This is beautiful and really useful seeming. I'm happy it exists, so thanks for making it.

I've been reading Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" and it seems to me that people don't need to be psychopaths to have difficulty feeling empathy and concern for other people. If you've read HPMOR, the villagers that used to enjoy cat burning are a good example, which Pinker uses. He suggests that our feelings of empathy have increased over time, although he's not sure for what reason. So earlier, a couple of people in their better moments might have claimed caring about others was important, but generally people were more selfish, so that the two did become out of sync.

I mean, even today when you say you care about other people, you don't suddenly donate all of the money that isn't keeping you alive to effective charities, because of the empathy you don't feel with every single other person on this earth. You don't have to be a psychopath for that happen.

Some ethical systems put false dichotomy between "doing what one wants" and "helping other people". And then they derive an 'ethical' conclusion that "doing what one wants" is evil, and "helping other people" is good, by definition.

Funny, this is a decent summary of an idea I've had kicking around for a while, though framed differently. A more or less independent one, I think; I've read Rand, but not for about a decade and a half.

I'd also add that "helping people" in this pop-culture mentality is typically built in a virtue-ethical rather than a consequential way; one is recognized as a good person by pattern-matching to preconceived notions of how a good person should behave, not by the expected results of one's actions. Since those preconceptions are based on well-known responses to well-known problems, a pop-culture altruist can't be too innovative or solve problems at too abstract a level; everyone remembers the guy that gave half his cloak to the beggar over the guy that pioneered a new weaving technique or produced an unusually large flax crop. Nor can one target too unfashionable a cause.

Innovators might eventually be seen as heroes, but only weakly and in retrospect. In the moment, they're more likely to be seen neutrally or even as villains (for e.g. crowding out less efficient flax merchants, or simply for the sin of greed). Though this only seems to apply in certain domains; pure scientists for example are usually admired, even if their research isn't directly socially useful. Same for artists.

IOW “Typical Mind and Disbelief In Straight People” but s/straight/good/?

I don't read philosophy, so I can't tell if someone has said it exactly like this, but it seems to me that this is not a strawman. At least it seems to me that I have heard such ideas floating around, although not expressed this clearly. (Maybe it's not exactly what the original philosopher said; maybe it's just a popular simplification.) There is the unspoken assumption that when people "do what they want", that does not include caring about others; that people must be forced into pro-social behavior... and the person who says this usually suggests that some group they identify with should be given power over the evil humans to force them into doing good.

I do read philosophy, and this does seem like a strawman to me. I'm not aware of a single serious moral philosopher who believes there is a sharp dichotomy between "doing what you want" and "helping others".

The only philosopher who comes close, I think, is Kant, who thought that the reasons for performing an action are morally relevant, above and beyond the action and its consequences. So, according to Kant, it is morally superior to perform an act because it is the right thing to do rather than because it is an act I want to perform for some other reason. Given this view, the ideal test case for moral character is whether a person is willing to perform an act that goes against her non-moral interests simply because it is the right thing to do. But this still differs from the claim that altruistic behavior is opposed to self-interested behavior.

And somehow people never realize the paradox of where does the "wanting to do what seemingly no one wants to" come from. I mean, if no one really cared about X, then no one would be concerned that no one cares about X, right? If nobody cares about sorting pebbles, then nobody feels that we should create some mechanisms to force people to sort pebbles because otherwise, oh the horrors, the pebbles wouldn't be sorted properly.

Well, no. For example, I care very much about these pebbles right here (these represent my friends), and recognize that there are many other people who don't care about these pebbles and instead care about totally different pebbles I don't care either way about. And some other people I know care about some of my pebbles, but not the rest, and I care about some of theirs but not the rest.

It occurs to me that if there were a broad set of principles everyone agreed to which said that, ethically, all pebbles ought to be sorted, then everyone would care some about my pebbles, at the comparatively low cost for me of caring a little about other people's pebbles.

Of course, from there it's a short step to people who conclude that, ethically, it is best to disregard your own particular attachment to your personal pebbles and be an effective pebblist, taking whatever actions most effectively sort pebbles anywhere even if that means your own pebbles are less sorted than they could be if you devoted more time to them. And some people take that too far and provoke Rayn And Pebblist to promote focusing on your own pebbles to the exclusion of all else.

And somehow people never realize the paradox of where does the "wanting to do what seemingly no one wants to" come from. I mean, if no one really cared about X, then no one would be concerned that no one cares about X, right?

The way out of this paradox is that no one wants to promote X themselves, but they want other people to do it.

I've never heard it called that, but I roll most of my clothes when traveling for work. They end up less wrinkled and you can fit a lot into a small volume. I highly recommend it.

Looks interesting, but I'm assuming this doesn't work if I like to iron my clothes before storing them. Is that right, or does the rolling not majorly detract from the ironing?

But still, the predictors will care about their outcomes (because those who won't, will be gradually removed from the system).

So you are suggesting a system that relies on the opinions of people who got selected because they really want to see their names at the top of the page in big font?

Pundits already make predictions all the time, but no one scores them. Even ones that where the outcome is very clear, like finding a nuclear program in Iraq or Apple making a TV.

So I think it is important to identify what the problem is and make sure you are actually addressing it. Setting up special venues has some advantages, like making sure that the questions are precise and judgeable, and attracting the right kind of people. Prestige for pundits is basically venue. Moving up and down inside a venue is a pretty small scale of change. I suppose that it is possible that if your venue has lots of churn, then the stakes would be higher.

One venue for realish money celebrity predictions is Long Bets, but while the emphasis is on accountability, it sure isn't on building a track record.

Also: does any government other than USA object to prediction markets? I suppose that ipredict's bankroll limitations indicate an objection by NZ, but I'm skeptical that this is a significant limiting factor.

Corretational or causational e.g. how it affects intelligence or how much intelligent people usually drink?

High certainty assigned to binge drinking causing some brain damage (if you have a hangover, you definitely binge-drank) via a combination of toxicity and depletion of key resources.

Low certainty assigned to moderate drinking possibly having protective effects on the aging brain via its blood thinning properties preventing stroke.

Medium certainty assigned to absolutely no protective or beneficial effects for moderate drinking in youth (beyond fun and social benefits).

Medium certainty assigned to the notion that for youth, the major drawback of moderate alcohol consumption is the risk of physically injuring yourself while intoxicated, not the actual toxicity.

I really doubt there is significant damage associated with moderate drinking in youth. With the number of studies that have been done on this, if there were a huge noticeable difference in brain structure and function we would have found them by now. However, I do think it will damage you at least a little bit.

As someone who has been on both sides, "just show up and introduce yourself" has been good every time so far.

It doesn't seem like the webmasters, or administrators, of Less Wrong receive these requests as signals. Maybe try sending them a private message directly, unless the culture of Less Wrong already considers that inappropriate, or rude.

As a first approximation, if you want the LW codebase changed, you need to do it yourself.

One thing in the show that I see very rarely outside of LW is the AI taking over a person.

So I watched the first episode a while back and it seemed like they have an AI that models the world so well that it knows what's going to happen and who is involved. Maybe I missed something, but if it can tell what's going to happen, why can't it tell the difference between the one responsible for the bad thing happening and the victim?

I think there's some truth to your counterarguments 1 and 2. Young people are easier to sway into any change-oriented movement, so any push for sweeping change will have a lot of youth behind it, even if it's an older person pulling the strings and reaping the benefits.

It was the youthful Red Guards who were guilty of the worst Cultural Revolution atrocities, and Pol Pot's regime was even more reliant on adolescent murderers killing everyone who had criminal traditional values or had received a traditional education.

In contrast, Deng Xiaoping was over 70 years old when he instituted his post Cultural Revolution reforms.

Aside from teaching basic mathematical skills and literacy, the major goal of the new educational system was to instill revolutionary values in the young. For a regime at war with most of Cambodia's traditional values, this meant that it was necessary to create a gap between the values of the young and the values of the nonrevolutionary old.

The regime recruited children to spy on adults. The pliancy of the younger generation made them, in the Angkar's words, the "dictatorial instrument of the party."[citation needed] In 1962 the communists had created a special secret organisation, the Democratic Youth League, that, in the early 1970s, changed its name to the Communist Youth League of Kampuchea. Pol Pot considered Youth League alumni as his most loyal and reliable supporters, and used them to gain control of the central and of the regional CPK apparatus. The powerful Khieu Thirith, minister of social action, was responsible for directing the youth movement.

Hardened young cadres, many little more than twelve years of age, were enthusiastic accomplices in some of the regime's worst atrocities. Sihanouk, who was kept under virtual house arrest in Phnom Penh between 1976 and 1978, wrote in War and Hope that his youthful guards, having been separated from their families and given a thorough indoctrination, were encouraged to play cruel games involving the torture of animals. Having lost parents, siblings, and friends in the war and lacking the Buddhist values of their elders, the Khmer Rouge youth also lacked the inhibitions that would have dampened their zeal for revolutionary terror.

The Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Italofascists were also Young Turk movements, although the generation gap was not quite so extreme. In the case of the Nazis, the weakened conservative Junker elite (epitomized by the elderly Paul von Hindenburg) first tried to reign them in, then tried to use them, and wound up losing everything to them.

I'm Against Moral Progress. I don't think moral progress the way we usually talk about it is well founded. We observe moral change, then we decide since past moral change made values ever more like our present values on average, something that is nearly a tautology, the process itself must be good, despite us having no clear understanding of how it works.

Such confusion fogs many people on a similar process, evolution, having noticed they like opposable thumbs and that over time past hominids have come to resemble present hominids ever more they often imagine evolution to be an inherently good process. This is a horribly wrong perception.

Younger people haven't been right, they merely won the demographic battle and had their way.

Young people in general are good at picking winners, and quickly adapting to what is popular. Younger people's status quo bias will also fixate on newer norms compared to older people with aliefs the status quo is something else. Winners will also tend to try and influence them, especially in our society where voting power and public opinion grant legitimacy.

Younger people haven't been right, but despite being a young person who has over the past 3 years drifted strongly towards traditional values, I can't say they were wrong either. They simply had a different value set from the older generations before them.

Consider that currently monogamy or not flaying people alive is still valued both by the old and the young. We don't feel a need to explain why this is so. But should very convincing PeopleFlayers land in Central Park (LW2014 would think this bad) or should Polyamory continue to gain ground (LW2014 would think this good) in 20 years we would be wondering why young people are into PeopleFlaying and Polyamory and older people are not as much, and if this says something important about the nature of morality.

For the past few decades, or perhaps even centuries, it seems younger people have consistently been right in their position on social issues.

I guess you're not from a country that had Stalin Youth around in the 1970s. (We weren't an Eastern Bloc country either, they were just useful idiots.)

For the past few decades, or perhaps even centuries, it seems younger people have consistently been right in their position on social issues.

Taboo "right."

Alternatively:

There is no "right and wrong", it's a subjective value judgement, and similar to #1, they ultimately are the one's who's subjective values are taken to be objectively "right".

This gallup report suggests that views on abortion are more complicated. Young people are most likely to favor no restrictions on abortion, but also most likely to favor a categorical ban (even more likely than the 65+ crowd).

Right now, this would mean that gay marriage, marijuana legalization, abortion, etc would all very quickly become legal (In the US at least).

In the US, under-30 adults have less liberal views on abortion than middle-aged adults, and the under-30s were getting less liberal about it more quickly than older adults until 2010 or so. (Also, abortion's been legal in the US for four decades.)

What were the equivalents of marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage 20 years ago? 40 years ago? Etc. And what policies did young people support that weren't enacted?

Perhaps society should take that into account, and weigh their opinions more heavily.

This kind of feels like suggesting "if you notice that your tribe is becoming extinct, you should help to speed up the process".

younger people have consistently been right in their position on social issues.

[Citation needed]

Not to mention that you treat "younger people" as a homogenous group which, quite clearly, it is not.

Younger people haven't been consistently right. They support bad ideas as often as any other group but those are rejected and forgotten.

This can be tested. Organize a huge youth conference that will provide dozens of new ideas. Record the ideas, wait 20 years, and review them; wait 50 years and review them yet again. Also, compare with new good things that happened meanwhile, but were not suggested at the conference.

I suggest trying to find evidence about issues that made a larger difference, such as support for Mao or for fighting major wars. Maybe there's a principled definition of "social issues" that excludes things about which the young are wrong, but I'll guess that it's hard to find consensus about such a definition.

It only seems this way because of selection bias. Young people generally want to change stuff, and history/ethics is written by the victors. In cases where young people lost, the status quo was maintained, which means we don't pay as much attention.

I think, in practice, young people would have to start voting more in order to have their opinions reflected in politics. Voter turnout among young adults is very low, so when politicians make decisions, they feel like they can safely ignore their concerns.

In my experience, the primary factor that generates love is the amount of time I think about positive qualities in a woman.
It's a fairly simple and surprising hack of my brain that could very well work for you too: if I devote enough time (say, a couple of minutes every hour) thinking about what I like in a woman, my brain will automatically start to generate feelings of love. On the converse, when I feel a lot of attraction, if I consciously stop thinking about her, the feelings intensity diminishes drastically.
It's almost like the brain was seeking to maintain internal consistency: if you think a lot about someone you're attracted to, it must be because you're in love, and viceversa. The best part is that, since we don't have access to our internal workings, the feelings generated in this way feels very true (they are true, actually).

My advice then is: before trying more invasive hack of your brain, just devote some time to regularly think about what you like in her. There's a good chance that soon you'll start idealizing her.

One of the ways of building intimacy or closeness, which is a key component of companionate love (the type you seem to be going for here, have a look at the research on passionate vs. companionate love if you're interested) is self-disclosure that is responded to by one's partner with warmth, understanding and supportiveness.

You can spend a lot of time doing things together without having this self-disclosure: to get it, you need to want to disclose/hear more about the other person, and preferably have dates etc. where you spend some time just talking about whatever, in private, about your pasts or your thoughts - things that might lead to self-disclosure.

So first step, set up these situations. Second step, talk about your past and your thoughts and try to be open - be trusting. Relate random conversations to things you hold close to you. Third step, if your partner opens up to you, make sure to respond supportively and engage with it, and not brush it off or turn the conversation to less close topics.

Which is not to say you should do this all the time, fun dates and silliness and dancing in a club way too loud to talk in are good too. But with any luck, adding a bit more of this in will help you feel that connection and intimacy.

There is a thin line between changing your desires and suppressing them. You may replace a goal X by a goal Y, or you may just convince yourself that you did. -- Think about all the religious homosexual people who try to hack themselves to heterosexuality, believe they have succeeded, and then later realize it didn't work.

Is there a way to get both X and Y? For example having an open long-term relationship with one partner, and a few short-term relationships when you need them. Or to save time and effort, to have one long-term emotional relationship, and a few long-term contacts where both sides only want sex occasionally.

Why do you feel that it comes across as obnoxious?

Say what you're about to do, before doing it.

Sometimes, providing a summary will activate an immune response. This is a red flag about the context in which you're communicating, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't participate in an effective way.

Here's an intervention, rather than a test: If she says something that hurts your feelings again, just say, "I know you're joking around, but that kind of hurts my feelings."

Instead of informing your model, inform hers.

If it were me, I would just assume she was lightheartedly teasing. If that's the case, the course of action would be to tease back, but also in a lighthearted way. Either that, or reply with an extremely exaggerated form of self-deprecation; agree with her teasing but in a way that exaggerates the original intent. Even if that's not the case, and she's being vindictive, I think responding as though she were teasing would be ideal anyway.

Examples:

"I tripped and almost fell on you. Oh but you would be happy if I accidentally fell on you, right?" (tease back): "Clumsy people don't really do it for me" (exaggerate): "That's because I have never had a woman touch me before in my life"

"Oh no, you're going to need a triple X size." (tease back): "I think you just like saying 'triple X'. Get your mind out of the gutter, thanks" (exaggerate): "I'm going to cry myself to sleep over my size tonight "

If she laughs and/or plays along with these responses, she's probably just teasing. If she gets even more cruel in her response, then she's probably being intentionally vindictive.

Y'know egocentric bias? Where people think the world revolves around them more than it does? I find that I often see my friend's actions in terms of what they think of me, but I imagine that they're in fact focused on me a lot less, so I would advise trying to discount that idea strongly. If it bothers you more, then just look at your options e.g. Mention it to her, don't mention it to her, think of an experimental test for the hypothesis, etc. Then pick one. Otherwise... Worrying is of course useless if it isn't motivating a useful action, so attempt not to.

My probabilities for each scenario: 0.1 - 0.2 - 0.3 - 0.4 - 0.

I like her a lot and some months ago I have told her so, trying to be as level-headed as possible.

In my experience, explicit declarations never work. You need to convey attraction subtextually.

Asking what you "should wish for" still requires you to specify what you're trying to maximize. Specifying your goal in detail has all the same risks as specifying your wish in detail, so you have the same exposure to risk.

Edit: See my longer explanation below

How is it different from what Eliezer calls "I wish for you to do what I should wish for"?

With a safe genie, wishing is superfluous. Just run the genie.

I think the problem is, 'Mischievous but rule abiding' doesn't sufficiently help limit the genies activities to sane ones.

For instance, the genie pulls out a pen made entirely out of antimatter to begin writing down a perspicuous explanation, and the antimatter pen promptly reacts with the matter in the air, killing you and anyone in the area.

When the next person comes into the wasteland after it has stopped exploding and says "That's not mischievous, that's clearly malicious!" The genie points out that he can just make them all come back if someone wishes for it so clearly it is only a bit of mischief, much like how many would consider taking a cookie from a four year old and holding it above their head mischievous: Any suffering is clearly reversible. Oh also, the last person asked for a perspicuous explanation of what they should wish for, and it is written down on antimatter paper and antimatter pen in that opaque massive magnetically sealed box, which is just about to run out of power, and then THAT person also blows up when the boxes power containment fails.

Hanson has kinda defended this scenario because the ems would want to be alive

Has he? I think his more typical defense is Poor Folks Do Smile.

I would guess yes - but that might change depending on details. At the very least, if we decided on some way to measure QALYs (our current methodology is real simple!), and then tried to maximize that measurement, we'd at best get something that looked like pared-down ems.

Ultimately, how you choose between futures is up to you. Even if something has an objective-sounding name like "quality-adjusted life years," this doesn't mean that it's the right thing to maximize.

Yes, wanting to live isn't perfect evidence of a life worth living. But it sure looks like it provides some bayesian evidence.

Looking at whether the ems want more copies of themselves and want faster clock speeds should provide stronger evidence, and it seems unlikely that ems who don't want either of those will be common.

Ems should have some ability to alter themselves to enjoy life more. Wouldn't they use that?

The only reasoning in there was that wearable tech doesn't make you a cyborg because you're a simulation.

I'd say that even if the world is a simulation, there's no reason to go crazy with semantics. You call someone a cyborg when they'd qualify as a cyborg in a non-virtual world.

Wearable tech doesn't make you a cyborg because it isn't part of you? The fact that you scoff at things that sound like nonsense but which includes the prediction that you will scoff is (at best) very weak evidence for it, since scoff is what you would do anyway? Besides, the garbage man doesn't say anything about how he knows about the simulation, if he just made it up, then what him believing it is also unrelated to whether or not it is true.

the "you're a simulation" argument could explain anything and hence explains nothing. He managed to predict scoffing, but that wasn't a consequence of his hypothesis, that was just to be expected.

Meetups should have its own thread, like the Open thread, not be posted in Discussion. Of course, we do not live in a should universe...

I'd be happy to provide deadlines or accountability to anyone else who wants it.

Conscientiousness: Alice keeps putting off a project, since she knows it'll only take an hour (say, fixing a roof - after all, you only need to start an hour before the rainstorm). Bob just does it. Alice gets rained on.

Coonscientiousness: Alice and Bob's town is slowly invaded by a herd of raccoons. Alice looks up how to deal with raccoons, asks for advice, and looks for successful people and copies them. Bob just does what he thinks of first, yelling at them to stay away from his garden, until he gets to tired and raccoons eat all his vegetables.

Steal the plotline of "Feeling Pinkie Keen" from My Little Pony and fix the ending so instead of being about taking things on faith, it's about updating on the cumulatively overwhelming evidence that the quirky character's predictive ability actually works.

I'd settle for a well-executed cartoon adaptation of Pratchett's Tiffany Aching books. Almost as good in terms of rationality, and a lot more marketable.

I guess you just have to try it.

Make one article. Make it a standalone article about one topic. (Not an introduction to a planned long series of articles; just write the first article of the series. Not just the first half of an article, to be continued later; instead choose a narrower topic for the first article. As a general rule: links to already written articles are okay, but links to yet unexisting articles are bad; especially if those yet unexisting articles are used as an excuse for why the existing articles don't have a conclusion.)

Put the article in Discussion; if it is successful and upvoted, someone will move it to Main. Later perhaps, when two of your articles were moved, put the third one directly in Main.

The topics seems interesting, but it's not just what topic you write about, but also how do you write it. For example "The Layers of Evolution": I can imagine it written both very good and very badly. For example, whether you will only speak generally, or give specific examples; whether those examples will be correct or incorrect. (As a historical warning, read "the tragedy of group selectionism" for an example of something that seemed like it would make sense, but at the end, it failed. There is a difference between imagining a mechanism, and having a proof that it exists.)

If you have a lot of topics, perhaps you should start with the one where you feel most experienced.

I think the better course of action is if you just post your ideas first in the discussion section, let the feedback pour and then, based on what you receive, craft posts for the main section. After all, that's what the discussion section is for.
In this way, you'll get a lot of perspectives at a time, without waiting the help of a single individual.

Does this suggest a problem with using Bayes to generate hypotheses?

I think that Bayes is completely silent on how one should generate hypotheses...

An example of using Bayes to "generate hypotheses" that's successful is the mining/oil industry that makes spatial models and computes posterior expected reward for different drilling plans. For general-science type hypotheses you'd ideally want to put a prior on a potentially very complicated space (e.g. the space of all programs that compute the set of interesting combinations of reagents, in your example) and that typically isn't attempted with modern algorithms. This isn't to say there isn't room to make improvements on the state of the art with more mundane approaches.

I'm not sure TLP is a single person.

TLP's anonymity was actually broken a while ago. I won't post details here, but if you feel you need evidence feel free to PM me.

He's male.

However, this doesn't remove the possibility that some works published under the TLP brand were written by another author.

I believe I read someone claim that TLP is written by a married couple. Before I read that I assumed TLP was a man, however. The writing style seems pretty masculine.

It's a "Lava Basalisk".

EDIT: See here: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Template_talk:LessWrong

Picture of Lava Basalisk, as noted by Oscar_Cunningham, linking to the concept of Roko's Basilisk, which is a large point of interest for RW users.

The difference between a monster and a god is in your point of view, unless it's a sexless, lifeless husk like the Abrahamic religion's God, or some other platonic ideal. The cyborg seems likely to be a reference/confusion to the Singularity as Rapture of the Nerds, where we become as gods, a large misunderstanding of what it seems most here hop for, an AI np more conscious than a chair that makes us what we would want to be if we were more what we want to be.

Why ate you spending time on RationalWiki? I know LessWrong has gone downhill but there are still interesting books, and blogs, and people.