Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014

Re: "civilizational incompetence". I've noticed "civilizational incomptence" being used as a curiosity stopper. It seems like people who use the phrase typically don't do much to delve in to the specific failure modes civilization is falling prey to in the scenario they're analyzing. Heaven forbid that we try to come up with a precise description of a problem, much less actually attempt to solve it.

(See also: http://celandine13.livejournal.com/33599.html)

I had the same thought when I read Hayworth's recent interview. It's really good.

No, it's not up to date. (It's on my list of things to fix, but I don't have many spare cycles right now.) I'd start with a short set theory book (such as Naive Set Theory), follow it up with Computation and Logic (by Boolos), and then (or if those are too easy) drop me a PM for more suggestions. (Or read the first four chapters of Jaynes on Probability Theory and the first two chapters of Model Theory by Chang and Keisler.)

Edit: I have now updated the course list (or, rather, turned it into a research guide) that is fairly up-to-date (if unpolished) as of 6 Nov 14.

I have some suggestions for books related to the topics you mentioned. There's a pretty good section on cognitive ergonomics in Wickens' Introduction to Human Factors Engineering that is a clear introduction to the topic, and mentions some examples of design issues that can arise from human beings' cognitive limitations and biases.

Also, Chris Eliasmith's book Neural Engineering: Computation, Representation, and Dynamics in Neurobiological Systems shows some of the technical approaches people have taken to modelling what happens in the brain.

I'm not sure if either of those is what you're looking for, but I found them interesting.

Is the recommended courses page on MIRI's website up to date with regards to what textbooks they recommend for each topic? Should I be taking the recommendations fairly seriously, or more with a grain of salt? I know the original author is no longer working at MIRI, so I'm feeling a bit unsure.

I think Understanding Machine Learning (out this year) is better than Bishop's book (which is, frankly, insufferably obscurantist), and that instead of model-checking you ought to be learning a proof assistant (I learned Coq from Benjamin Pierce's Software Foundations).

If he could not repeat the claim that UFAI is so easily compressible it could "spread across the world in seconds" through the internet, that would be quite helpful, actually. Even in the rich world, with broadband, transferring an intelligent agent all across the world will take whole hours, especially given the time necessary for the bugger to crack into and take control of the relevant systems (packaging itself as a trojan horse and uploading itself to 4chan in a "self-extracting zip" of pornography will take even longer).

I just sent a message to Luke. Hopefully he will notice it.

I wonder what would happen if we trained monkeys to reveal this kind of detalis with us.

How did you deal with the prospect of one of the kids being emotional hurt by the whole process of being explicit about relationships?

Yes, take the Invisible Hand approach to altruism, by pursuing your own productive wellbeing you will generate wellbeing in the worlds of others. Trickle down altruism is a feasible moral policy. Come to the Dark Side and bask in Moral Libertarianism.

I'm sure this sounds simplistic since much of the LW literature already discusses such things

Important insights usually happen to sound simple but the insight still takes years to achieve.

my reading of Theodore Roosevelt's doing much the same to transform himself from an idiot into a badass

Link/source?

I agree about all of that except for contrarianism (and yes, I'm aware of the irony). You want to have some amount of contrarianism in your ecosystem, because people sometimes aren't satisfied with the hivemind and they need a place to go when that happens. Sometimes they need solutions that work where the mainstream answers wouldn't, because they fall into a weird corner case or because they're invisible to the mainstream for some other reason. Sometimes they just want emotional support. And sometimes they want an argument, and there's a place for that too.

What you don't want is for the community's default response to be "find the soft bits of this statement, and then go after them like a pack of starving hyenas tearing into a pinata made entirely of ham". There need to be safe topics and safe stances, or people will just stop engaging -- no one's always in the mood for an argument.

On the other hand, too much agreeableness leads to another kind of failure mode -- and IMO a more sinister one.

My first comment was after I completed the 2014 survey. I've only been lurking for about a month, and this was the first survey I've participated in.

I have been an on-and-off lurker for ~15 months, and only recently created an account (not because of the survey though). I have participated in both 2013 and 2014's surveys.

Laundry (plus ironing, if you have clothes that require that - I try not to), washing up (I think this is called doing the dishes in America), mopping, hoovering (vacuuming), dusting, cleaning bathroom and kitchen surfaces, cleaning toilets, cleaning windows and mirrors. That might cover the obvious ones? Seems like most of them don't involve much learning but do take a bit of getting round to, if you're anything like me.

Adding on to Emily:

Having a particular hamper or even corner of your room where you put dirty laundry, so that it isn't all over your floor. When this hamper / corner is full, do your laundry.
Analogous organized or occasionally-organized places for paperwork or whatever else is being clutter-y.
If you have ancient carpet and it's dirty and stinky, learn how to rent a Rug Doctor-type steam cleaner from a nearby supermarket.
If you have a bunch of broken or dirty / stinky stuff in your house, learn how to get the trash people to haul it away, and learn where to buy cheap used furniture / cheap online kitchen supplies / whatever to replace your old junk.
Having tools handy to tidy up nails / tighten loose screws etc. when you notice them.
Keeping a bush and plunger near your toilet.
If your sink has clogged any time in the past 6 months, also consider having chemical unclogger / a long skinny "snake" (that's what it's actually called) that you shove down the drain and wiggle around to bust clogs.
Figure out where all the places that are hard to clean are. These are the places that will have 50 years of accumulated nasty dirt that will make the whole house smell better when you get rid of it.

Learn to notice things that need cleaning.

Know a good way to get rid of everything you possess when you no longer need it (bookcrossing, electronic waste recycling or just a trash bag). Learn to notice when you have things cluttering up the place that you no longer need.

If you've got the money and a simple enough apartment layout, I recommend a vacuum cleaning robot. My crawling saucer collects a ridiculous amount of dust from the floor every day, and this seems to keep other surfaces and the air dustless too. There's no way I could clean up that much dust myself, and I'd do the cleaning so rarely that the dust would get all over the place.

Avoid these and you'll be off to a good start. :)

I had a conversation with another person regarding this Leslie's firing squad type stuff. Basically, I came up with a cavemen analogy with the cavemen facing lethal threats. It's pretty clear - from the outside - that the cavemen which do probability correctly and don't do anthropic reasoning with regards to tigers in the field, will do better at mapping lethal dangers in their environment.

This is related to the Sleeping Beauty Problem, and in general the answer depends what you're trying to do with "probability". For lots and lots more, Bostrom's PhD thesis is very detailed: Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy.

Bostrom's Observation Selection Effects and Human Extinction Risks paper is less philosophical and sounds like it's more relvant to the paper you're working on.

Before I actually do the math, "you hear nothing" appears to affect my estimate exactly in the same way as "you're still alive."

A side note: under the cherry bomb scenario the probability of you hearing the word "red" is zero.

If the two jar scenarios start with equal anthropic measure (i.e. looking in from the outside), then you really are less likely to have jar R if you're not dead.

I'm only a not-very-studious undergraduate (in physics), and don't spend an awful lot of time thinking about maths ourside of that, but I pretty much only think about maths in the nonverbal way - I can understand an idea when verbally explained to me, but I have to "translate it" into nonverbal maths to get use out of it.

I don't tend to do a lot of proofs anymore. When I think of math, I find it most important to be able to flip back and forth between symbol and referent freely - look at an equation and visualize the solutions, or (to take one example of the reverse) see a curve and think of ways of representing it as an equation. Since when visualizing numbers will often not be available, I tend to think of properties of a Taylor or Fourier series for that graph. I do a visual derivative and integral.

That way, the visual part tells me where to go with the symbolic part. Things grind to a halt when I have trouble piecing that visualization together.

I usually think about math nonverbally. I am not usually doing such thinking to come up with proofs. My background is in engineering, so I got a different sort of approach to math in my education about math than the people who were in the math faculty at the university I attended.

Sometimes I do go through a problem step by step, but usually not verbally. I sometimes make notes to help me remember things as I go along. Constraints, assumptions, design goals, etc. Explicitly stating these, which I usually do by writing them on paper, not speaking them aloud, if I'm working by myself on a problem, can help. But sometimes I am not working by myself and would say them out loud to discuss them with other people.

Also, there is often more than one way to visualize or approach a problem, and I will do all of them that come to mind.

I would suggest, to spend more time thinking about math, find something that you find really beautiful about math and start there, and learn more about it. Appreciate it, and be playful with it. Also, find a community where you can bounce ideas around and get other people's thoughts and ideas about the math you are thinking about. Some of this stuff can be tough to learn alone. I'm not sure how well this advice might work, your mileage may vary.

When I am really understanding the math, it seems like it goes directly from equations on the paper right into my brain as images and feelings and relations between concepts. No verbal part of it. I dream about math that way too.

As someone employed doing mid-level math (structural design), I'm much like most others you've talked to. The entirely non-verbal intuitive method is fast, and it tends to be highly correct if not accurate. The verbal method is a lot slower, but it lends itself nicely to being put to paper and great for getting highly accurate if not correct answers. So everything that matters gets done twice, for accurate correct results. Of course, because it is fast the intuitive method is prefered for brainstorming, then the verbal method verifies any promising brainstorms.

Which of those, if any, sounds closer to the way you think about math?

Each serves its own purpose. It is like the technical and artistic sides of musical performance: the technique serves the artistry. In a sense the former is subordinate to the latter, but only in the sense that the foundation of a building is subordinate to its superstructure. To perform well enough that someone else would want to listen, you need both.

This may be useful reading, and the essays here (from which the former is linked).

As someone with a Ph.D. in math, I tend to think verbally in as much as I have words attached to the concepts I'm thinking about, but I never go so far as to internally vocalize the steps of the logic I'm following until I'm at the point of actually writing something down.

I think there is another much stronger distinction in mathematical thinking, which is formal vs. informal. This isn't the same distinction as verbal vs. nonverbal, for instance, formal thinking can involve manipulation of symbols and equations in addition to definitions and theorems, and I often do informal thinking by coming up with pretty explicitly verbal stories for what a theorem or definition means (though pictures are helpful too).

I personally lean heavily towards informal thinking, and I'd say that trying to come up with a story or picture for what each theorem or definition means as you are reading will help you a lot. This can be very hard sometimes. If you open a book or paper and aren't able to get anywhere when you try do this to the first chapter, it's a good sign that you are reading something too difficult for your current understanding of that particular field. At a high level of mastery of a particular subject, you can turn informal thinking into proofs and theorems, but the first step is to be able to create stories and pictures out of the theorems, proofs, and definitions you are reading.

I'm a math undergrad, and I definitely spend more time in the second sort of style. I find that my intuition is rather reliable, so maybe that's why I'm so successful at math. This might be hitting into the "two cultures of mathematics", where I am definitely on the theory builder/algebraist side. I study category theory and other abstract nonsense, and I am rather bad (relative to my peers) at Putnam style problems.

I don't see a clear verbal vs. non-verbal dichotomy - or at least the non-verbal side has lots of variants. To gain an intuitive non-verbal understanding can involve

• visual aids (from precise to vague): graphs, diagrams, patterns (esp. repetitions), pictures, vivid imagination (esp. for memorizing)

• acoustic aids: rhythms (works with muscle memory too), patterns in the spoken form, creating sounds for elements

• abstract thinking (from precise to vague): logical inference, semantic relationships (is-a, exists, always), vague relationships (discovering that the more of this seems to imply the more of that)

Note: Logical inference seems to be the verbal part you mean, but I don't think symbolic thinking is always verbal. Its conscious derivation may be though.

And I hear that the verbal side despite lending itself to more symbolic thinking can nonetheless work its grammar magic on an intuitive level too (though not for me).

Personally if I really want to solve a mathematical problem I immerse myself in it. I try lots of attack angles from the list above (not systematically but as it seems fit). I'm an abstract thinker and don't rely on verbal, acoustic or motor cues a lot. Even visual aids don't play a large role though I do a lot of sketching, listing/enumerating combinations, drawing relations/trees, tabulating values/items. If I suspect a repeating pattern I may tap to it to sound it out. If there is lengthy logical inference involved that I haven't internalized I speak the rule repeatedly to use the acoustic loop as memory aid. I play around with it during the day visualizing relationships or following steps, sometimes until in the evening everyting blurs and I fall asleep.

Personally, the nonverbal thing is the proper content of math---drawing (possibly mental) pictures to represent objects and their interactions. If I get stuck, I try doing simpler examples. If I'm still stuck, then I start writing things down verbally, mainly as a way to track down where I'm confused or where exactly I need to figure something out.

I don't really draw that distinction. I'd say that my thinking about mathematics is just as verbal as any other thinking. In fact, a good indication that I'm picking up a field is when I start thinking in the language of the field (i.e. I will actually think "homology group" and that will be a term that means something, rather than "the group formed by these actions...")

Meh, he seems to be trying to hard to pretend to be wise. One of the more egregious examples:

There's no excuse for threats to anyone, whatever "side" they are on. Posting someone's home address or private phone number or financial details will almost never be relevant to a good-faith dispute — it's clearly intended to terrorize, and it risks empowering disturbed people to do real harm. These things are wrong no matter who does them, no matter the motive, and no mater the target.

That's like saying "Violence is wrong no matter who does it, therefore if an armed gang invades your neighborhood you should passively comply".

This could be a big deal for the bestiality debate (although conducting the necessary training without falling afoul of the original ethical concerns would probably be a trick).

Admitting you are wrong.

Excercises in small rational behaviours. E.g. people genrally are very reluctant to apologize about anything, even if the case means little to them and a lot to the other person. Maybe it's "if I apologize, that will mean I was a bad person in the first place" thinking, maybe something else.

It's a nice excercise: if somebody seems to want something from you or apparently is angry with you when you did nothing wrong, stop for a moment and think: how much will it cost me to just say "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you". After all, those are just words. You don't have to "win" every confrontation and convince the other person you are right and their requirements are ridiculus. And if you apologize, in fact you both will have a better day - the other person will feel appreciated and you will be proud you did something right.

(A common situation from my experience is that somebody pushes me in a queue, I say "excuse me, but please don't stand so close to me/don't look over my arm when I'm writing the PIN code etc." and then the pusher often starts arguing how my behaviour is out of line - making both of us and the cashier upset)

Come to think of it, it's a lot like Quirrell's second lesson in HPMoR...

Noticing confusion is the first skill I tried to train up last year, and is definitely a big one, because knowing what your models predict and noticing when they fail is a very valuable feedback loop that prevents you from learning if you can't even notice it.

Picturing what sort of evidence would unconvince you of something you actively believe is a good exercise to pair with the exercise of picturing what sort of evidence would convince you of something that seems super unlikely. Noticing unfairness there is a big one.

Realizing when you are trying to "win" at truthfinding, which is... ugh.

Taking stock of what information you have, and what might be good sources for information, well in advance of making a decision.

Map and territory - why is rationality important in the first place?

I've been to several of CFAR's classes throughout the last 2 years (some test classes and some more 'official' ones) and I feel like it wasn't a good use of my time. Spend your money elsewhere.

(Apologies for the slight thread hijack here.)

It occurs to me that CFAR's model of expensive workshops and generous grants to the impoverished (note: I am guessing about the generosity) is likely to produce rather odd demographics: there's probably a really big gap between (1) the level of wealth/income at which you could afford to go, and (2) the level of wealth/income at which you would feel comfortable going, especially as -- see e.g. cursed's comments in this thread -- it's reasonable to have a lot of doubt about whether they're worth the cost. (The offer of a refund mitigates that a bit.)

Super-handwavy quantification of the above: I would be really surprised if a typical person whose annual income is $30k or more were eligible for CFAR financial aid. I would be really surprised if a typical person whose income is $150k or less were willing to blow $4k on a CFAR workshop. (NB: "typical". It's easy to imagine exceptions.) Accordingly, I would guess that a typical CFAR workshop is attended mostly by people in three categories: impoverished grad students, etc., who are getting big discounts; people on six-figure salaries, many of them quite substantial six-figure salaries; and True Believers who are exceptionally convinced of the value of CFAR-style rationality, and willing to make a hefty sacrifice to attend.

I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, it strikes me as a pretty good recipe for getting an interesting mix of people. But it does mean there's something of a demographic "hole".

CFAR has financial aid.

Also, attending LW meetups and asking about organizing meetups based on instrumental rationality material is cheap and fun.

The person who uses ev psych to justify their romantic preferences to potential and current partners. (There's a generalisation of this that I'm not sure how to describe, but I've fallen into it when talking with friends about the game-theoretical value of friendship.)

The person who airs fringe supremacist (or even eliminationist) views ... then is surprised and offended when members of the targeted groups shun him or her instead of arguing the points as if they were a matter of abstract intellectual interest.

No, wait, that's probably not LW-specific enough.

Calculating Bayes rule for everything can be quite weird for a lot of people. I remember a case where someone found it weird that another person asked on LW how to do a Bayesian calculation for the likelihood that a specific girl likes him.

Calculating probabilities for many everyday issues is hugely weird for many people. You might even have to take care to make it sound believable even if you do describe a real world character.

I remember an anecdote of a person doing an utility calculation that suggest having sex without a condom and being exposed to the chance of getting AIDS is quite okay.

Another of those things that CFAR preaches that can be seen as pretty weird is purposeful comfort zone extension. It's the kind of topic where you also have to worry about believability if you just tell real world stories.

Someone who applies useful effective behaviors towards the achievement of a ridiculous or reprehensible end goal.

people outside the memeplex see those inside it as weirdos.

When judging how weird a community is, people often approximate a kind of "weirdness Pagerank" by looking at people the community holds in high esteem. I think Yudkowsky can come across as weird and offputting to some folks (not in person, but online. This is a bit of a tangent, but I think it is very interesting to think about the systematic ways our online and offline personas differ and why they do so). If people perceive that, their alarms immediately go off and they conclude folks are brainwashed since they are not seeing the weirdness themselves.

Put another way, I've been trying to think of the various ways that people outside the memeplex see those inside it as weirdos.

The lurker, who may not be gaining as much utility as they would if they participated. However, they still receive the same (or a degree of) connotations from those outside the memeplex, due to their association with the group. These percepts from the outside may be either good or bad.

Do you feel lonely because you spent your time alone or because you will you don't connect with the people with whom you spend your time?

Two separate problems.

In my experience, "dealing with the negative feelings" is useless, because if you deal with them today and you're still lonely tomorrow, the feelings will just come back. It's better to find people who are interested in the same things as you, and hang out with them.

Joining clubs is good - especially if you're willing to put in enough work for it to be implicitly joining a social scene (unfortuanately, this bit has plenty of caveats, but trial and error sometimes works fine). Do you make music? There are scenes for that. Dance, ditto. Playing card games, ditto.

LW is almost big enough to work for this, actually - certainly if one lives in a big city.

Sometimes negative emotions are just bad weather -- you have to get stuff done anyways. I also agree with and second sensible advice below on dealing with causes.

What strategies have you found for either dealing with the negative feelings, or addressing the cause of loneliness, and have they worked?

On one side, a feeling of loneliness is a signal that in my life I should socialize and connect more.
Other times though, decisions and actions taken under that emotion turned up to be pretty bad: it would have been better to just be and feel alone.
I have thus filled up my week but have left slots of time to be alone, and I know that any feeling of loneliness that I get is just a withdrawal symptom.
I've filled my social life with dancing classes, founding a local go club, joined a teaching class and time to go out with my generic friends. On the other side, when I still feel alone I just take some minutes to sit quietly and imagine being in a pleasant social or sexual situation, trying to focusing on every detail. This is usually more than enough to clean me from any negative state of mind.

Robert Cialdini did something a bit like this in researching his book "Influence", and so far as I can tell pretty much everyone agrees it's a good thing he wrote it.

I suspect attitudes to your doing this would depend on what your publication looked like. You could write

• a book called "Secrets of Successful Second-hand Sales", aimed at used car salespeople, advising them on how to manipulate their customers;
• a book called "Secrets of the Sinister Second-hand Sellers", aimed at used car buyers, advising them on what sort of things they should expect to be done to them and how to see through the bullshit and resist the manipulation;
• a book called "A Scientific Study of Second-hand Sales Strategies", aimed at psychologists and other interested parties, presenting the information neutrally for whatever use anyone wants to make.

(As an unusually moral person you probably wouldn't actually want to write the first of those books. But some others in a similar situation might.)

My gut reaction to the first would be "ewww", to the second would be "oh, someone trying to drum up sales by attention-grabbing hype",and to the third would be "hey, that's interesting". Other people's guts may well differ from mine. Cialdini's book is mostly the third, with a little touch of the second.

I think it depends very much on the case.

There are things in the social skill space that I discovered via experimentation that I don't openly share.

Sales man aren't the only people who care about getting people to make decisions. In medicine compliance is pretty important and choice engineering as a field isn't completely evil.

Understanding our decision making can also give us insight into issues like akrasia.

Side point: I've found material like his, "concepts we talk about here, but under different names", extremely useful when I want to explain the idea of rationality to someone without having to work around the lesswrong lingo and trying to have a conversion while tabooing all the lesswrong phases and cached thoughts.

why we don't have many extremely successful people as members of the community.

I'm not sure if the community has been around long enough for this to be a useful kind of a measurement. Success doesn't happen in an instant and there's a lot of turnover. People who are already successful don't have much pressure to join in.

Fully agree that he uses concepts used with less wrong, under different names. And I've seen him referenced frequently on less wrong as somewhere to look for rational financial / career advice.

I follow his free material, it has provided me with inspiration/direction/confidence to aggressively pursue increased compensation, successfully. I've been tempted to purchase his material before, but am always discouraged last second by the smell of snake oil.

These days, most of my time on Anki is on Japanese (which I'm learning for fun) and Chinese (which I already know, but I'm brushing up on tones and characters).

Looking through my decks, I also have decks on:

• Algorithms and data structures (from a couple books I read on that)
• Communication (misc. tips on storytelling, giving talks, etc.)
• Game Design (insights and concepts that seemed valuable)
• German
• Git and Unix Command Line commands
• Haskell
• Insight (misc. stuff that seemed interesting/important)
• Mnemonics
• Productivity (notes from Lukeprog's posts and vairous other sources)
• Psychology and neuroscience
• Rationality Habits (one of the few decks I have that come all made, from Anna Salmon I think, though I also added some stuff and delted others)
• Statistics
• Web Technologies (some stuff on Angular JS and CSS that I got tired of looking up all the time)

(also a few minor decks with very few cards)

I review those pretty much every day (I sometimes leave a few unfinished, depending on how much idle time I have in queues, transport, etc.)

Geography: "what direction [relative to central london] is this tube stop in?", English counties (locations), U.S. states (locations, capitals), Canadian territories and provinces (locations and capitals), countries (locations, capitals, and at some point I'll add flags). (Most of these came from ankiweb originally, but I had to add reverse cards.)

Bayes: conversions between odds, probabilities and decibels (specific numbers and more recently the general formulas)

Miscellaneous: the NATO phonetic alphabet, logs (base 2 of 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, and base 10 of 2 through 9), some words I can never remember how to spell (this turns out not to help), some computer stuff (the order of the arguments in python's datetime.strptime, and the difference between a left join and a right join), some definitions in machine learning, some historical dates (e.g. wars, first moon landing, introduction of the model T), some historical inflation rates, some astronomical facts.

Also a deck based on the twelve virtues of rationality essay. (This one and most of the bayes one I found through LW.)

I'm not sure most of this is useful, but most of it hasn't cost me significant effort either.

For instance, since humans are not telepathic we don't have access to the thoughts or mood of another person. The only way we can discover them is by being told about them — or, theoretically, brain-scans

I think various people are better at mood detection via reading body language than brain-scans. Both brain scans and reading body language are cases where you have partial information and use that to do pattern matching. I have multiple experiences where I meet people who can perceive my own mood better than I can myself.

There are many times where I get a better idea about someone mood by hugging that person then by asking them verbally and them telling me about how they feel.

I doubt this generalizes very well.

There have clearly been cases in the history of the world where one party made it clear that they really did intend to hurt or kill their perceived opponents. And then, after acceding to power, went on to do just that.

I've seen remarks here on LW from at least one person in a central European country that he or she felt increasingly personally unsafe due to particular political factions in that country producing increasingly violent rhetoric. I would not tell that person that he or she would be wrong to shun people who advocated political violence against him or her.

Here in the U.S., it sure seems that political eliminationist rhetoric (of the "All the Other Party should be killed as traitors" sort) is produced largely as a form of commercial entertainment, not serious political advocacy. But I say that from a position of relative security and privilege ....

David Brooks is more or less correct about the US where the two mainstream parties are not very distinguishable. He is entirely wrong about many other places of the world. There are enough countries where someone's political views are "a marker for basic decency".

P.S. I am amused by a piece of incidental research he cites:

For example, political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood gave 1,000 people student résumés and asked them which students should get scholarships. The résumés had some racial cues (membership in African-American Students Association) and some political cues (member of Young Republicans). Race influenced decisions. Blacks favored black students 73 percent to 27 percent, and whites favored black students slightly.

That is called blatant racism and in case of s/black/white/ would be cause for much hand-wringing, soul-searching, and probably obligatory "diversity training" for everyone.

My thoughts on the following are rather disorganized and I've been meaning to collate them into a post for quite some time but here goes:

Discussions of morality and ethics in the LW-sphere overwhelmingly tend to short-circuit to naive harm-based consequentialist morality. When pressed I think most will state a far-mode meta-ethical version that acknowledges other facets of human morality (disgust, purity, fairness etc) that would get wrapped up into a standardized utilon currency (I believe CEV is meant to do this?) but when it comes to actual policy (EA) there is too much focus on optimizing what we can measure (lives saved in africa) instead of what would actually satisfy people. The drunken moral philosopher looking under the lamppost for his keys because that's where the light is. I also think there's a more-or-less unstated assumption that considerations other than Harm are low-status.

It is extremely important to find out how to have a successful community without sociopaths.

(In far mode, most people would probably agree with this. But when the first sociopath comes, most people would be like "oh, we can't send this person away just because of X; they also have so many good traits" or "I don't agree with everything they do, but right now we are in a confict with the enemy tribe, and this person can help us win; they may be an asshole, but they are our asshole". I believe that avoiding these - any maybe many other - failure modes is critical if we ever want to have a Friendly society.)

I think this could be better put as "what do you believe, that most others don't?" - being wrong is, from the inside, indistinguishable from being right, and a rationalist should know this. I think there have actually been several threads about beliefs that most of LW would disagree with.

• Arguing on the internet is much like a drug, and bad for you
• Progress is real
• Some people are worth more than others
  • You can correlate this with membership in most groups you care to name
• Solipsism is true

I've signed up for cryonics, invest in stocks through index funds, and recognize that the Fermi paradox means mankind is probably doomed.

Inequality is a good thing, to a point.

I believe in a world where it is possible to get rich, and not necessarily through hard work or being a better person. One person owning the world with the rest of us would be bad. Everybody having identical shares of everything would be bad (even ignoring practicalities). I don't know exactly where the optimal level is, but is it closer to the first situation than the second, even if assigned by lottery.

I'm treating this as basically another contrarian views thread without the voting rules. And full disclosure I'm too biased for anybody to take my word for it, but I'd enjoy reading counterarguments.

General :

• There are absolutely vital lies that everyone can and should believe, even knowing that they aren't true or can not be true.

• /Everyone/ today has their own personal army, including the parts of the army no one really likes, such as the iffy command structure and the sociopath that we're desperately trying to Section Eight.

• Systems that aim to optimize a goal /almost always/ instead optimize the pretense of the goal, followed by reproduction pressures, followed by the actual goal itself.

Political :

• Network Neutrality desires a good thing, but the underlying rule structure necessary to implement it makes the task either fundamentally impossible or practically undesirable.

• Privacy policies focused on preventing collection of identifiable data are ultimately doomed.

LessWrong-specific:

• "Karma" is a terrible system for any site that lacks extreme monofocus. A point of Karma means the same thing on a top level post that breaks into new levels of philosophy, or a sufficiently entertaining pun. It might be the least bad system available, but in a community nearly defined by tech and data-analysis it's disappointing.

• The risks and costs of "Raising the sanity waterline" are heavily underinvestigated. We recognize that there is an individual valley of bad rationality, but haven't really looked at what this would mean on a national scale. "Nuclear Winter" as argued by Sagan was a very, very overt Pascal's Wager: this Very High Value event can be avoided, so much must avoid it at any cost. It /also/ certainly gave valuable political cover to anti-nuclear war folk, may have affected or effected Russian and US and Cuban nuclear policy, and could (although not necessarily would) be supported from a utilitarian perspective... several hundred pages of reading later.

• "Rationality" is an overloaded word in the exact sort of ways that make it a terrible thing to turn into an identity. When you're competing with RationalWiki, the universe is trying to give you a Hint.

• The type of Atheism that is certain it will win, won't. There's a fascinating post describing how religion was driven from its controlling aspects in History, in Science, in Government, in Cleanliness ... and then goes on to describe how religion /will/ be driven from such a place on matters of ethics. Do not question why, no matter your surprise, that religion remains on a pedestal for Ethics, no matter how much it's poked and prodded by the blasphemy of actual practice. Lest you find the answer.

• ((I'm /also/ not convinced that Atheism is a good hill for improved rationality to spend its capital on, anymore than veganism is a good hill for improved ethics to spend its capital on. This may be opinion rather than right/wrong.))

MIRI-specific:

• MIRI dramatically weakens its arguments by focusing on special-case scenarios because those special-case situations are personally appealing to a few of its sponsors. Recursively self-improving Singularity-style AI is very dangerous... and it's several orders of complexity more difficult to describe that danger, where even minimally self-improving AI still have potential to be an existential risk and requires many fewer leaps to discuss and leads to similar concerns anyway.

• MIRI's difficulty providing a coherent argument to predisposed insiders for its value is more worrying than its difficulty working with outsiders or even its actual value. Note: that's a value of "difficulty working with outsiders" that assumes over six-to-nine months to get the Sequences eBook proofread and into a norm-palatable format. ((And, yes, I realize that I could and should help with this problem instead of just complaining about it.))

Diet and exercise generally do not cause substantial long term weight loss. Failure rates are high, and successful cases keep off about 7% of they original body weight after 5 years. I strongly suspect that this effect does not scale, you won't lose another 7% after another 5 years.

It might be instrumentally useful though for people to believe that they can lose weight via diet and exercise, since a healthy diet and exercise are good for other reasons.

It would be a lot harder to make a machine that actually is conscious (phenomenally conscious, meaning it has qualia) than it would be to make one that just acts as if is conscious (in that sense). It is my impression that most LW commenters think any future machine that acts conscious probably is conscious.

Where are you right, while most others are wrong? Including people on LW!

A friend I was chatting to dropped a potential example in my lap yesterday. Intuitively, they don't find the idea of humanity being eliminated and replaced by AI necessarily horrifying or even bad. As far as they're concerned, it'd be good for intelligent life to persist in the universe, but why ought it be human, or even human-emulating?

(I don't agree with that position normatively but it seems impregnable intellectually.)

Residing in the US and taking part in US society (eg by pursuing a career) is deeply problematic from an ethical point of view. Altruists should seriously consider either migrating or scaling back their career ambitions significantly.

The importance of somatics is currently likely the most significant.

What do you mean with "lives saved by donating blood" in the first place?

Quantity people who would die without any blood donations

Liters of blood donated

That's not a pretty useful number if you want to make personal decisions based on it. If our Western system would need more blood, raising the incentives for donations isn't that hard.

I keep finding the statistic that "one pint of donated blood can save up to 3 lives!"

The expression "can save up to" should immediately trigger your bullshit detector. It's a reliable signal that the following number is meaningless.

Doodle poll, select "free text" might work.

http://support.doodle.com/customer/portal/articles/645362-how-to-create-a-poll-

I highly doubt the subjects were drunk enough to have trouble figuring out that 5 > 1. So one could equally offer an interpretation that e.g. drunk people answered honestly, while sober people wanted to signal that they were too caring to kill someone under any circumstances.

It's a fascinating result, but I don't think the interpretation is a slam dunk.

I've been wondering whether utilitarianism undervalues people's loyalty to their own relationships and social networks.

In two field studies with a combined sample of 103 men and women recruited at two bars in Grenoble, France

Field studies are hard work :-D

Just test it and report back the result :) That will teach you and us many things we can't see right now.

Instead of a psychiatrist maybe a psychologist might be the better option?

Have you considered the idea of learning echolocation? Here is the beginning of a series of blog posts from blind programmer Austin Seraphim about how he learned to use echolocation to navigate the environment and get a spatial sense of things without touching them. He learned it from a teacher from World Access for the Blind.

It came to mind because you mentioned a National Federation of the Blind training center, and I'm not sure what you would learn there, but I'm pretty sure they don't offer echolocation training.

Politician, noun: a person who cheers in-group values professionally.

My friend recently attended an event at which Ray Kurzweil and an urban planner named Richard Florida were speaking. He didn't like Richard Florida as a speaker, citing how Richard Florida 'sounded just like a politician', and was speaking 'only in applause lights'. I noted it was funny to use 'applause light' in that context, as an auditorium where the speaker looks over a crowd while bathed in light, saying things specifically to garner applause, is just about the most literal interpretation of 'applause light' I could think of.

Relevant wikipedia link. The keyword is something like "many-body wavefunction."

But seriously, if you're curious, try to find a textbook online, or a series of video lectures for an introductory course (you might either watch the whole course, or skip to what you want to learn and then try and figure out what the prerequisites are, then do the same thing for the prerequisites).

I think the factorization is a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_annihilation_operators from quantum field theory. I haven't learned quantum field theory though, so I can't comment much. From what I can gather, multiplying something by the creation operator gets you the same state but with an extra particle.

I can tell you that at the very minimum, assuming Copenhagen and the minimal amount of physics to allow entanglement to happen at all, whenever two of the same kind of particle are entangled, they have a 50% chance of swapping. If you use MWI, it's that I can find a universe with the same probability density in which those particles are swapped.

Probably Siri-- in the way that Eugene Goostman was a slightly worse chatbot.

The manufacturer's website is only merely illustrative.