usernames I recognize immediately and those I don't, which probably correlates pretty well with karma. And maybe between ones for which I have a reasonable idea of what sort of thing the user tends to post about, what kind of positions they take, how impressed (or not) I've been with their thinking, etc., and those for which I haven't. That probably correlates with karma too. Perhaps the first one is kinda sorta a bit like karma>=1000 and the second is kinda sorta a bit like karma>=5000 or thereabouts -- but those numbers are completely made up and the correlation isn't really good enough for them to make a lot of sense.

No. You should either learn a bunch more math, or show the scars on your soul from demon-summoning. Or go to a bunch of in-person meetups and a CFAR workshop.

I have a bit more than that, and I only self-identify as an LW regular, not any kind of a "real member". At a guess, you are not a real member until you stop looking at your karma, except maybe as a feedback on individual posts and comments.

I'm close to breaking a thousand*, which feels exciting, but I don't think of myself as becoming a particularly "real" member. Maybe when I start going to meetups.

*edit: not as close as I thought

Depends on what you mean by 'Real' member. Karma is roughly correlated with comment/posting volume so I think 1000 is a decent threshold for "regularly says smart enough things" but plenty of people who are steeped in LW worldview almost never post to LW.

I am not sure what does "a real member" mean. So far no one tried to collect any dues from me or issue me a membership card. Like shminux, I would probably call myself "a regular".

I celebrated breaking 1337 more.

By some coincidence, I spent a long time on that particular score, too.

Meh, I could not remember where I was in relation to this threshhold without scrolling up, and I don't open tabs to check people's karma while I'm reading and commenting.

I have over 1000 and feel like a welcome guest, but not a real member. The score is from asking vaguely interesting questions, rehashing old LW arguments, a minimal amount of original thought and losing a couple of points from complaining about LW phenomena.

You can also try reddit's TipOfMyTongue subreddit

I can't help you directly, but TVTropes' You Know That Show is really good at finding these kinds of things.

I use http://feedly.com/ , mostly because I had a robust RSS feed when Google used to come with one, and Feedly volunteered to transfer over RSS accounts when it was shutting down to capture users. I don't have any complaints.

I think your answer is in The Domain of Your Utility Function. That post isn't specifically about cryonics, but is about how you can care about possible futures in which you will be dead. If you understand both of the perspectives therein and are still confused, then I can elaborate.

I've found the results are very different between living in a hot city and a cold city. When I lived in a hot, coastal city, I was never able to rewear anything; in my current cold city I can (theoretically, mind you) go days without a shower.

I usually wear jeans about three, sometimes four, times between washes. I haven't noticed any smell, and haven't heard any complaints either.

Not sure if it's in addition to what you're thinking of or it is what you're thinking of, but Tommy Hilfiger 'never' 'washes his Levis'. I heard this and confirmed with a fashion- and clothing-conscious friend that they (the friend) had tried it. I used to wash jeans and chinos after a few consecutive days of wearing them. For the past five or six weeks I've been trying out the 'no wash' approach. I wore one pair of jeans for about thirty five days (maybe split into two periods of continuous wearing) and washed them probably once or never during that time. So far as I could tell they did not smell anywhere near enough to be offensive, and I only stopped wearing them because I got too small for them. This included doing some form of exercise like pushups, circuits, or timed runs at the track in the jeans (and then not showering for a few hours afterwards) on most days.

After those jeans I've been wearing the same pair of chinos for eight days and they seem to be fine. It's worth giving a try to see if it works for you too, in your circumstances. It is very plausible that climate, bathing frequency, sensitivity to own sweat, sensitivity to laundry products, underpants use etc. provide enough variation between people that doing it is a no-brainer for some and not doing it is probably right for others.

During this period, before showering each night, I take the trousers off, shake them off, then (assuming I don't have any reason to think the outside of them had accumulated much ickiness during that day) drape them inside out over a chair, which hopefully lets them air out and let moisture evaporate off. (In fact, I now do this with most of my clothes, and it seems like it might indeed make them smell fresher for longer.)

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tommy+hilfiger+wash+jeans http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2459720/Tommy-Hilfiger-thinks-crazy-throw-jeans-laundry-wear.html

Most jeans you aren't supposed to wash too often, since it can make them fade and wear out faster, but you still want to wash them when they seem dirty like when you spill on them, get really sweaty in them, or if they smell. I wash mine every 3-5 wears which seems to be a good amount.

If you're wearing raw denim, you're not supposed to wash your jeans at all but raw denim is kind of a niche thing anyways.

I can see how freezing might help with smell, but what confuses me is sweat. If I wear pants more than about 4 times in a row, they start to itch, and I don't see how freezing would help with that. I don't think I sweat unusually much.

When it comes to sweat different people have different issues.

I remember that the once I gave a PowerPoint Karaoke in front of maybe 80 people at my university. Afterwards I smelt really badly because of stress induced smell.

On the other hand I can dance Salsa and my clothes are wet from sweat because I move that intensely. In my experience that doesn't lead to clothes that stink the next day.

Some nerdy people with high level of social anxiety sweat more smelly than average.

The only way to know surely whether something smells in a socially unacceptable way is to ask other people. I for example trust my mother to give me honest answers to that question. But you can use any friends for that purpose that you trust to give honest answer and that have decent social skills.

It might also be worth to get opinions from multiple people, as people's smell receptors differ. Androstenone for example smells musky and pleasant to some people and bad to others.

Who knows if this really works, but the Levi's Vice President of Women's Design recommends leaving your jeans in the freezer overnight once a month (to kill smelly bacteria).

The USA puts a pretty unique emphasis on not smelling, so this might be a cultural difference if their upbringing wasn't in the US.

It also depends on the jeans. Some jeans are, for some reason, more likely to smell after being worn just once. I have no idea why, but several people I know have corroborated this independently.

In general, Cryonics organizations have funds and people whose duty it is to revive frozen people. It's not like they're left in a random ditch to be found. Alcor (I don't know about the others) tries to only recruit people to this body who have relatives or loved ones in cryo, and are signed up themselves, therefore having an incentive both to unfreeze existing people and to cause the organization to unfreeze people in the future.

But even were they tossed into a ditch, there are several possible reasons:

1: Research. People from 300 years ago will have a wealth of interesting genetic, bacterial, possibly physiological, psychological, and other differences to study. They'll also have relatively privileged information about archaeological finds and historical manuscripts. I'm not sure how much that part will apply to the future, considering many more records are kept now than were 300 years ago, but the biological parts of the point hold regardless.

1. Profit: Reviving people from the past (at least the first time) would make whoever did it famous and respected, which will lead to more grants and other forms of remuneration. You could also put those weird primitives on a reality tv show.

1. Charity: People regularly pay to save stray dogs, cats, etc. from starving to death outside. They not only usually don't receive anything out of this, but in fact contribute to overpopulation of said animals as well as losing money. It would surprise me, assuming the process was not too costly, if there was no one in the next few centuries who felt it their calling to reanimate the frozen altruistically.

1. Experimentation. To perfect a revival procedure, you need to test it out on people. Depending on the availability of future corpsicles, there might be a limited supply, which would bump up people frozen centuries ago into the ranks of the potential scientific revivals.

Your second question is more a matter of morals but plenty of people do selfish things and yet we don't punish them with death for it.