"Stupid" questions thread

LW's foundational posts are all very strongly biased towards epistemic rationality, and I think that strong bias still affects our attempts to talk about instrumental rationality. There are probably all sorts of instrumentally rational things we could be doing that we don't talk about enough.

Do you have any experience doing this successfully? I'd assume that powerful people already have lots of folks trying to make friends with them.

It seems to me that, unless one is already a powerful person, the best thing one can do to gain optimization power is building relationships with people more powerful than oneself.

Power isn't one dimensional. The thing that matters isn't so much to make relationships with people who are more powerful than you in all domains but to make relationship with people who are poweful in some domain where you could ask them for help.

Because it's hard. That's what kept me from doing it.

I am very close to explicitly starting a project to do just that, and didn't get to this point even until one of my powerful friends explicitly advised me to take a particular strategy to get relationships with more powerful people.

I find myself unable to be motivated to do it without calling it "Networking the Hard Way", to remind myself that yes, it's hard, and that's why it will work.

Realistically, Less Wrong is most concerned about epistemic rationality: the idea that having an accurate map of the territory is very important to actually reaching your instrumental goals. If you imagine for a second a world where epistemic rationality isn't that important, you don't really need a site like Less Wrong. There's nods to "instrumental rationality", but those are in the context of epistemic rationality getting you most of the way and being the base you work off of, otherwise there's no reason to be on Less Wrong instead of a specific site dealing with the sub area.

Also, lots of "building relationships with powerful people" is zero sum at best, since it resembles influence peddling more than gains from informal trade.

Insofar as MIRI folk seem to be friends with Jaan Tallin and Thiel etc. they appear to be trying to do this, though they don't seem to be teaching it as a great idea. But organizationally, if you're trying to optimize the world in a more rational way, spreading rationality might be a better way than trying to befriend less rational powerful people. Obviously this is less effective on a more personal basis.

It seems to me that, unless one is already a powerful person, the best thing one can do to gain optimization power is building relationships with people more powerful than oneself.

Depends on how powerful you want to become. Those relationships will be a burden the moment you'll "surpass the masters" so to speak. You may want to avoid building too many.

The downsides of talking to strangers are really, really low. Your feelings of anxiety are just lies from your brain.

I've found that writing a script ahead of time for particular situations, with some thoughts of different possible variations in how the conversation could go.

Honestly, not sure I understand the question.

A good way to start is to say something about your situation (time, place, etc.). After that, I guess you could ask their names or something. I consider myself decent at talking to strangers, but I think it's less about what you say and more about the emotions you train yourself to have. If you see strangers as friends waiting to be made on an emotional level, you can just talk to them the way you'd talk to a friend. Standing somewhere with lots of foot traffic holding a "free hugs" sign under the influence of something disinhibiting might be helpful for building this attitude. If you currently are uncomfortable talking to strangers then whenever you do it, afterwards comfort yourself internally the same way you might comfort an animal (after all, you are an animal) and say stuff like "see? that wasn't so bad. you did great." etc. and try to build comfort through repeated small exposure (more).

I was climbing a tree yesterday and realized that I hadn't even thought that the people watching were going to judge me, and that I would have thought of it previously, and that it would have made it harder to just climb the tree. Then I thought that if I could use the same trick on social interaction, it would become much easier. Then I wondered how you might learn to use that trick.

In other words, I don't know, but the question I don't know the answer to is a little bit closer to success.

I like this idea! I feel like the current questions are insufficiently "stupid," so here's one: how do you talk to strangers?

I think the question is badly formed. I think it's better to ask: "How do I become a person who easily talks to strangers?" When you are in your head and think about: "How do I talk to that person over there?" you are already at a place that isn't conductive to a good interaction.

Yesterday during the course of traveling around town three stangers did talk to me, where the stranger said the first word.

The first was a woman in mid 30s with a bicycle who was searching the elevator at the public train station. The second was an older woman who told me that the Vibriam Fivefinger shoes in wearing look good. The third was a girl who was biking next to me when her smart phone felt down. I picked it up and handed it back to her. She said thank you.

I'm not even counting beggars at the train in public transportation.

Later that evening I went Salsa dancing. There two woman I didn't know who were new to Salsa asked me to dance.

Why was I at a vibe that let's other people approach me? I spent five days at a personal development workshop given by Danis Bois. The workshop wasn't about doing anything to strangers but among other things teaches a kind of massage and I was a lot more relaxed than I was in the past.

If you get rid of your anxiety interactions with strangers start to flow naturally.

What can you do apart from visiting personal development seminars that put you into a good emotional state?

Wear something that makes it easy for strangers to start a conversation with you. One of the benefits of Vibriam Fivefingers is that people are frequently curious about them.

Do good exercises.

1) One exercise is to say 'hi' or 'good morning' to every stranger you pass. I don't do it currently but it's a good exercise to teach yourself that interaction with strangers is natural.

2) Learn some form of meditation to get into a relaxed state of mind.

3) If you want to approach a person at a bar you might feel anxiety. Locate that anxiety in your body. At the beginning it makes sense to put your hand where you locate it.

Ask yourself: "Where does that feeling want to move in my body" Tell it to "soften and flow". Let it flow where it wants to flow in your body. Usually it wants to flow at a specific location out of your body.

Do the same with the feeling of rejection, should a stranger reject you.

Exercise three is something that I only learned recently and I'm not sure if I'm able to explain it well over the internet. In case anybody reading it finds it useful I would be interested in feedback.

I'd like to ask an even stupider one: why do people want to talk to strangers?

I've had a few such conversations on trains and the like, and I'm not especially averse to it, but I think afterwards, what was the point of that?

Well, that passed the time.

*It would have passed anyway.*

Yes, but not as quickly.

At least the train eventually arrives.

While it's probably good not to have a crippling fear of talking to strangers, it's not something I really do unless I have a specific reason to. Like, a week ago I met a girl on a bus with a t-shirt that said something about tuk-tuks, which told me she'd probably been to southeast Asia and therefore probably interesting to talk to, so I commented on the shirt and that got the conversation rolling. Or if I'm at a meetup for people with shared interests, that fact is enough for me to want to talk to them and assume they want to talk to me.

One of the most simple lessons that I got a lot of milage out of is: don't be afraid to state the obvious. A lot of conversations and human interactions are more about the positive vibe that's being created than about the content. (Somewhat less so in these circles.)

I travel long-distance by plane alone quite a lot, and I like talking to people. If the person I'm sitting with looks reasonably friendly, I often start with something like "Hey, I figure we should introduce ourselves to each other right now, because I find it almost excruciatingly awkward to sit right next to somebody for hours without any communication except for quick glances. Why the hell do people do that? Anyway, I'm so-and-so. What's your name?"

I've gotten weird looks and perfunctory responses a couple of times, but more often than not people are glad for the icebreaker. There are actually a couple of people I met on planes with whom I'm still in regular touch. On the downside, I have sometimes got inextricably involved in conversation with people who are boring and/or unpleasant. I don't mind that too much, but if you are particularly bothered by that sort of thing, maybe restrict your stranger-talking to contexts where you have a reasonable idea about the kind of person you're going to be talking with. Anyway, my advice is geared towards a very specific sort of situation, but it is a pretty common situation for a lot of people.

You ask them to help you find a lost puppy.

If no question you ask is ever considered stupid, you're not checking enough of your assumptions.

After all, if you don't at least occasionally have a stupid question to ask, you're probably poorly calibrated on how many questions you should be asking.

Or you know, you might be using Google for asking the questions that would be considered stupid. (In fact for me the definition of a stupid question is a question that could be answered by googling for a few minutes)

An important thing to realize is that people working on anthropics are trying to come up with a precise inferential methodology. They're not trying to draw conclusions about the state of the world, they're trying to draw conclusions about how one should draw conclusions about the state of the world. Think of it as akin to Bayesianism. If someone read an introduction to Bayesian epistemology, and said "This is just a mess of tautologies (Bayes' theorem) and thought experiments (Dutch book arguments) that pays no rent in anticipated experience. Why should I care?", how would you respond? Presumably you'd tell them that they should care because understanding the Bayesian methodology helps people make sounder inferences about the world, even if it doesn't predict specific experiences. Understanding anthropics does the same thing (except perhaps not as ubiquitously).

So the point of understanding anthropics is not so much to directly predict experiences but to appreciate how exactly one should update on certain pieces of evidence. It's like understanding any other selection effect -- in order to properly interpret the significance of pieces of evidence you collect, you need to have a proper understanding of the tools you use to collect them. To use Eddington's much-cited example, if your net can't catch fish smaller than six inches, then the fact that you haven't caught any such fish doesn't tell you anything about the state of the lake you're fishing. Understanding the limitations of your data-gathering mechanism prevents you from making bad updates. And if the particular limitation you're considering is the fact that observations can only be made in regimes accessible to observers, then you're engaged in anthropic reasoning.

Paul Dirac came up with a pretty revisionary cosmological theory based on several apparent "large number coincidences" -- important large (and some small) numbers in physics that all seem to be approximate integer powers of the Hubble age of the universe. He argued that it is implausible that we just happen to find ourselves at a time when these simple relationships hold, so they must be law-like. Based on this he concluded that certain physical constants aren't really constant; they change as the universe ages. R. H. Dicke showed (or purported to show) that at least some of these coincidences can be explained when one realizes that observers can only exist during a certain temporal window in the universe's existence, and that the timing of this window is related to a number of other physical constants (since it depends on facts about the formation and destruction of stars, etc.). If it's true that observers can only exist in an environment where these large number relationships hold, then it's a mistake to update our beliefs about natural laws based on these relationships. So that's an example of how understanding the anthropic selection effect might save us (and not just us, but also superhumans like Dirac) from bad updates.

So much for anthropics in general, but what about the esoteric particulars -- SSA, SIA and all that. Well, here's the basic thought: Dirac's initial (non-anthropic) move to his new cosmological theory was motivated by the belief that it is extraordinarily unlikely that the large number coincidences are purely due to chance, that we just happen to be around at a time when they hold. This kind of argument has a venerable history in physics (and other sciences, I'm sure) -- if your theory classifies your observed evidence as highly atypical, that's a significant strike against the theory. Anthropic reasoning like Dicke's adds a wrinkle -- our theory is allowed to classify evidence as atypical, as long as it is not atypical for observers. In other words, even if the theory says phenomenon X occurs very rarely in our universe, an observation of phenomenon X doesn't count against it, as long as the theory also says (based on good reason, not ad hoc stipulation) that observers can only exist in those few parts of the universe where phenomenon X occurs. Atypicality is allowed as long as it is correlated with the presence of observers.

But only that much atypicality is allowed. If your theory posits significant atypicality that goes beyond what selection effects can explain, then you're in trouble. This is the insight that SSA, SIA, etc seek to precisify. They are basically attempts to update the Diracian "no atypicality" strategy to allow for the kind of atypicality that anthropic reasoning explains, but no more atypicality than that. Perhaps they are misguided attempts for various reasons, but the search for a mathematical codification of the "no atypicality" move is important, I think, because the move gets used imprecisely all the time anyway (without explicit evocation, most of the time) and it gets used without regard for important observation selection effects.

If you taboo "anthropics" and replace by "observation selection effects" then there are all sorts of practical consequences. See the start of Nick Bostrom's book for some examples.

The other big reason for caring is the "Doomsday argument" and the fact that all attempts to refute it have so far failed. Almost everyone who's heard of the argument thinks there's something trivially wrong with it, but all the obvious objections can be dealt with e.g. look later in Bostrom's book. Further, alternative approaches to anthropics (such as the "self indication assumption"), or attempts to completely bypass anthropics (such as "full non-indexical conditioning"), have been developed to avoid the Doomsday conclusion. But very surprisingly, they end up reproducing it. See Katja Grace's theisis.

Take Bayes’ theorem: P(H|O) = P(O|H) × P(H) / P(O). If H is a hypothesis and O is an observation, P(O|H) means “what is the probability of making that observation if the hypothesis is true?”

If a hypothesis has as consequence “nobody can observe O” (say, because no humans can exist), then that P(O|H) is 0 (actually, it’s about the probability that you didn’t get the consequence right). Which means that, once you made the observation, you will probably decide that the hypothesis is unlikely. However, if you don’t notice that consequence, you might decide that P(O|H) is large, and incorrectly assign high likelihood to the hypothesis.

For a completely ridiculous example, imagine that there’s a deadly cat-flu epidemic; it gives 90% of cats that catch it a runny nose. Your cat’s nose becomes runny. You might be justified to think that it’s likely your cat got cat-flu. However, if you know that all cases, the cat’s owner dies of the flu before the cat has any symptoms, the conclusion would be the opposite. (Since, if it were the flu, you wouldn’t see the cat’s runny nose, because you’d be dead.) The same evidence, opposite effect.

Anthropics is kind of the same thing, except you’re mostly guessing about the flu.

The obvious application (to me) is figuring out how to make decisions once mind uploading is possible. This point is made, for example, in Scott Aaronson's The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine. What do you anticipate experiencing if someone uploads your mind while you're still conscious?

Anthropics also seems to me to be relevant to the question of how to do Bayesian updates using reference classes, a subject I'm still very confused about and which seems pretty fundamental. Sometimes we treat ourselves as randomly sampled from the population of all humans similar to us (e.g. when diagnosing the probability that we have a disease given that we have some symptoms) and sometimes we don't (e.g. when rejecting the Doomsday argument, if that's an argument we reject). Which cases are which?

Possible example of an anthropic idea paying rent in anticipated experiences: anthropic shadowing of intermittent observer-killing catastrophes of variable size.

I'd add that the Doomsday argument in specific seems like it should be demolished by even the slightest evidence as to how long we have left.

There's a story about anthropic reasoning being used to predict properties of the processes which produce carbon in stars, before these processes were known. (apparently there's some debate about whether or not this actually happened)

It seems like a mess of tautologies and thought experiments

My own view is that this is precisely correct and exactly why anthropics is interesting, we really should have a good, clear approach to it and the fact we don't suggests there is still work to be done.

Not sure about anthropics, but we need decision theories that work correctly with copies, because we want to build AIs, and AIs can make copies of themselves.

This question has been bugging me for the last couple of years here. Clearly Eliezer believes in the power of anthropics, otherwise he would not bother with MWI as much, or with some of his other ideas, like the recent writeup about leverage. Some of the reasonably smart people out there discuss SSA and SIA. And the Doomsday argument. And don't get me started on Boltzmann brains...

My current guess that in the fields where experimental testing is not readily available, people settle for what they can get. Maybe anthropics help one pick a promising research direction, I suppose. Just trying (unsuccessfully) to steelman the idea.

I care about anthropics because from a few intuitive principles that I find interesting for partially unrelated reasons (mostly having to do with wanting to understand the nature of justification so as to build an AGI that can do the right thing) I conclude that I should expect monads (programs, processes; think algorithmic information theory) with the most decision-theoretic significance (an objective property because of assumed theistic pansychism; think Neoplatonism or Berkeleyan idealism) to also have the most let's-call-it-conscious-experience. So I expect to find myself as the most important decision process in the multiverse. Then at various moments the process that is "me" looks around and asks, "do my experiences in fact confirm that I am plausibly the most important agent-thingy in the multiverse?", and if the answer is no, then I know something is wrong with at least one of my intuitive principles, and if the answer is yes, well then I'm probably psychotically narcissistic and that's its own set of problems.

It tells you when to expect the end of the world.

Is willpower, in the short-term at least, a limited and depletable resource?

I felt that Robert Kurzban presented a pretty good argument against the "willpower as a resource" model in Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite:

[After criticizing studies trying to show that willpower is a resource that depends on glucose]

What about the more general notion that “willpower” is a “resource” that gets consumed or expended when one exerts self-control? First and foremost, let’s keep in mind that the idea is inconsistent with the most basic facts about how the mind works. The mind is an information-processing device. It’s not a hydraulic machine that runs out of water pressure or something like that. Of course it is a physical object, and of course it needs energy to operate. But mechanics is the wrong way to understand, or explain, its action, because changes in complex behavior are due to changes in information processing. The “willpower as resource” view abandons these intellectual gains of the cognitive revolution, and has no place in modern psychology. That leaves the question, of course, about what is going on in these studies.

Let’s back up for a moment and think about what the function of self-control might be. Taking the SATs, keeping your attention focused, and not eating cookies all feel more or less unpleasant, but it’s not like spraining your ankle or running a marathon, where the unpleasant sensations are easy to understand from a functional point of view. The feelings of discomfort are probably the output of modules designed to compute costs. When your ankle is sprained, putting weight on it is costly because you can damage it further. When you have been running for a long time, the chance of a major injury goes up. These sensations, then, are probably evolution’s way of getting you to keep your weight off the joint and stop doing all that running, respectively.

There’s nothing obviously analogous for not eating cookies or doing word problems. Why does it feel like something, anything at all, to (not) do these things? As we’ve seen, lots of other stuff happens in your head, all the time, and it doesn’t feel like anything. Further, given that it seems as if exerting self-control is a good thing, that is, that it generally leads to outcomes that might be expected to yield fitness benefits, you might expect that exerting self-control would feel good and easy. Why does it seem hard, and feel even harder over time? What is the sensation of “effort” designed to get you to do?

One reason it seems hard might derive from that fact that “exerting self-control” entails incurring immediate costs in various forms, and “effort” is the representation of these costs. Consider not eating a cookie. There are probably modules in your mind that are designed to compute the benefits of eating nice calorie packages. They’re wired up to the senses, designed to calculate just how good (in the evolutionary sense) eating the calorie package is. From the point of view of these modules, not eating the cookie is a cost, in particular, the lost calories in the cookie. So, the sensation of the effort of not eating it—”temptation”—is probably evolution’s way of getting you to eat the cookie, just as the sensation of pain is evolution’s way of getting you to stay off your sprained ankle. In both cases, the experience is the output of a module designed to compute costs.

The same argument applies to other opportunities, and they take various forms. In some experiments, subjects are told to ignore words flashing on a computer screen, something that feels quite effortful. Why? Well, not reading words on a screen carries a loss of information: What did those words say? A similar argument applies regarding Ariely’s work on decision making during sexual arousal, which we looked at earlier in this chapter. The reason that subjects respond to those survey questions when they are aroused is probably because the mechanisms designed to take advantage of mating opportunities are computing benefits in the environment, though they are being fooled by the fact that the images they are getting are pictures rather than actual people.

Is it also a cost to solve word problems? Sure, but the cost isn’t caloric. Solving word problems requires the use of certain fancy modules, and when one is doing one of these tasks, these modules are kept busy. This means that doing these tasks carries real (opportunity) costs: all the things that these modules could be doing but are not because they are engaged. It’s not unlike what happens when you start up some big piece of software on your computer: Other things suffer, necessarily. Starting up software carries these costs. Working on word problems, similarly, prevents you from using important modular systems from doing other tasks.

So, instead of a resource view, my view is that the issue is more of an effort monitor—an “effortometer”62 in the mind. My guess is that the reason it feels like something to pay close attention to something, solve hard problems, or avoid eating cookies is that doing these things is costly from the perspective of certain modules.63 The feeling of “mental effort,” on this view, is like a counter, adding up all these opportunity costs to determine if it’s worth continuing to do whatever one is doing.64 As these costs get higher—either because one is doing the task for a while, or for some other reason—the effortometer counts higher, giving rise to the sensation of effort, and also giving the impatient modules more and more of an edge.

If I’m working on word problems—but not getting anywhere—using my modules in this way isn’t doing much good, so maybe I should stop. Interestingly, as illustrated by the results of the studies described above, the effect seems to extend from one task to another, even if the tasks are quite different.

This idea suggests that a mechanism is needed that performs these computations, weighing the costs and benefits of doing tasks that make use of certain modules. Some modules are counting up these costs, and when the effortometer increases, there is less suppression of the short-term modules—it’s time to move on. So, it’s not “willpower” that’s exhausted—it’s that the ratio of costs to reward is too high to justify continuing. As Baumeister himself indicated, “it is adaptive to give up early on unsolvable problems. Persistence is, after all, only adaptive and productive when it leads to eventual success.”

The effortometer view suggests a way to “reset” or at least reduce the count. Suppose we give subjects a reward, such as a small gift, or even light praise; this ought to “reset” the counter, just as when a foraging animal’s time is rewarded by finding food morsels. Diane Tice and colleagues conducted some work in which some subjects were told not to think of a white bear,* and others were not. The idea was that not thinking of a white bear takes some “willpower,” and when you’ve just used your willpower, you have less of it left to use in the next task, which was drinking an unpleasant beverage. They found that if you have to suppress thinking of a white bear, you can’t drink as much of the awful Kool-Aid. So, that looks good for a “resource” model. Your willpower sponge has been squeezed out.

Some subjects were, however, given a small gift after suppressing thinking of a white bear. These subjects were able to drink just as much of the nasty stuff as those who were at liberty to think of as many white bears as they wanted. That is, their “willpower” seems to have been restored, making them able to endure the foul-tasting beverage.

These findings are very hard to accommodate with a “resource” model. If my self-control sponge is squeezed dry by not thinking of a white bear, a gift shouldn’t help me exert willpower—I’m all out of it. (And certainly the gift didn’t increase the amount of glucose in my body.) In contrast, this finding fits very well with the effortometer model. If the effortometer is monitoring reward, then a gift resets it, and ought to improve subsequent self-control tasks.

Elsewhere in the book (I forget where) he also notes that the easiest explanation for people to go low on willpower when hungry is simply that a situation where your body urgently needs food is a situation where your brain considers everything that’s not directly related to acquiring food to have a very high opportunity cost. It seems like a more elegant and realistic explanation than saying the common folk-psychological explanation that seems to suggest something like willpower being a resource that you lose when you’re hungry or tired. It’s more of a question of the evolutionary tradeoffs being different when you’re hungry or tired, which leads to different cognitive costs.

I don't know about the first question, but for the second: yes.

In About Behaviorism (which I unfortunately don't currently own a copy of, so I can't give direct quotes or citations) , B. F. Skinner makes the case that the "Willpower" phenomenon actually reduces to opperant conditioning and scheduals of reinforcement. Skinner claims that people who have had their behavior consistently reinforced in the past will become less sensitive to a lack of reinforcement in the present, and may persist in behavior even when positive reinforcement isn't forthcoming in the short term, whereas people whose past behavior has consistantly failed to be reinforced (or even been actively punished) will abandon a course of action much more quickly when it fails to immediately pay off. Both groups will eventually give up at an unreinforced behavior, though the former group will typically persist much longer at it than the latter. This gives rise to the "willpower as resource" model, as well as the notion that some people have more willpower than others. Really, people with "more willpower" have just been conditioned to wait longer for their behaviors to be reinforced.

The standard metaphor is "willpower is like a muscle". This implies that by regularly exercising it, you can strengthen it, but also that if you use it too much in the short term, it can get tired quickly. So yes and yes.

As far as I can tell, LW was created explicitly with the goal of producing rationalists, one desirable side effect of which was the creation of friendly AI researchers. Decision theory plays a prominent role in Eliezer's conception of friendly AI, since a decision theory is how the AI is supposed to figure out the right thing to do. The obvious guesses don't work in the presence of things like other agents that can read the AI's source code, so we need to find some non-obvious guesses because that's something that could actually happen.

This was what I gathered from reading the beginning of the TDT paper: "There's this one decision theory that works in every single circumstance except for this one crazy sci-fi scenario that might not even be physically possible, and then there's this other decision theory that works in said sci-fi scenario but not really anywhere else. We need to find a decision theory that combines these two in order to always work, including in this one particular sci-fi scenario."

I guess it might be useful for AI research, but I don't see why I would need to learn it.

Lawyer's perspective:

People want to ask me about legal issues all the time. The best way to get a useful answer is to describe your current situation, the cause of your current situation, and what you want to change. Thus:

I have severe injuries, caused by that other person hitting me with their car. I want that person's driver's license taken away.

Then I can say something like: Your desired remedy is not available for REASONS, but instead, you could get REMEDY. Here are the facts and analysis that would affect whether REMEDY is available.

In short, try to define the problem. fubarobfusco has some good advice about how to refine your articulation of a problem. That said, if you have reason to believe a person knows something useful, you probably already know enough to articulate your question.

The point of my formulation is to avoid assumptions that distort the analysis. Suppose someone in the situation I described above said "I was maliciously and negligently injured by that person's driving. I want them in prison." At that point, my response needs to detangle a lot of confusions before I can say anything useful.

Don't ask questions. Describe your problem and goal, and ask them to tell you what would be helpful. If they know more than you, let them figure out the questions you should ask, and then tell you the answers.

I don't think an answer has to be specific to be useful. Often just understanding how an expert in a certain area thinks about the world can be useful even if you have no specificity.

When it comes to questions: 1) What was the greatest discovery in your field in the last 5 years? 2) Is there an insight in your field that obvious to everyone in your field but that most people in society just don't get?

I never know how to ask questions that will inspire useful, specific answers. They just don't occur to me. How do you ask the right questions?

My favorite question comes from The Golden Compass:

If you were me, what question would you ask of the Consul of the Witches?

I haven't employed it against people yet, though, and so a better way to approach the issue in the same spirit is to describe your situation (as suggested by many others).

I find "How do I proceed to find out more about X" to give best results. Note: it's important to phrase it so that they understand you are asking for an efficient algorithm to find out about X, not for them to tell you about X!

It works even if you're completely green and talking to a prodigy in the field (which I find to be particularly hard). Otherwise you'll get "RTFM"/"JFGI" at best or they will avoid you entirely at worst.

One approach: Think of two terms or ideas that are similar but want distinguishing. "How is a foo different from a bar?" For instance, if you're looking to learn about data structures in Python, you might ask, "How is a dictionary different from a list?"

You can learn if your thought that they are similar is accurate, too: "How is a list different from a for loop?" might get some insightful discussion ... if you're lucky.

For the narrow subset of technical questions, How to Ask Questions the Smart Way is useful.

But if you don't have a problem to begin with -- if your aim is "learn more in field X," it gets more complicated. Given that you don't know what questions are worth asking, the best question might be "where would I go to learn more about X" or "what learning material would you recommend on the subject of X?" Then in the process of following and learning from their pointer, generate questions to ask at a later date.

There may be an inherent contradiction between wanting nonspecific knowledge and getting useful, specific answers.

Start by asking the wrong ones. For me, it took a while to notice when I had even a stupid question to ask (possibly some combination of mild social anxiety and generally wanting to come across as smart & well-informed had stifled this impulse), so this might take a little bit of practice.

Sometimes your interlocutor will answer your suboptimal questions, and that will give you time to think of what you really want to know, and possibly a few extra hints for figuring it out. But at least as often your interlocutor will take your interest as a cue that they can just go ahead and tell you nonrelated things about the subject at hand.

What do you want to learn more about? If there isn't an obvious answer, give yourself some time to see if an answer surfaces.

The good news is that this is the thread for vague questions which might not pan out.

Ask the smartest questions you can think of at the time and keep updating, but don't waste time on that. After you have done a bit of this, ask them what you are missing, what questions you should be asking them.

Nope, not for everyday decisions. For me "remember to update" is more of a mantra to remember to change your mind at all - especially based on several pieces of weak evidence, which normal procedure would be to individually disregard and thus never change your mind.

I never do this. See this essay by gwern for an example of someone doing this.

I suspect very little, but this does remind me of Warren Buffett speaking on Discounted Cash Flow calculations.

For quick background, an investment is a purchase of a future cash flow. Cash in the future is worth less to you than cash right now, and it is worth less and less as you go further into the future. Most treatments pretend that the proper way to discount the value of cash in the future is to have a discount rate (like 5% or 10% per year) and apply it as an exponential function to future cash.

Warren Buffett, a plausible candidate for the most effective investor ever (or at least so far), speaks highly of DCF (discounted cash flow) as the way to choose between investments. However, he also says he never actually does one other than roughly in his head. Given his excellent abilities at calculating in his head, I think it would translate to something like he never does a DCF calculation that would take up more than about 20 lines in an excel spreadsheet.

There are a broad range of policies that I have that are based on math: not gambling in Las Vegas because it's expectation value is negative (although mostly I trust the casinos to have set the odds so payouts are negative, I don't check their math). Not driving too far for small discounts (expense of getting discount should not exceed value of discount). Not ignoring a few thousand dollar difference in a multi-hundred thousand dollar transaction because "it is a fraction of a percent."

I do often in considering hiring a personal service compare paying for it to how long it would take me to do the job vs how long I would need to work at my current job to hire the other person. I am pretty well paid so this does generally lead to me hiring a lot of things done. A similar calcuation does lead me to systematically ignore costs below about $100 for a lot of things which still "feels" wrong, but which I have not yet been able to do a calculation that shows me it is wrong.

I am actually discouraging my wife and children from pushing my children towards elite colleges and universities on the basis that they are over-priced for what they deliver. I am very unconfident in this one as rich people that I respect continue to just bleed money into their children's educations. SO I am afraid to go independent of them even as I can't figure out a calculation that shows what they are doing makes economic sense.

I do look at, or caculate, the price per ounce in making buying decisions, I guess that is an example of a common bayesian calculation.

I'd be alarmed if anyone claimed to accurately numerically update their priors. Non-parametric Bayesian statistics is HARD and not the kind of thing I can do in my head.

I had the same worry/question when I first found LW. After meeting with all the "important" people (Anna, Luke, Eliezer...) in person, I can confidently say: no, nobody is carrying around a sheet of paper and doing actual Bayesian updating. However, most people in these circles notice when they are surprised/confused, act on that feeling, and if they were wrong, then they update their believes, followed soon by their actions. This could happen from one big surprise or many small ones. So there is a very intuitive sort of Bayesian updating going on.

Your brain does most of this at lightning speed unconsciously. Often, trying to make the process unto a deliberative, conscious one slows it down so much that the results are of little practical use.

I only literally do an expected outcome calculation when I care more about having numbers than I do about their validity, or when I have unusually good data and need rigor. Most of the time the uncertainties in your problem formulation will dominate any advantage you might get from doing actual Bayesian updates.

The advantage of the Bayesian mindset is that it gives you a rough idea of how evidence should affect your subjective probability estimate for a scenario, and how pieces of evidence of different strengths interact with each other. You do need to work through a reasonable number of examples to get a feel for how that works, but once you have that intuition you rarely need to do the math.

This was a big realization for me personally:

If you are trying to get someone to like you, you should strive to maintain a friendly, positive interaction with that person in which he or she feels comfortable and happy on a moment-by-moment basis. You should not try to directly alter that person's opinion of you, in the sense that if you are operating on a principle of "I will show this person that I am smart, and he will like me", "I will show this person I am cool, and she will like me," or even "I will show this person that I am nice, and he will like me", you are pursuing a strategy that can be ineffective and possibly lead people to see you as self-centered. This might be what people say when they mean "be yourself" or "don't worry about what other people think of you".

Also, Succeed Socially is a good resource.

In actuality,a lot of people can like you a lot even if you are not selfless. It is not so much that you need to ignore what makes you happy, as much as it is that you need to pay attention and energy to what makes other people happy. A trivial if sordid example is you don't get someone wanting to have sex with you by telling them how attractive you are, you will do better by telling them, and making it obvious that, you find them attractive. That you will take pleasure in their increased attentions to you is not held against you because it means you are not selfless not at all. Your need or desire for them is the attractor to them.

So don't abnegate, ignore, deny, your own needs. But run an internal model where other people's needs are primary to suggest actions you can take that will serve them and glue them to you.

Horribly self-centered isn't a statement that you elevate your own needs too high. It is that you are too ignorant and unreactive to other people's needs.

The standard reference for this is "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. I have not read it myself.

I second what gothgirl said; but in case you were looking for more concrete advice:

1. Exchange compliments. Accept compliments graciously but modestly (e.g. "Thanks, that's kind of you").
2. Increase your sense of humour (watching comedy, reading jokes) until it's at population average levels, if it's not there.
3. Practise considering other people's point of view.
4. Do those three things consciously for long enough that you start doing them automatically.

At least, that's what worked for me when I was younger. Especially 1 actually, I think it helped with 3.

You can be self-centered and not act that way. If you even pretend to care about most people's lives they will care more about yours.

If you want to do this without being crazy bored and feeling terrible, I recommend figuring out conversation topics of other people's lives that you actually enjoy listening people talk about, and also working on being friends with people who do interesting things. In a college town, asking someone their major is quite often going to be enjoyable for them and if you're interested and have some knowledge of a wide variety of fields you can easily find out interesting things.

Is there any non-creepy way to indicate to people that you're available and interested in physical intimacy? doing something like just telling everyone you meet "hey you're cute want to make out?" seems like it would go badly.

Slightly increase eye contact. Orient towards. Mirror posture. Use touch during interaction (in whatever ways are locally considered non-creepy).

Tell a few friends, and let them do the asking for you?

The non-creepy socially accepted way is through body language. Strong eye contact, personal space invasion, prolonged pauses between sentences, purposeful touching of slightly risky area (for women: the lower back, forearms, etc.) all done with a clearly visible smirk.
In some context however the explicitly verbal might be effective, especially if toned down (Hey you're interesting, I want to know you better) or up (Hey, you're really sexy, do you want to go to bed with me?), but it is highly dependent on the woman.
I'm not entirely sure what's the parameter here, but I suspect plausible deniability is involved.

I don't think that trying to skip the whole mating dance between men and women is a good strategy. Most woman don't make calculated mental decisions about making out with men but instead follow their emotions. Those emotions need the human mating dance.

If you actually want to make out flirtation is usually the way to go.

One way that's pretty safe is to purposefully misunderstand what the other person is saying and frame it as them hitting on you. Yesterday, I chatted with a woman via facebook and she wanted to end the chat by saying that she now has to take a shower.

I replied with: "you want me to picture yourself under the shower..."

A sentence like that doesn't automatically tell the woman that I'm interested in her but should encourage her to update in that direction.

For what it's worth, Eliezer's answer to your second question is here:

There is no safe wish smaller than an entire human morality. (...) With a safe genie, wishing is superfluous. Just run the genie.

Basically it's a matter of natural selection. Given a starting population of EMs, if some are unwilling to be copied, the ones that are willing to be copied will dominate the population in short order. If EMs are useful for work, eg valuable, then the more valuable ones will be copied more often. At that point, EMs that are willing to be copied and do slave labor effectively for no complaints will become the most copied, and the population of ems will end up being composed largely of copies of the person/people who are 1) ok with being copied, 2) ok with being modified to work more effectively.

Well, no offense, but I'm not sure you are aware of the need for Friendliness in Obedient AI, or rather, just how much F you need in a genie.

If you were to actually figure out how to build a genie you would have figured it out by trying to build a CEV-class AI, intending to tackle all those challenges, tackling all those challenges, having pretty good solutions to all of those challenges, not trusting those solutions quite enough, and temporarily retreating to a mere genie which had ALL of the safety measures one would intuitively imagine necessary for a CEV-class independently-acting unchecked AI, to the best grade you could currently implement them. Anyone who thought they could skip the hard parts of CEV-class FAI by just building a genie instead, would die like a squirrel under a lawnmower. For reasons they didn't even understand because they hadn't become engaged with that part of the problem.

I'm not certain that this must happen in reality. The problem might have much kinder qualities than I anticipate in the sense of mistakes naturally showing up early enough and blatantly enough for corner-cutters to spot them. But it's how things are looking as a default after becoming engaged with the problems of CEV-class AI. The same problems show up in proposed 'genies' too, it's just that the genie-proposers don't realize it.

I know that Hanson thinks that 1. ems will not be robbed of their humanity

I don't know whether Hanson has a concret concept of 'humanity'.

Besides Eliezer's rather strong-looking argument, ethically creating Obedient AI would require solving the following scary problems:

• A "nonperson predicate" that can ensure the AI doesn't create simulations which themselves count as people. If we fail to solve this one, then I could be a simulation the AI made in order to test how people like me react to torture.

• A way to ensure the AI itself does not count as a person, so that we don't feel sad if it eventually switches itself off. See here for a fuller explanation of why this matters.

Now, I think Wei Dai suggested we start by building a "philosophical" AI that could solve such problems for us. I don't think philosophy is a natural class. (A 'correct way to do philosophy' sounds like a fully general correct way to think and act.) But if we get the AI's goals right, then maybe it could start out restricted by flawed and overcautious answers to these questions, but find us some better answers. Maybe.

(as opposed to any other form of uploading)

I didn't know "em" was a specific form of uploading. What form is it, and what other forms are there?

Why the huge focus on fully paternalistic Friendly AI rather than Obedient AI? It seems like a much lower-risk project. (and yes, I'm aware of the need for Friendliness in Obedient AI.)

Because the AI is better at estimating the consequences of following an order than the person giving the order.

There also the issue that the AI is likely to act in a way that changes the order that the person gives if it's own utility criteria are about fulfilling orders.

What's with the ems?

We can make more soild predictions about ems than we can about strong AI since there are less black swans regarding ems to mess up our calculations.

Does anthropics come into it?

No.

Why the huge focus on fully paternalistic Friendly AI rather than Obedient AI? It seems like a much lower-risk project.

the need for Friendliness in Obedient AI.

I think it's easier to get a tiny fraction of the planet to do a complex right thing than to get 99.9% of a planet to do a simpler right thing, especially if 99.9% compliance may not be enough and 99.999% compliance may be required instead.

Given enough time for ideas to develop, any smart kid in a basement could build an AI, and every organization in the world has a massive incentive to do so. Only omnipresent surveillance could prevent everyone from writing a particular computer program.

Once you have enough power flying around to actually prevent AI, you are dealing with AI-level threats already (a not-necessarily friendly singleton).

So FAI is actually the easiest way to prevent UFAI.

The other reason is that a Friendly Singleton would be totally awesome. Like so totally awesome that it would be worth it to try for the awesomeness alone.

We discuss this proposal in Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk, under the sections "Regulate research" and "Relinquish technology". I recommend reading both of those sections if you're interested, but a few relevant excerpts:

Large-scale surveillance efforts are ethically problematic and face major political resistance, and it seems unlikely that current political opinion would support the creation of a far-reaching surveillance network for the sake of AGI risk alone. The extent to which such extremes would be necessary depends on exactly how easy it would be to develop AGI in secret. Although several authors make the point that AGI is much easier to develop unnoticed than something like nuclear weapons (McGinnis 2010; Miller 2012), cutting edge high-tech research does tend to require major investments which might plausibly be detected even by less elaborate surveillance efforts. [...]

Even under such conditions, there is no clear way to define what counts as dangerous AGI. Goertzel and Pitt (2012) point out that there is no clear division between narrow AI and AGI, and attempts to establish such criteria have failed. They argue that since AGI has a nebulous definition, obvious wide-ranging economic benefits, and potentially rich penetration into multiple industry sectors, it is unlikely to be regulated due to speculative long-term risks.

AGI regulation requires global cooperation, as the noncooperation of even a single nation might lead to catastrophe. Historically, achieving global cooperation on tasks such as nuclear disarmament and climate change has been very difficult. As with nuclear weapons, AGI could give an immense economic and military advantage to the country that develops it first, in which case limiting AGI research might even give other countries an incentive to develop AGI faster (Cade 1966; de Garis 2005; McGinnis 2010; Miller 2012) [...]

To be effective, regulation also needs to enjoy support among those being regulated. If developers working in AGI-related fields only follow the letter of the law, while privately considering all regulations as annoying hindrances and fears about AGI overblown, the regulations may prove ineffective. Thus, it might not be enough to convince governments of the need for regulation; the much larger group of people working in the appropriate fields may also need to be convinced.

While Shulman (2009) argues that the unprecedentedly destabilizing effect of AGI could be a cause for world leaders to cooperate more than usual, the opposite argument can be made as well. Gubrud (1997) argues that increased automation could make countries more self-reliant, and international cooperation considerably more difficult. AGI technology is also much harder to detect than, for example, nuclear technology is—nuclear weapons require a substantial infrastructure to develop, while AGI needs much less (McGinnis 2010; Miller 2012). [...]

Goertzel and Pitt (2012) suggest that for regulation to be enacted, there might need to be an “AGI Sputnik”—a technological achievement that makes the possibility of AGI evident to the public and policy makers. They note that after such a moment, it might not take very long for full human-level AGI to be developed, while the negotiations required to enact new kinds of arms control treaties would take considerably longer. [...]

“Regulate research” proposals: Our view

Although there seem to be great difficulties involved with regulation, there also remains the fact that many technologies have been successfully subjected to international regulation. Even if one were skeptical about the chances of effective regulation, an AGI arms race seems to be one of the worst possible scenarios, one which should be avoided if at all possible. We are therefore generally supportive of regulation, though the most effective regulatory approach remains unclear. [...]

Not everyone believes that the risks involved in creating AGIs are acceptable. Relinquishment involves the abandonment of technological development that could lead to AGI. This is possibly the earliest proposed approach, with Butler (1863) writing that “war to the death should be instantly proclaimed” upon machines, for otherwise they would end up destroying humans entirely. In a much-discussed article, Joy (2000) suggests that it might be necessary to relinquish at least some aspects of AGI research, as well as nanotechnology and genetics research.

AGI relinquishment is criticized by Hughes (2001), with Kurzweil (2005) criticizing broad relinquishment while being supportive of the possibility of “fine-grained relinquishment,” banning some dangerous aspects of technologies while allowing general work on them to proceed. In general, most writers reject proposals for broad relinquishment. [...]

McKibben (2003), writing mainly in the context of genetic engineering, suggests that AGI research should be stopped. He brings up the historical examples of China renouncing seafaring in the 1400s and Japan relinquishing firearms in the 1600s, as well as the more recent decisions of abandoning DDT, CFCs, and genetically modified crops in Western countries. However, it should also be noted that Japan participated in World War II, that China now has a navy, that there are reasonable alternatives for DDT and CFCs, which probably do not exist for AGI, and that genetically modified crops are in wide use in the United States.

Hughes (2001) argues that attempts to outlaw a technology will only make the technology move to other countries. He also considers the historical relinquishment of bio- logical weapons to be a bad example, for no country has relinquished peaceful biotechnological research such as the development of vaccines, nor would it be desirable to do so. With AGI, there would be no clear dividing line between safe and dangerous research. [...]

Relinquishment proposals suffer from many of the same problems as regulation proposals, only worse. There is no historical precedent of general, multi-use technology similar to AGI being successfully relinquished for good, nor do there seem to be any theoretical reasons for believing that relinquishment proposals would work in the future. Therefore we do not consider them to be a viable class of proposals.

There's a third alternative, though it's quite unattractive: damaging civilization to the point that AI is impossible.

My impression of Eliezer's model of the intelligence explosion is that he believes b) is much harder than it looks. If you make developing strong AI illegal then the only people who end up developing it will be criminals, which is arguably worse, and it only takes one successful criminal organization developing strong AI to cause an unfriendly intelligence explosion. The general problem is that a) requires that one organization do one thing (namely, solving friendly AI) but b) requires that literally all organizations abstain from doing one thing (namely, building unfriendly AI).

CFCs and global warming don't seem analogous to me. A better analogy to me is nuclear disarmament: it only takes one nuke to cause bad things to happen, and governments have a strong incentive to hold onto their nukes for military applications.

The approach of Leverage Research is more like (b).

The second one involves just the sociological/political problem of convincing everyone of the risks and banning/discouraging AI research "in time" to avoid an intelligence explosion.

There have been some efforts along those lines. It doesn't look as easy as all that.

a half-written computer game doesn't run at all

I realize this does not really address your main point, but you can have half-written games that do run. I've been writing a game on and off for the last couple of years, and it's been playable the whole time. Make the simplest possible underlying engine first, so it's playable (and testable) as soon as possible.

I have/had this problem. My computer and shelves are full of partially completed (or, more realistically, just-begun) projects.

So, what I'm doing at the moment is I've picked one of them, and that's the thing I'm going to complete. When I'm feeling motivated, that's what I work on. When I'm not feeling motivated, I try to do at least half an hour or so before I flake off and go play games or work on something that feels more awesome at the time. At those times my motivation isn't that I feel that the project is worthwhile, it is that having gone through the process of actually finishing something will be have been worthwhile.

It's possible after I'm done I may never put that kind of effort in again, but I will know (a) that I probably can achieve that sort of goal if I want and (b) if carrying on to completion is hell, what kind of hell and what achievement would be worth it.

Beeminder. Record the number of Pomodoros you spend working on the project and set some reasonable goal, e.g. one a day.

there's a good chance I'll get frustrated and give up before actually completing the project

Make this not true. Practice doing a bunch of smaller projects, maybe one or two week-long projects, then a month-long project. Then you'll feel confident that your work ethic is good enough to complete a major project without giving up.

Undertaking this project will require a lot of time and effort spent on activities that aren't enjoyable for their own sake, and there's a good chance I'll get frustrated and give up before actually completing the project. So it would be better not to bother; the benefits of successfully completing the project seem unlikely to be large enough to justify the delay and risk involved.

Would it be worthwhile if you could guarantee or nearly guarantee that you will not just give up? If so, finding a way to credibly precommit to yourself that you'll stay the course may help. Beeminder is an option; so is publicly announcing your project and a schedule among people whose opinion you personally care about. (I do not think LW counts for this. It's too big; the monkeysphere effect gets in the way)

Earth is currently the only known biosphere. More biospheres means that disasters that muck up one are less likely to muck up everything.

Less seriously, people like things that are cool.

EDIT: Seriously? My most-upvoted comment of all time? Really? This is as good as it gets?

1: It's awesome. It's desirable for the same reason fast cars, fun computer games, giant pyramids, and sex is.

2: It's an insurance policy against things that might wreck the earth but not other planets/solar systems.

3: Insofar as we can imagine there to be other alien races, understanding space colonization is extremely important either for trade or self defense.

4: It's possible different subsets of humanity can never happily coexist, in which case having arbitrarily large amounts of space to live in ensures more peace and stability.

Eggs, basket, x-risk.

Would you rather have one person living a happy, fulfilled life, or two? Would you rather have seven billion people living with happy, fulfilled lives, or seven billion planets full of people living happy, fulfilled lives?

It seems likely that exploiting resources in space will make society richer, benefiting everyone. Perhaps that will require people live in space.

Another reason is that the earth's crust is quite rare in virtually all precious and useful metals (just look at the d-block of the periodic table for examples). Virtually all of them sank to the core during earth's formation, the existing deposits are the result of asteroids striking. So, asteroid mining is worth considering even if you're a pure capitalist working for your own gain.

Space colonization is part of the transhumanist package of ideas originating with Nikolai Federov.

It is not the space as currently is, to be colonized. It's the radically technologically transformed space we are after!

no population cap

If you're an average utilitarian, it's still a good idea if you can make the colonists happier than average. Since it's likely that there is large amounts of wildlife throughout the universe, this shouldn't be that difficult.

Establish a strong social script regarding instances where words should be taken denotatively, e.g. Crocker's rules. I don't think any other obvious strategies work. Hidden connotations exist whether you want them to or not.

(non-existent)

This is the wrong attitude about how communication works. What matters is not what you intended to communicate but what actually gets communicated. The person you're communicating with is performing a Bayesian update on the words that are coming out of your mouth to figure out what's actually going on, and it's your job to provide the Bayesian evidence that actually corresponds to the update you want.

Become more status conscious. You are most likely inadvertently saying things that sound like status moves, which prompts others to not take what you say at face value. I haven't figured out how to fix this completely, but I have gotten better at noticing it and sometimes preempting it.

I wish I could upvote this question more. People assuming that I meant more than exactly what I said drives me up the wall, and I don't know how to deal with it either. (but Qiaochu's response below is good)

The most common failure mode I've experienced is the assumption that believing equals endorsing. One of the gratifying aspects of participating here is not having to deal with that; pretty much everyone on LW is inoculated.

Attend a CFAR workshop!

What do you want to be more rational about?

Reading "Diaminds" holds the promise to be on the track of making me a better rationalist, but so far I cannot say that with certainty, I'm only at the second chapter (source: recommendation here on LW, also the first chapter is dedicated to explaining the methodology, and the authors seem to be good rationalists, very aware of all the involved bias).

Also "dual n-back training" via dedicated software improves short term memory, which seems to have a direct impact on our fluid intelligence (source: vaguely remembered discussion here on LW, plus the bulletproofexec blog).

• Talk to a stranger
• Don't use a GPS
• Try a new food/restaurant
• If you usually drive, try getting somewhere on public transit
• Sign up for a Coursera class (that's actually happening, so you have the option to be graded.) (Note: this will be a small risk on a daily basis for many consecutive days)
• Go to a meetup at a library or game store

Apparently some study found that the difference between people with bad luck and those with good luck is that people with good luck take lots of low-downside risks.

Can't help with specific suggestions, but thinking about it in terms of the decision-theory of why it's a good idea can help to guide your search. But you're doing it for the action-feeling...

Climb a tree.

Use a randomizer to choose someone in your address book and call them immediately (don't give yourself enough time to talk yourself out of it). It is a rush thinking about what to say as the phone is ringing. You are risking your social status (by coming off wierd or awkward, in the case you don't have anything sensible to say) without really harming anyone. On the plus side, you may make a new ally or rekindle an old relationship.

When you go out to eat with friends, randomly choose who pays for the meal. In the long run this only increases the variance of your money. I think it's fun.

Going for the feeling without the actual downside? Play video games MMPRPGs. Shoot zombies until they finally overwhelm you. Shoot cops in vice city until the army comes after you. Jump out of helicopters.

I really liked therufs suggestion list below. The downside, the thing you are risking in each of these, doesn't actually harm you, it makes you stronger.

Try some exposure therapy to whatever it is you're often afraid of. Can't think of what you're often afraid of? I'd be surprised if you're completely immune to every common phobia.

I actually have a book on exactly this subject: Absinthe and Flamethrowers. The author's aim is to show you ways to take real but controllable risks.

I can't vouch for its quality since I haven't read it yet, but it exists. And, y'know. Flamethowers.

Day trading?

I think I'm simply lazy.

But I've been able to cultivate caring about particular goals/activities/habits, and then, with respect to those, I'm not so lazy - because I found them to offer frequent or large enough rewards, and I don't feel like I'm missing out on any particular type of reward. If you think you're missing something and you're not going after it, that might make you feel lazy about other things, even while you're avoiding tackling the thing that you're missing head on.

This doesn't answer your question. If I was able to do that, then I'm not just lazy.

Taboo "lazy." What kind of a person are we talking about, and do they want to change something about the kind of person they are?

What do you mean by lazy? How do you distinguish between laziness and akrasia? By lazy do you mean something like "unmotivated and isn't bothered by that" or do you mean something else?

First thing to note is that "worthy of moral consideration" is plausibly a scalar. The philosophical & scientific challenges involved in defining it are formidable, but in my books it has something to do with to what extent a non-human animal experiences suffering. So I am much less concerned with hurting a mosquito than a gorilla, because I suspect mosquitoes do not experience much of anything, but I suspect gorillas do.

Although I think ability to suffer is correlated with intelligence, it's difficult to know whether it scales with intelligence in a simple way. Sure, a gorilla is better than a mouse at problem-solving, but that doesn't make it obvious that it suffers more.

Consider the presumed evolutionary functional purpose of suffering, as a motivator for action. Assuming the experience of suffering does not require very advanced cognitive architecture, why would a mouse necessarily experience vastly less suffering that a more intelligent gorilla? It needs the motivation just as much.

To sum up, I have a preference for creatures that can experience suffering to not suffer gratuitously, as I suspect that many do (although the detailed philosophy behind this suspicion is muddy to say the least). Thus, utilitarian veganism, and also the unsolved problem of what the hell to do about the "Darwinian holocaust."

Do you think that all humans are persons? What about unborn children? A 1 year old? A mentally handicapped person?

What your criteria for granting personhood. Is it binary?

Are you confused? It seems like you recognize that you have somewhat different values than other people. Do you think everyone should have the same values? In that case all but one of the views is wrong. On the other hand, if values can be something that's different between people it's legitimate for some people to care about animals and others not to.

Three hypothesis which may not be mutually exclusive:

1) Some people disagree (with you) about whether or not some animals are persons.

2) Some people disagree (with you) about whether or not being a person is a necessary condition for moral consideration - here you've stipulated 'people' as 'things subject to moral concern', but that word may too connotative laden for this to be effective.

3) Some people disagree (with you) about 'person'/'being worthy of moral consideration' being a binary category.

I think you are confused in thinking that humans are somehow not just also running a program that reacts to pain and whatnot.

You feel sympathy for animals, and more sympathy for humans. I don't think that requires any special explanation or justification, especially when doing so results in preferences or assertions that are stupid: "I don't care about animals at all because animals and humans are ontologically distinct."

Why not just admit that you care about both, just differently, and do whatever seems best from there?

Perhaps just taking your apparent preferences at fact value like that you run into some kind of specific contradiction, or perhaps not. If you do, then you at least have a concrete muddle to resolve.

Why do you assume you're confused?

I would guess that you're not a utilitarian and a lot of LWers are. The standard utilitarian position is that all that matters is the interests of beings, and beings' utility is weighed equally regardless of what those beings are. One "unit" of suffering (or utility) generated by an animal is equal to the same unit generated by a human.