After reading the third paragraph, I had already decided to post the following similar story:

It snowed a few weeks ago and my car was stuck in the driveway. Parts of the wheels had gotten ice/snow kind of frozen/compacted around them. I was breaking up the ice with one of those things you use to break up ice, but a lot of it was too hard and a lot of it was underneath the car and I couldn't get to it. I was pretty close to being late to work. So I thought "I need to make some kind of desperate rationalist effort here, what would HPJEV do?". And I sat and thought about it for five minutes, and I got a big tub, filled it with hot water, and poured it around the wheels. This melted/softened enough of the compacted ice that I was able to break up the rest and make it to work on time.

Then I read your fourth paragraph and saw your story was also about hot water.

I don't know if there's some kind of moral to this episode, like that the most rational solution to a problem always involves hot water, but I guess I'll raise it a little higher on my list of things to think about in various situations.

When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

By the way, this is stupid even from the "we only care about the 'good' people (women, black, trans, etc.)" viewpoint, because the consequences sometimes look like this:

1) Someone suggests there could be biological differences between men and women. Angry screams, research abandoned.

2) Medical research done on volunteers (the expendable males) finds a new cure.

3) It appears that the cure works better for men, and may be even harmful for women (because it was never tested on women separately, and no one even dared to suggest it should be). Angry screams again -- unfortunately no reflection of what actually happened; instead the usual scapegoat blamed again.

More meta lessons for the LW audience: The world is entangled, you can't conveniently split it into separate magisteria. If you decide to remove a part of reality from your model, you don't know how much it will cost you: because to properly estimate the cost of X you need to have X in your model.

I think "from the Harvard Crimson" is a misleading description.

One of their undergraduate columnists had a very silly column. Undergraduates do that sometimes. Speaking as a former student newspaper columnist, often these columns are a low priority for the authors, and they're thrown together in a hurry the night before they're due. The column might not even represent what the author would think upon reflection, let alone what the editorial board of the Crimson as a whole believes. So I wouldn't read too much into this.

(For non-US readers: The Harvard Crimson is the student-produced newspaper of Harvard University. The editors and writers are generally undergraduates and they don't reflect any sort of institutional viewpoint.)

announced explicitly as a good and noble goal, by the upcoming generation

Undergrad publications print the craziest shit imaginable and sometimes even mean it. I wouldn't expect them to "think" the same way a few years after graduation, though.

I'm not even sure if the article is serious or just a linkbait.

Going more meta: I think the students should have the right to fire professors whose political opinions they dislike. The customer is always right.

The problem is separating the "customer" aspects of the situation from the "non-customer" aspects, so the customer does not exercise more rights than they should have as a customer. For example in teaching, the student is a customer; in research they are not. Therefore students should have a right to prevent professors from teaching; not necessary university-wide, because other students may have different preferences; they should just have a right to avoid their lessons. But students shouldn't have a right to prevent professors from doing research. As a logical consequence, teaching and research should be separated. Because it seems that having the same person doing both research and teaching is a good idea for various reasons, I would just make both parts optional (and if the professor does less of one part, they have to do more of the other part).

The idea is: students saying "I don't want to hear this" shouldn't affect research. Although the students should have a right not to hear what they don't want to hear. And the university should have a right to choose how much of this "not hearing" is acceptable with getting a diploma there; again, each university should be freee to chose differently.

I am disturbed to see it announced explicitly as a good and noble goal, by the upcoming generation is concerning.

On the other hand, the most-upvoted comments on the article are encouraging. :)

Ironically enough, it's somewhat surprising that The Crimson didn't censor this article, as it was bound to attract negative press.

I'm hoping the fact that this is just an opinion piece, and that the article is currently in circulation on the internet as an example of what's wrong with academia, and that all the comments are opposed to it, is a sign that this is just the internet bringing the worst things to my attention, and that such thinking will never actually be reflected in any formal policy...if not, I've got some updating to do.

The problem is it's so complex that I don't see anyone implementing it anytime soon.

It seems to be a straightforward way to implement a new altcoin.

If someone pays 200,000$ for two man years of programmer time to implement this and then makes 10 million$ with the altcoin that seems to me like a valid business model.

Wouldn't evil people farm consensus karma via specifically constructed bets?

Though prediction markets have their potential problems, this could be the first in a long series of ever better decentralised prediction markets. I wonder what the legalities will be, similar to how Intrade got into trouble with the US government over regulations regarding commodity derivatives.

Many people I know report having much lower-quality experiences on Facebook than mine. The algorithm for improving the quality of the Facebook experience is fairly straightforward: if someone posts content you don't want to see, hide them. If someone makes comments on your statuses you don't want, unfriend them. Repeat. At some point you may need to find new friends, or at least follows.

Consider the following story:

I was feeling a little blue. I looked at the psychiatric literature, and they were saying all this weird stuff about neurotrophic factors and cognitive-behavioral therapy. But then that night I had dinner with some friends, went to the gym for an hour, and sure enough I felt a lot better afterwards!

I would have at least three qualms with such an attitude:

First, there are different kinds of low mood. Some differences are obvious; some people are less depressed than others, or depressed for much shorter time periods. But it could also be that there are no visible differences between two people, but that for hidden reasons one person's depression will respond to some quick exercise and social activity, and another person's won't.

Second, even interventions that are known to always work can be hard to task-ify. Exercise is indeed often a very effective treatment for depression, but when you tell a depressed person "just go and exercise", they usually won't do that because they're too depressed. Having a good social support network can be helpful in depression, but depressed people can be unable to make friends because deep down they assume everyone hates them. Part of treating depression is bringing people to the point where they're able to do the simple interventions. If you get a depressed person who does have the motivation to exercise and make friends, great, but it's not a point against psychiatry that they sometimes discuss how to help people who don't.

A third problem is general anti-scientificness. Yeah, sure, you don't need to understand exactly how neurogenesis occurs in order to treat depression. But it's neat to know. And in fact exercise may treat depression by increasing neurotrophic factors, so you're not disagreeing with the scientists, just looking at it from a different angle. And for certain people it might be, in a weird way, sort of inspirational to know the science and help them figure out why they're doing what they're doing. If they want to study it, why complain?

I think most of the same issues generalize to your comment.

I would also add one more, which is that it is generally much easier to lose weight on a diet than to keep the weight off for more than a year or two. For example, of people who lost (hey, look at that!) thirty pounds on a diet, one year later they had on average gained back fifteen of them. Longer followups usually find even more of the weight regained; see for example Mann 2007. So you're declaring something simple before you've even started the hard part.

For what it's worth, weight loss and related topics are one of the things that I might describe as unconventionally political: not aligned with any of the standard Blue-Green axes, but nonetheless identity-entangled enough that getting useful information out of them is unusually difficult. (Also in this category: relationship advice, file sharing, hardcore vs. casual within gaming, romantic status of fictional characters, ponies.)

"How could I rationally believe LW knows what they are talking about in regard to the Singularity, UFAI, etc. if they seem to spin their wheels so badly on a discussion about something as simple as weight loss?"

Dieting is one of many topics discussed on this forum where the level of discourse is hardly above dilettante. Applied rationality and AGI friendliness research is done by several people full-time, which brings the discussion quality up in these areas, mostly. So it would not be fair to judge those by the averages. Everything else is probably subreddit-level, only more polite and on-topic.

[...]something as simple as weight loss?"

Weight loss isn't as simple as you think.

Sure it's all about burning more than you eat, but for a lot of people "just eat less and exercise more!" isn't advice they can follow. You seem to have "lucked out" on that front.

The far more interesting and useful question is "what factors determine how easy it is to eat less and exercise more?". This is where it gets nontrivial. You can't even narrow it down to one field of study. I've known people to have success from just changing their diet (not all in the same way) as well as others who have had success from psychological shifts - and one from surgery.

I don't consider LW to be the experts on how to lose weight either, but that doesn't signal incompetence to me. Finding the flaws in the current set of visible "solutions" is much easier than finding your own better solution or even grasping the underlying mechanisms that explain the value and limitations of different approaches. So if you have a group of people who are good at spotting sloppy thinking who spend a few minutes of their day analyzing things for fun, of course you're going to see a very critical literature review rather than a unanimously supported "winner". Even if there were such a thing in the territory waiting to be found (I suspect there isn't), then you wouldn't expect anyone on LW to find it unless they were motivated to really study it.

Have you ever lost confidence in LW after a similar experience? Maybe something where it seemed to you people were "talking a big game" but failing to apply any of that to actually win in real life?

As a stats / machine learning person, a lot of the "Bayesian statistics" talk around here is pretty cringe-inducing. My impresion is that physicists probably feel similarly about "many-worlds" discussions. I think LessWrong unfortunately causes people to believe that being a dilettante is enough to merit a confident opinion on a subject.

There seemed to be all sorts of discussion about everything other than the simple math behind weight loss.

Well it seems there's a lot more to weight loss than simple math. I should add that from an outside perspective, there is a pretty good chance you will re-gain the weight you lost.

Anyway, I agree with you that the discourse about obesity/weight loss/etc. is not much better here than in other places. I think part of the problem is that low-carb dieting is almost like a religious issue for some people. I suspect another part of the problem is that self-deception seems to play a role in obesity/overweight. Last, there are a large number of poor thinkers who post here (as in most places); arguably a subject like weight loss which is very easy to have an opinion on is a magnet for them.

Have you ever lost confidence in LW after a similar experience?

Somewhat, yes. I wrote a blog post called "Is Lesswrong More Wrong" a while back.

Since your injury was in the neck (generally highly enervated tissue) and it was serious enough to forbid weightlifting, I assume it was quite painful. What painkillers did you take?

This is relevant because many painkillers (including Tramadol, a standard medication for herniated disks) greatly reduce appetite, and the after-effects can linger for weeks after you stop taking them.

The fact that you managed to lose weight in a way where you wish it weren't the case, doesn't mean much for the people who are intentionally trying to lower their weight.

I would also add that information about direct weight numbers doesn't tell the whole story. What was your BMI before and after?

I'm not sure if I'm reading your footnote correctly -- are you saying you lost 15 of the 30 pounds while eating poorly and lying around? Was it lost muscle from not weightlifting?

I really need to finish my post on practical body recomposition. The quality of information about this topic is very low on this website, and I feel like I could positively contribute.

I lost around 40 pounds using low carb methods. Should this make me less confident in anything you say when you promote other ways to lose weight?

The question then becomes how this trope should properly be averted in rationalist fiction. (Besides the HPMOR approach.)

He eventually finds the true solution, which perfectly explains all the evidence, and usually involves a complicated plot by someone else committing the crime in such a way to get an airtight alibi, or to frame the first suspect, or both.

Reality doesn't work that way. In reality most solutions don't explain every clues that you find. A lot of clues are just random noise.

They almost always end with the actual murderer being accused and then immediately getting angry and confessing thereby giving them the only actual hard evidence that could ever be used in a conviction. It's convenient that way. (See, for an extreme example, one of the episodes of the recent season 3 of Sherlock.)

Of course these stories also make crime look more difficult than it is, so they serve a useful purpose that probably outweighs the misrepresentation of real detective work.

I use an e-cigarette sometimes while working. I do not smoke. I feel like it does give a small lift at first, though re-dosing effects seem less pronounced than the first of the day. If I puff on it for too long, I feel like it actually gives a slight depressant effect. Overall, its pleasant and tastes good. I think most of the benefit comes from the fact that you're just a little bit "high" while working which makes it more enjoyable. They are definitely addicting.

About a year ago, after reading the same Gwern piece, I bought a pack of 20 Nicorette 4mg nicotine mints. It was my intention to use them to try and hack my internal reward system to find a certain activity (solo jazz dance classes) intrinsically enjoyable. I've now achieved this, but I can't attest to the role of nicotine in the process, and in all likelihood I probably just learned to like solo jazz classes. I've occasionally used them as a generic stimulant. Here are some observations and comments that may be of use to you:

• Of the original pack of 20, I still have about half a dozen left after nearly a year. A regular packet of Mentos wouldn't last a week.

• They taste kind of foul. Not horrible, but if I weren't sucking one with an objective in mind, I'd probably spit it out.

• I, personally, have a very poor ability to scrutinise my internal states. If I'm drunk, I don't feel drunk, but instead have to infer my state through my behaviour. 4mg of nicotine for a non-smoker is apparently quite a heavy dose, but I don't feel a "buzz" or any other subjective "come-on" experience.

• I'm reasonably sure nicotine gives me a short-term boost to focus/attention (observed in dance classes and study sessions), but I can't rule out a placebo effect.

I've used 1-2mg of nicotine (via gum) a few of times a month for a couple years. I previously used it a few times a week for a few months before getting a methylphenidate prescription for ADD. There hasn't been any noticeable dependency, but I haven't had that with other drugs either.

Using it, I feel more focused and more confident, in contrast to caffeine which tends to just leaves me jittery and methyphenidate which is better for focus but doesn't have the slight positive emotion boost. Delivered via gum, the half-life is short (an hour at most). That's not great for a day-to-day stimulant, but it's useful when I need something at 6pm and methylphenidate would interfere with my sleep. The primary downside is occasional nausea. Now I'm wondering if patches would be longer-lasting and less nausea-inducing.

If you look at the relevant meta-analyses, the effect size estimates are quite modest, so much that most of nicotine's cognitive benefits won't be detectable by introspection. Given the lack of readily observable benefits and given the foul taste of the gum/lozenges, it can be challenging to maintain the habit. All this is in accord with my experience. I would expect that e-cigarettes are superior in this respect.

In my experience, the beneficial effects of nicotine are weak and short-lived. They appeared not to stack with caffeine and I prefer coffee to gum. I didn't experience any dependency effects, but neither have I from other drugs, so that may not be a reliable indicator. My friends look at me strange when I talk about nootropics, so none to compare with

I have never smoked, but I use nicotine gum occasionally. It feels like it gives me a slight "edge" when I need to concentrate better, and I definitely feel more of an effect than with typical caffeine doses (which I don't consume regularly either). I tend to chew the gums longer than regular chewing gums, but I feel no particular desire for them when, and actually tend to forget I have them.

I found that post pretty confusing. It turns out that it's about control of databases, and i think copyright is a red herring. He wants to run his program over all published papers and find problems with them. He needs permission of the publisher to do this. He claims that his interpretation of the boiler-plate license doesn't allow that. I think he's mistaken and that in any event he could get permission if he asked. What he really wants to do (from other posts on the blog), that he definitely couldn't get permission for, is to synthesize the literature into a database of chemicals; which the publishers won't allow because they do that by hand.

Also, the title (which you didn't quote) is nonsense. There is no legal obstacle to the editor or referee using computers on new papers, which is the usual meaning of "referee." The problem there is getting the editor to try something new and to put in the necessary effort. Maybe it's easier for this guy to run his software on all papers ever written than to convince lots of editors to run it ahead of time, but difficulty is not a legal difficulty. Everyone would love it if these mistakes were caught in the refereeing process, rather than after the fact.

Couldn't he just publish the lists of errors anonymously?

When you want someone to do something for you, do you prefer to ask them directly or do you prefer to mention something related and expect that they infer what you want?

You're gonna lose at least 20% of the OKC population and a much larger chunk of the general population with the complexity of your sentence structure and the use of words like "infer".

When you want something do you

[pollid:614]

And there's another problem - the real answer will usually be "it depends on the situation". So an even better question would be

How often do you drop hints about what you want, instead of asking directly?

[pollid:615]

(Even now, my real answer is "it depends on what system I think the person I am talking to uses". I'm not sure ask/tell is actually a property attributable to individual people...it's more a mode of group interaction)

Possibly insurmountable problem is that loads of people want to think that they are Tell or at least Ask but in practice they are actually Guess and you have no way of filtering for this. In my experience people are extremely bad at knowing "how they are" relative to other people.

I would use "Do you prefer to explain everything you want to your partner explicitly, or do you prefer that they infer some of your desires from your implicit suggestions?" as well as "Is it OK to turn down an explicit request by your partner if you're capable of fulfilling it but you don't want to?"

I might also use the reversed versions: "Do you prefer to have everything explained to you explicitly, or do you prefer some things be left for you to infer from context?" and "Is it OK for your partner to turn down your explicit request if they're capable of fulfilling it but don't want to?"

I think you are making assumptions that might be hard justify:

-people have the self-knowledge to answer this question effectively -people are not gaming the answer to seem appealing -people can accurately identify their preferences about what type of communication style works for them

Don't mean to sound like a downer--I'm glad some people take this seriously. I think trying to produce questions like these is a good idea, I'm trying to point out some potential flaws to help.

I think what happens to be guessing depends a lot on the understanding that you have between two people.

I don't really think in terms of acting in a way that get's another person to take a specific action. I focus more on giving the person all relevant information and expect the other person to take the action that maximizes utility.

If I ask Alice to dance Salsa and she needs a break I don't want Alice to come dancing with me. I want Alice to act according to her feelings and take the break. I can ask Carol who might actually want to dance at that moment and ask Alice later. I can also spent some time meditating if there no woman who wants to dance at a particular moment around. I'm not attached to a particular action of another person.

On the other hand if the person doesn't engage in an action that maximizes utility to make a point of signaling status or to punish that can annoy me.

Depending on how well I know the position of the other person and how well I know what's right for myself I might just say what I feel or I might be very explicit about a possible solution.

Shyness can also hold me back from sharing certain information. It can be hard to articulate deep feelings in an environment where that's not normal behavior. I'm still quite bad at talking about feelings in a Salsa environment where I might ask a woman to dance very directly but rely a lot on nonverbal signs to regulate the level of intimacy of a dance. Openly saying something to an attractive woman like: "It feels a bit strange when you dance closely with me because you are tense and don't relax the way I would expect you to if you enjoy dancing close." is very hard.

If you hear me talk with my meditation teacher you probably would not understand what's said because the conversation heavily relies on implicit assumptions. On the other hand I have a hard time calling it guess culture because we both understand each other perfectly well.

The whole idea of guessing assumes that there's doubt whether the other person understands the point you want to make.

I think part of having a good intimate relationship with another person is that you have a good idea of what the other person wants without them saying so explicitly. On the other hand having a good intimate relationship also means that you can explicitly communicate your desires in cases where the other person doesn't pick them up on their own.

I think both of the question you mention tell you something about the other person. The goal of a good question isn't to be without bias but to provide a clear signal. Someone who says that they prefer to mention something related and expect the other person to infer what they want is a clear guess culture person in every sense of the word.

Ask this: "Name some things your partner can do to make you feel appreciated." If the person answers the question at all and does so in a useful way, that should tell you something about their communication style.

I mean this literally, I am actually physically frightened.

Why are you physically frightened of a random Internet blowhard?

The clearest statement of Chu view (from the comment thread) seems to be: "As a very tentative general heuristic ... major ideologies that attempt to validate some form of the just-world fallacy should be terminated with extreme prejudice." He correctly names sexism ("Men have all the power because they're just better!") and racism ("Europeans have all the power because they're just better!") as examples.

But the obvious problem is, if you buy the neo-reactionary model of how "the Cathedral" works, then social-justice progressivism is a clear-cut example of a massive just-world-fallacy in action! What's more, I'd hardly expect Moldbug or other neo-reactionaries to take the view that "the world is inherently fair" seriously, even as hidden, low-level implication. And whether Moldbug's worldview is right about the Cathedral is an empirical question that would seem to require serious, rational investigation, not just faith-based political commitment.

I suppose this does mean that no-one should believe any claims he makes before checking them first.

Frankly, he has my sympathies, and I say this speaking as one who is now officially and technically a fucking scientific racist, and is hating every minute of it. The increase in knowledge doesn't even seem worth the sacrifice; we're talking about differences in average IQ between 95, 105, 110, 115. For one such as I, who's got an IQ of 168, this degree of difference seems unimpressive, and, frankly, worth ignoring/not worth knowing.

"You're telling me all these massive groups of people have these slight differences in average between them? About one standard deviation? Of what use could this information possibly be?" "Let's forbid entrance to my particular country to immigrants from the inferior races, namely, people of 'african' and 'hispanic' ancestry; it's cheaper than giving everyone an IQ test. Is this not a clever idea that advances my nation's interest and saves taxpayer money?"

And then I sigh at the stupidity of people with high IQ's, myself included.

Nevertheless, pianoforte, you're definitely overreacting. Do give your friend Arthur some references on Ethical Injunctions and remind him of our Litanies. Even if you did nothing, I do not expect Arthur, or any lesswronger for that matter, to present a level of threat worth having actual cold sweats over.

Here's another argument you can give him; social justice seeks to achieve just ends, and to do so requires just means, an image of justice as well as a just system. To seek social justice is to seek righteousness, and to seek to be right; it demands that you be scrupulously rational. Since You Provably Can't Trust Yourself, you should not, cannot allow yourself to employ the methods of evil, of which irrationality, stupidity and incoherence are the very essence. Throughout my life, I have been in contact with all kinds of people who invested huge amounts of effort in struggling for the betterment of mankind, and, whenever they started thinking in martial terms, of Us Versus Them (see Robbers-Cave experiment), of a struggle where one allows oneself all dirty tricks because so does "the other side", Arguments Are Soldiers, and they lose themselves and their ability to identify the truth when it doesn't fit their narrative. And that's a huge handicap.

Keeping a clear mind and remaining open to the truth, no matter how inconvenient, is, I think, the only way to live through one's life, and remain sane to the very end. Once you forfeit your sanity, no matter your successes, you have lost.

Omohundro has a paper on instrumental goals that many/most intelligences would converge on. For instance, they would strive to model themselves, to expand their capabilities, to represent their goals in terms of utility functions, to protect their utility functions against change, etc. None of these are universally true because we can just posit a pathological intelligence whose terminal goal is to not do these things. (And to some extent e.g. humans do in fact behave pathologically like that.)

We can say very little "optimizers over possible futures" in full generality, because that concept can be very broad if you define "optimizer" sufficiently broadly. Is a thermostat an intelligence, with the goal of achieving some temperature? Or consider a rock - we can see it as a mind with the goal of continuing its existence, and thus decides to be hard.

This is isomorphic to the problem (edit: not impossibility) of coming up with a fully mind-neutral definition of information entropy, is it not?

Can one detect intelligence in retrospect?

Let me explain. Let's take the definition of an intelligent agent as an optimizer over possible futures, steering the world toward the preferred one.

Yes, at least some of the time. Evolution fits your definition and we know about that. So if you want examples of how to deduce the existence of an intelligence without knowing its goals ahead of time, you could look at the history of the discovery of evolution.

Also, Eliezer has has written an essay which answers your question, you may want to look at that.

Let's take the definition of an intelligent agent as an optimizer over possible futures, steering the world toward the preferred one.

That's a very low bar for intelligence, it looks more like a definition of life. Most or all living creatures do this. Some pretty simple software would fit the bill, too.

I found a watch upon the heath.

Anyway, I think there are enough instrumental goals that even without human-like goals we should be able to recognize crafted tools like watches, hammers, and whatnot.

Liked it a lot.

I've noticed that "already" seems to be a very important word in LW-related arguments and posts, i.e. if X were a good idea, people would already be doing it; if Y is a plausible end for the universe, it's probably happened already.

What do you mean by "communicate"? If I send a command, and you observe the result of that command on the game, we've communicated.

If that's allowed, the non-troll case is easy: Wait a random amount of time, then send a command. If yours was the first command to be sent, play the game. If someone else sends a command before you do, do nothing ever again.

I have been checking in on this for the last few days. I do not think they will be able to make it through victory road. This would require them to get through a passage, where they have to go down once, then left 11 times, then up once without pressing down at any point along the way. If they make it through, they will have to solve a large number of boulder puzzles in a cave with lvl 40 wild pokemon, and if they die at any time, they have to go across the passage again.

I did an estimate of how long I think it would take them to accomplish just walking across the passage once, based on how they did on similar passages in the past, and it came out to 50 years.

This estimate was before they changed the system to some weird democracy system, which will likely help them.

Use the stream-of-commands as seen from the chat and the stream to estimate the delay between inputs now and results later. Generate a probable future state, given the current distribution of commands. Evaluate what distribution of commands maximizes positive results, and spam that distribution.

The biggest time sink other than the program logic is creating pathing/scoring rules. I'd start with "how to successfully deposit the first pokemon in your party" - Markov chains is where you want to go.

Weird. Someone showed this to me just on Monday.

I pointed out right away that the non-trolls will want to overlevel their team (if that's a thing, I dunno), to be safe against interference.

Of course, trolls will be very effective at preventing you from getting far in menus (menu cancel spam) so you may be stuck with your starting pokemon or whatever for a long time. And heaven help you if the game requires you to go deep into a menu hierarchy to activate level up bonuses.

If you put a backslash before any closing parentheses in a url, it will work.00005-0)

On the iTunes store 172 people gave it the lowest ranking, many saying it won't get past the name screen.

(Works on the brain, not the eyes.)

I don't think I understand what distinction you're making here.

If you’re running a business, conventional wisdom states that you’re a much more effective business owner if you study business in school, create well thought-out business plans, and analyze your business’s performance diligently. But if someone went to school to learn about how to pick a life partner and take part in a healthy relationship, if they charted out a detailed plan of action to find one, and if they kept their progress organized rigorously in a spreadsheet, society says they’re A) an over-rational robot, B) way too concerned about this, and C) a huge weirdo.

No, when it comes to dating, society frowns upon thinking too much about it, instead opting for things like relying on fate, going with your gut, and hoping for the best. The respectable way to meet a life partner is by dumb luck, by bumping into them randomly or being introduced to them from within your little pool.

As the article mentions later, it's not just the society, it's also biology. Well, in the ancient evolutionary environment "your little pool" is all humans that don't try to kill you at the first sight, so it makes sense to find a mate there; and the pool does not change dramatically, so you can pick right now.

if we want to find a happy marriage, we need to think small—we need to look at marriage up close and see that it’s built not out of anything poetic, but out of 20,000 mundane Wednesdays.

No one wants to spend 50 years fake laughing. A life partner doubles as a career/life therapist, and if you don’t respect the way someone thinks, you’re not going to want to tell them your thoughts on work each day, or on anything else interesting that pops into your head, because you won’t really care that much what they have to say about it. Secrets are poison to a relationship, because they form an invisible wall inside the relationship, leaving both people somewhat alone in the world—and besides, who wants to spend 50 years lying or worrying about hiding something?

This is probably also a greater problem now than in the past, because the increasing inferential distances make communication more difficult.

While expanding your selection pool has obvious benefits, I think there is a good alternative route with regards to your tiny circle of friends and acquaintances.

Suppose you can easily quantify the partner-compatibility of a person, let's say on a 0-10 scale, probably exponential distribution. The best you can find among your friends is a 6. That's unsatisfactory, so you start searching, and after a while you find an 8, which is satisfactory, and you marry them.

However, this model is flawed: The grades can change over time - both the other person and you can change. These changes are more likely to happen earlier in life, such as during teen years or early twenties. Thus the model would have to be expanded to account for the potential compatibility, or even a function how the compatibility changes with time.

If we were to look at this model, that 6 from high school has a much better potential. In a long term relationship, people effect other people, slowly changing them towards themselves. This process works both ways, so you have two entities slowly pulling each other closer. What can easily happen is that in a few years time that it took to find the 8, you have created an 8. Furthermore, since you were also changed in the process, that 8 might no longer be an 8. It could be a 7, or a 9. It could also have a better rate of change, meaning a potential 10.

I would, however, assume the rate of change slows down as people grow older (I haven't any data to confirm this assumption), meaning a change from a self-made 8 to a natural 8 wouldn't yield much benefits.

To expand on the business metaphor: You are running a business, and you need someone to take the position of CTO. You can look for skilled CTOs, but your existing employees have the advantage of already knowing the company and the business process. No doubt, many external applicants, given two years would be better than any of the existing employees, but how many would be better than existing employee with two extra years of experience as CTO? Basically, you need to plot grade(time) for all applicants, see how long will it take for one of the external ones to beat the employee, and decide whether the loss is worth it.

Gosh, that site is addictive.

I'm pretty sure I made up this definition of "precision" because upon Google-ing I can't find any definition of "precision" that matches this.

Reminds me of 'discrimination'. See Yudkowsky. (I'd link to WP, but seems there's no article there on the term.)

Have you read A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation

My guess is the person most likely to defend this criterion is a Popperian of some flavor, since precise explanations (as you define them) can be cleanly falsified.

While it's nice when something is cleanly falsified, it's not clear we should actively strive for precision in our explanations. An explanation that says all observations are equally likely is hard to disprove and hence hard to gather evidence for by conversation of evidence, but that doesn't mean we should give it an extra penalty.

If all explanations have equal prior probability, then Bayesian reasoning will tend to favor the most precise explanations consistent with the evidence. Seeing a black marble is most likely when all the marbles in a collection are black. If you then found a red marble, that would definitely rule out the black collection (assuming they both had to come from the same one). The best candidate would then be one that is half each. Ultimately, this all comes back down to likelihoods though, so I'm not sure the idea of precision adds much.

In my experience, subvocalization doesn't become a barrier until you hit maybe 900-1000 wpm. I still subvocalize, and I read at about 800 wpm with appropriate software and 500 wpm on dead trees, so it's definitely achievable. Over the span of several weeks, I increased my speed from ~250 wpm by spending 30 minutes a day practicing the techniques from Matt Fallshaw's presentation at the Effective Altruism Summit. Unfortunately, my notes are about 3000 miles away, right now.

I just read a lot. No system.

Also, I don't normally read at 600 wpm - that was approaching the limit where I don't need to stop and think about what I'm reading, only stopping to consciously note and identify each individual word. On, say, a LW comment, where I actually need to think at least a little? Hmm. Heh. It came out as 550 wpm, not a big drop. Trying a harder one? 490.

I use Acceleread. Its an app for the iPhone and iPad, and very user friendly with 10 minute lessons divided into 2 minute segments.

Is there a policy for who posts open threads, or how they're posted?

No and yes. And I'm sorry but you did it badly (I'm saying this only because you are asking). So for the future:

1. Open Threads belong in Discussion and not Main.
2. Open Threads should have the 'open_thread' tag.
3. There is generally no point in calling the Open thread '...18-24..' when you have created it on the 19th.

I've posted some open threads. So far as I know, there's no policy, just custom.

The closing date on an open thread is an invitation to start a new thread, not a rule against posting to the old thread.

Add a meetup with Philadelphia in the location field?

I took this class as my first programming course the first time edX offered it. That course has now been split into the first two courses in the X-series mentioned here. It was extremely high quality, had challenging programming assignments with good guidance, and a very helpful auto-grader. I highly recommend it.

Moved to Discussion, added open_thread tag.

The antonym of hot is cold.

The negation of hot is not-hot.

I sometimes use "negation of X" to refer to the logical operator NOT-X.

The other-side-of-a-continuum relationship I don't have a single word for. I might say that the "complement" of green is red, but that's specific to color. I often use "opposite" when I want a generic term here, with the understanding that I'm using it colloquially.

"Complement" is sort of a word for the second one.

Often when people want to emphasize that what they mean is not the complement of the referent, they say "diametrically opposed" or "direct opposite" or "antipode": "the complement of hot [in the set of all temperature perceptions] is not-hot, but the direct opposite of hot is cold".

Not any more than I'm bothered by a million other ambiguous words. (Also, as a mathematician, I'm comforted by the fact that there are many precise notions of "opposite" in mathematics.)

I'd say that opposite means the opposite side of the spectrum, and not means something other then.

The opposite of hot is cold, and not hot is not hot.

For a psychological basis, check out the research on how humans basically represent everything on a single scale (book recommendation: Thinking, Fast and Slow).

In Esperanto, prefix "mal-" means the opposite, "ne-" means the negation.

English equivalents would be "anti-" and "non-".

Slightly off-topic, but the actual complement of red is cyan, and the complement of green is magenta.

There is a lot of noise in voting, so don't overanalyze it. There is a correlation between good comments and upvotes, but unless you get at least -3 on a comment, or perhaps -1 on 5 comments in a row, you should probably just ignore it. Also, upvotes usually mean you did something right, but of course a comment made early in the debate gets more visibility and votes than a comment made late in the debate.

Generally, upvotes and downvotes mean "want more of this" and "want less of this". This is a community about rationality, so you should consider whether the given way of communicating contributes to rationality, or more specifically to building a good rationalist community. Use your own judgement.

Going against the majority opinion... I'd guess it depends on whether the argument brings something new to the discussion. Saying: "you are all wrong because you didn't consider X" (where X is something that makes sense and really wasn't mentioned on LW) will probably be welcome; saying "you are all wrong, because this is against my beliefs / against majority opinion" will not. But here I would expect even more noise than usual.

By the time I get to wreckage of a flame war to catch the juicy details, there isn't much point to myself as an individual actor dishing out further downvotes.

I'm not confident with how to proceed in upvoting posts that already have lots of karma.

I think you should upvote or downvote comments regardless of the karma they already have. If 10 times more people think a comment is awesome (or horrible), it should get 10 times more upvotes (or downvotes). If you worry about someone getting infinitely many downvotes for participating in one stupid flamewar -- they have an option to retract the comments, which stops the voting.

The intuition behind this is approximately that if voting is better than not voting (which based on my experience with web fora I consider obvious) then more voting is better than less voting. Also, some fraction of users will abuse the voting system, so we need more votes from the nice users to balance this. Actually, this is also a reason why the nice users should vote more often.

I'm sometimes worried about my votes being biased in the sense that they go to posts, or comments, which increase the visibility of things I only value personally, rather than being reflective of how much a given post, or comment, increases, or decreases, the quality of the discourse on Less Wrong.

You are a human and to some degree this is inevitable. You should try to do as well as you can, but don't try to reverse stupidity and extract signal from noise. Let's assume that 20% of your votes are biased, but 80% correctly estimate what improves the discourse. How could you improve this ratio by voting less? You can't; because the assumption was that you don't know which votes belong to the 20%. Voting less frequently is equivalent to giving your votes a multiplier 0.5 or 0.1 or maybe 0.01. If you have a reason to believe that you are significantly more biased than an average voter (which is not the same as an average commenter), you should abstain from voting completely; otherwise there is no reason to tune down your voting. The mere fact that you care about this all is an evidence that you should vote.

I can never predict how my comments would be rated, so I gave up on looking for voting criteria and do what feels right at the moment.

My friends and I made a trolley problem shirt. (Also Plato's Cave and Prisoners Dilemma jokes)

"No slogans! No slogans!"

What other catchphrases do you like?

You could try simply loading all your comments: http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/lesswrong_user.php?u=falenas108

Add ?before=t_1 to the URL: you. If you want to page forward from there also add &count=100000: you.

The comments pages of a user have urls of the form

http://lesswrong.com/user/falenas108/comments/?count=25&after=t1_3mby

I'm not quite sure how they work, but the last 4 characters seem to give the index of the last comment on the page before (i.e. later than) the one it shows you (in base 36 or something), so you can try binary searching through these.

I think the link I gave is your earliest comments.

The comments pages of a user have urls like

http://lesswrong.com/user/falenas108/overview/?count=25&after=t1_aa28

where the last four characters denote the number of the last comment on the previous page (in like base 36 or something). So with a bit of effort you can binary search your way through these.

Click on your username.

I've had success with Mack's soft silicone earplugs.

I haven't tried this, but you could get a white noise generator, or download a white noise app for your phone, or use http://simplynoise.com/ . Or you could wear a headband over your ears, or (what I do) play ASMR over sleep-compatible headphones.

Well, normally you sneeze (too much) either because the room is too dusty, or because you have a mild allergy to something in that room.

Does the room look dusty? If you don't wipe a horizontal surface, how much dust would accumulate in, say, a week?

The allergy thing is more complicated, but one way to test it would be to take some OTC anti-hystamine and see if that stops your sneezing. If it does you should update towards being allergic to something in that room.

You can put an air filter in the room for a while and see if there's a noticeable change. If you want to be scientific about it you can ask a friend to turn it on and off at random while you're out of the room

Bad is hard to quantify.

What particular aspect of bad air quality makes you sneeze? Once we narrow that down we can review options.

I couldn't stand The Egg, will I still enjoy The Martian?

FWIW, I liked it a lot! Your summary is good.

Been discussed here several times. GIYF.