Replace religion with this dilemma and you have NS's Microkernel reliigon.

I don't see these as alternatives, more like complements.

Suppose that making correct predictions does not enable goal-accomplishing actions. We might call this Cassandra's world

It's a memorable name, but it does not need to be called anything so dramatic, given that we live in this world already. For example, most of us make a likely correct prediction that if we procrastinate less then we will be better off, yet we still waste time and regret it later.

Suppose that the path to success is not to update your model of the world, so much as to update your model of your self and goals.

Why this AIXIsm? We are a part of the world, and the most important part of it for many people, so updating your model of self is very Bayesian. Lacking this self-update is what leads to a "Cassandra's world".

I'd tell you what method, I would use to evaluate the evidence to decide in which world we are, but it seems like you denied it in the premise. ;)

That's an interesting post. Let me throw in some comments.

I am not sure about the Cassandra's world. Here's why:

• Knowing X and being able to do something about X are quite different things. A death-row prisoner might be able to make the correct prediction that he will be hanged tomorrow, but that does not "enable goal-accomplishing actions" for him -- in the Bayes' world as well. Is the Cassandra's world defined by being powerless?

• Heroes in myth defy predictions essentially by taking a wider view -- by getting out of the box (or by smashing the box altogether, or by altering the box, etc.). Almost all predictions are conditional and by messing with conditions you can affect predictions -- what will come to pass and what will not. That is not a low-level world property, that's just a function of how wide your framework is. Kobayashi Maru and all that.

As to the Buddha's world, it seems to be mostly about goals and values -- things on the subject of which the Bayes' world is notably silent.

Other than Bayes' world, which other worlds might we be living in?

A world with causes and effects. (Bayes' world as described is Cassandra's world, for the usual reasons of "prediction" not being what you want for choosing actions).

[ There was something else here, having to do with how it is hard to use causal info in a Bayesian way, but I deleted it for now in order to think about it more. You can ask me about it if interested. The moral is, it's not so easy to just be Bayesian with arbitrary types of information. ]

For one thing, we already have strong evidence rationality is a useful idea: it's called science & technology.

Cassandra's world: Mythical predictions seem to be unconditional whether Bayesian predictions are conditional on your own actions and thus can be acted upon.

Buddha's world: Well, understanding your own values and understanding how to maximize them are two tasks none of which is redundant. I think rationality is useful in understanding your own values as well, for example by analyzing them through evolutionary psychology or cognitive neuroscience. Moreover, empirically understanding of our own values also improves when learning epistemic facts and analyzing hypothetical scenarios. Without rationality it is difficult to create sufficiently precise language for formulating the values.

MIRI's publications seem to exclusively refer to TDT

Why do you say that? If I do a search for "UDT" or "TDT" on intelligence.org, I seem to get about an equal number of results.

people here on LW seem to refer pretty much exclusively to UDT in serious discussion

This seems accurate to me. I think what has happened is that UDT has attracted a greater "mindshare" on LW, to the extent that it's much easier to get a discussion about UDT going than about TDT. Within MIRI it's probably more equal between the two.

that UDT is just an uninteresting variant of TDT so as to hardly merit its own name

As I recall, Eliezer was actually the one who named UDT. (Here's the comment where he called it "updateless", which everyone else then picked up. In my original post I never gave it a name but just referred to "this decision theory".)

Has either one been fully specified/formalized?

There has been a number of attempts to formalize UDT, which you can find by searching for variations on "formal UDT" on LW. I'm not aware of a similar attempt to formalize TDT, although this paper gives some hints about how it might be done. It's not really possible to "fully" specify either one at this time because both need to interface with a to-be-discovered solution to the problem of logical uncertainty, and at this point we don't even know the type signature of such a solution. In the attempts to formalize UDT, people either make a guess as to what the type signature is, or side-step the problem by assuming that all relevant logical facts can be deduced by the agent.

I'm not serious, but I'd say that there's little actual use of TDT because it requires us to solve the difficult problem of finding the right causal and logical structure of the problem - this can be handwaved in by the user, but doing that feels awkward. Folk-UDT ("just execute the best strategy") is sufficient for most purposes, both in application and in e.g. trying to understand logical uncertainty.

On the other hand, using causal structure is what lets us consider hypotheticals properly - so TDT will not have some issues that typical-UDT does with hypotheticals about its own actions. On the mutant third hand, TDT's solution of adding logical nodes to the causal structure might just be a simplification of something deeper, so it's not like we (us non-serious decision-theory dilettantes) should put all our eggs in one basket.

Has either one been fully specified/formalized?

Here's one attempt to further formalize the different decision procedures: http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Hintze-Problem-class-dominance-in-predictive-dilemmas.pdf (H/T linked by Luke)

All the things you've heard are consistent and together they answer your final question by denying that there is a discrepancy in choice of theory, just in choice of name. (Not that I'm sure that all the things you've heard are true.)

Good questions!

This model explains tulpas

Could you elaborate? I haven't read the paper, but this connection doesn't seem obvious to me.

O_O

This explains SO MUCH of things I feel from the inside! Estimating a small probability it'll even help deal with some pretty important stuff. Wish I could upvote a million times.

I have suffered from social anxiety continuously and depression off and on since childhood. I've sought treatment that included talk therapy and medication. Currently I am doing EMDR therapy which may or may not end up being helpful, but I don't expect it to work miracles. Everyone in my immediate family has had similar issues throughout their lives. I feel your pain. Despite not being perfect and being in therapy, I feel like my life is going pretty well. Here is what has worked for me:

Acceptance: Not everyone can be or should be the life of the party. Being quiet or reserved or shy is a perfectly acceptable way to live your life. You can still work on becoming comfortable in more social situations but you are fine right now. There are plenty of people who will like you just as you are, even if you social skills are far from perfect. Harsh self-judgement can make anxiety worse and lead to procrastination and depression. What I try to do as best I can is to just do whatever I feel like in the moment, and just let the world correct me. I try not to develop too many theories about how the world will react to me since I know from experience that those theories will be biased and pessimistic.

Decide what you want from the world: I guess this is somewhat generic life advice, but it has really worked for me. I decided fairly early on what I wanted to get from the social world. I wanted 3 things.

• marriage
• children
• a good career

Deciding those things, I plugged away at getting them. I was completely incompetent at talking to women but with some help from e-harmony I found one who I was able to be comfortable with and who liked me. We got married 6.5 years ago and we have a 2 year old daughter and another child on the way. Professionally, I found a career that involves a minimum of politicking and no customer interaction. And yet it is both intellectually satisfying and highly remunerative. Even though neither my home life nor my professional life are perfect, achieving my basic life goals has given me a deep feeling of confidence and satisfaction that I can use to counter feelings of anxiety and depression as they come.

Each step I took along the path towards my goals gave me more confidence to move forward, but that confidence wasn't necessarily automatic. I have to periodically brag to myself about myself because otherwise I will naturally focus on my failures and weaknesses and start to feel like a loser. You should be very proud of your accomplishments in college. Most people could not do what you have done. Remind yourself of that. Feel good about yourself.

but a reaction to an environment in the broadest sense inherently unsuitable to humans.

So, can you say more about what aspect of your environment is bugging you? Captivity?? Do you want to try living somewhere more "outdoors"?

How strong is the evidence in favor of psychological treatment really?

I think the evidence shows that it works for some people, doesn't work for other people, and the spectrum of outcomes stretches all the way from "miraculously fixed everything" to "made everything worse" :-/

Oh, and "some people" and "other people" refers not just to the person being treated, but to a patient/psychotherapist pair. It is fairly common for people to have no success with a chain of therapists until they find "the one" who clicks and can effectively help with whatever the problem is.

Sorry, but there is really no answer to the question as posed.

We see these phenomena consistently in people. We also see them consistently in animals being held in captivity not suited to their species' specific needs. I am less and less convinced that this block of anxiety, depression and procrastination is a disease but a reaction to an environment in the broadest sense inherently unsuitable to humans.

What does it mean for a dog to be procrastinating?

Procrastination usually involves human wanting to do things that are not natural.

I used to believe that procrastination was something very unique to me but today I believe that nearly everyone struggles with it to some extend. Even someone like Tim Ferriss who advises a dozen startups and writes a book at the same time still deals with it. People who are productive simply have found strategies to still be productive despite being imperfect humans.

I am open to bibliotherapy.

You already read Burns. How about doing 15 minutes per day of his exercises for the next year?

We see these phenomena consistently in people. We also see them consistently in animals being held in captivity not suited to their species' specific needs. I am less and less convinced that this block of anxiety, depression and procrastination is a disease but a reaction to an environment in the broadest sense inherently unsuitable to humans.

I've heard the idea from Somatic Experiencing-- unfortunately, I haven't found anything that goes into detail about that particular angle, except that part of it seems to be about having a tribe-- it's not just about spending time out of doors.

I'll be keeping an eye out for information on the subject, but meanwhile, you might want to look into Somatic Experiencing and Peter A. Levine.

Consider neurofeedback administered by a professional. In the U.S. it will cost between $50/200 a session. You probably need at least 20 sessions for permanent results, but you might be able to feel some effects during the first session.

How strong is the evidence in favor of psychological treatment really?

Existent. But psychological treatment is in it's infancy. I am not a licensed mental health professional, but watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_rI2N6Fco

Now, go find a therapist who's at least 45 years old, preferably 50-plus, is not burned out, and loves what they do. It doesn't really matter what the therapeutic modality is. Don't go to a thirty-something CBT-weenie.

Edit: A bunch of recent posts on my blog are about therapy. May or may not be useful:

http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/

some personal anecdotes /data points from someone in a similar situation (social anxiety,depression,procrastination to the point of dropping out of uni,going abroad): I was lucky with my CBT-psychotherapist,they helped me unravelling that big knot of connected issues. I am still suffering, but now equipped to deal with it. That said, I decided to travel for 8month (NZ),basically as frontal override for some of my issues. Be aware traveling with mental issues can terribly backfire; you are on your own without your usual escape strategies. Depending on your flavour of issues, strategies to get around that vary but expect and be resolved to have the same bad days like at home. Having heaps of money to get your own room/room service/fast food/return tickets helps; ensure a really solid safety net from home (someone to lend you money,do minor services for you,people to call at strange times, people to call you regularly). Do not expect the condition "abroad" to change you quickly- you'll still find it harder to get to know people than others. Expect lots of gras is greener-fallacy; I caught my brain giving the exactly same reasons for going home early that it gave month ago for going away. That said,was going away a good decision? Yes. Was it the optimal decision? I am not sure.

Making friends is hard with social anxiety but I think it's your best bet.

Who are you, what are your physical and social environments like, and do you do the obvious things like lifting weights (or at least similar if you're female) and eating "right"?

The only reason to pay someone for non-specific therapy is if you don't have any friends, and even then you can't be truly honest without risking being institutionalized.

It's not useful to discuss whether or not anxiety, depression, or procrastination is a "disease." It either is or isn't a useful way to adapt to the current environment, and if it's not useful you want to change either your reaction or your environment.

But the theoretical basis intrigued me. It just made so much more sense to be determined by one's beliefs than a fear of having one's balls chopped off, hating their parents and actively seeking out displeasure because that is what fits the narrative.

If by psychological treatment, you mean the Freudian kind, that's mostly BS.

Here are some things people might describe as "unfair":

• Someone shortchanges you. You buy what's advertised as a pound of cheese, only to find out at home that it's only four-fifths of a pound; the storekeeper had their thumb on the scale to deliberately mis-weigh it.
• Someone passes off a poor-quality item as a good one. You buy a sealed box of cookies, only to find out that half of them are broken and crumbled due to mishandling at the store.
• Someone entrusted with a decision abuses that trust to their advantage. The facilities manager of a company doesn't hire the landscaping company that makes the best offer to the company, but instead the one that offers the best kickback to the facilities manager.
• Someone uses a position of power to take something that isn't theirs; especially when the victim can't do anything about it. A boy's visiting grandmother gives him $50 to buy a video game for his birthday; but as soon as the grandmother has left, the boy's mother takes the money away and uses it to buy liquor for herself.
• Someone abandons a responsibility, leaving it to others to cover. Four people go out to dinner together; and the bill comes to $100. One person excuses himself "to go to the restroom," but doesn't come back, so the others have to pay his share of the bill as well as their own.
• Someone takes advantage of a person's weak or ignorant position. A taxi driver, knowing that a tourist doesn't know the city, takes a deliberately circuitous route to run up the meter.
• Someone uses asymmetrical information to deprive others of a stronger negotiating position. An employer tells each of her employees individually that they are poor performers, easily replaceable, and unlikely to get a raise; so that they do not realize that together they are not easily replaceable and that by collective bargaining they could negotiate for higher wages.
• Someone breaks agreed-upon rules to take something of value. A poker player uses a trick to put a card into play that wasn't dealt to him — the classic "ace up the sleeve" — in order to win money that another player would have won.
• Someone entrusted to do a good job instead does a bad job in order to gain an advantage some other way. A star sports player deliberately plays poorly so his team will lose a game they are strongly favored to win, allowing people who have bet against his team to win big.
• Someone gets away with breaking the rules by making outside arrangements with those responsible for enforcing them. By donating to the "police charitable fund," you get a bumper sticker that makes it less likely the police will pull you over if you break the traffic laws.

What sorts of things do you see in common among these situations?

It's not a theistic concept - if anything, it predates theology(some animals have a sense of fairness, for example). We build social structures to enforce it, because those structures make people better off. The details of fairness algorithms vary, but the idea that people shouldn't be cheated is quite common.

What does that even mean?

I am with Stanislaw Lem -- it's hard to communicate in general, not just about fairness. I find so many communication scenarios in life resemble first contact situations..

It's a cultural norm. If someone constantly defects in prisoner dilemma he's violating the norm of fairness and deverses to be punished for doing so.

The sense of fairness evolved to make our mental accounting of debts (that we owe and are owed) more salient by virtue of being a strong emotion, similar to how a strong emotion of lust makes the reproductive instinct so tangible. This comes in handy because humans are highly social and intelligent and engage in positive-sum economic transactions, so long as both sides play fair... according to your adapted sense of what's fair. If you don't have a sharp sense of fairness other people might walk all over you, which is not evolutionarily adaptive. See "The Moral Animal" or "Nonzero" by Robert Wright, or the chapter "Family Vaules" in Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works."

This sense of fairness may have been co-opted at other levels, like a religious or political one, but it's quite instinctual. Very young children have a strong sense of fairness before they could reason to it, just as they can acquire language before they could explicitly/consciously reason from grammar rules to produce grammatical sentences. It's very engrained in our mental structure, so I think it would take quite an effort to "wipe the concept."

So, as I've heard Mike Munger explain it, fairness is evolution's solution to the equilibrium outcome selection problem. "Solution to the what?" you ask. This would be easy to explain if you're familiar with the Edgeworth box.

In a simplified economy consisting of two people and two goods, where the two people have some combination of different tastes and different initial baskets of things. Suppose that you have 20 oranges and 5 apples, and that I have 3 oranges and 30 apples, and that we each prefer more even numbers of fruits than either extreme. We can trade apples and oranges to make each of us strictly better off, but there's a whole continuum of possible trades that make us better off. And with your highly advanced social brain, you can tell that some of these trades are shit deals, like when I offer you 1 apple for 12 of your oranges. Even though we'd both mutually benefit, you'd be inclined to immediately counteroffer with something a closer to the middle of the continuum of mutually beneficial exchanges, or a point that benefits you more as a reprimand for my being a jerk. Dealing fairly with each other skips costly repeated bargaining, and standing up to jerks who deviate from approximate fairness preserves the norm.

This is the sort of intuition that we're trying to test for in the Ultimatum game.

"Fairness" generally means one out of two things.

Either it's, basically, a signal of attitude -- to call something "fair" is to mean "I approve of it" -- or it is a rhetorical device in the sense of a weapon in an argument.

I think that people generally have gut ideas about what fairness entails, but they are fuzzy, bendable, and subject to manipulation, both by cultural norms and by specific propaganda/arguments.

According to Moral Foundations Theory, fairness is one of the innate moral instincts.

According to Scott Adams, fairness was invented so children and idiots can participate in arguments.

I think we have a fairness instinct mostly so we can tell clever stories about why our desire for more stuff is more noble than greed.

It might be that "fairness" is part of our ingrained terminal values. Of course it doesn't mean you shouldn't violate "fairness" when the violation is justified by positive utility elsewhere. However, beware of over-trusting your reasoning.

Tracing the memetic roots back, you could say that 'fairness' derives from the assumption that all humans have equal inherent worth, which I suppose you could link back to religious ideals. Natural rights follow from this same chain, but it's not obvious to me what concepts came first and caused the others (never mind what time they were formalized).

If you want to strike it from your thinking, keep in mind that fairness is a core assumption of our social landscape, for better or worse. It can be worth keeping solely because people might hate you if you don't.

The word "fairness" has been subject to a lot of semantic drift during the past century. Here is a blog post by Bart Wilson, describing the older definition, which frankly I think makes a lot more sense.

It was surprising to see that the camel has two humps, that is, one part of the population seems to be incapable of learning programming, while the other is.

The study you're probably thinking of failed to replicate with a larger sample size. While success at learning to code can be predicted somewhat, the discrepancies are not that strong.

http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/

The researcher didn't distinguish the conjectured cause (bimodal differences in students' ability to form models of computation) from other possible causes. (Just to name one: some students are more confident; confident students respond more consistently rather than hedging their answers; and teachers of computing tend to reward confidence).

And the researcher's advisor later described his enthusiasm for the study as "prescription-drug induced over-hyping" of the results ...

Clearly further research is needed. It should probably not assume that programmers are magic special people, no matter how appealing that notion is to many programmers.

See also the comments of Yvain's What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It? for a broad selection of examples of how human minds vary.

There are three separate issues:

(a) The concept of averaging. There is nothing wrong with averages. People here like maximizing expected utility, which is an average. "Effects" are typically expressed as averages, but we can also look at distribution shapes, for instance. However, it's important not to average garbage.

(b) The fact that population effects and subpopulation effects can differ. This is true, and not surprising. If we are careful about what effects we are talking about, Simpson's paradox stops being a paradox.

(c) The fact that we should worry about confounders. Full agreement here! Confounders are a problem.

I think one big problem is just the lack of basic awareness of causal issues on the part of the general population (bad), scientific journalists (worse!), and sometimes even folks who do data analysis (extremely super double-plus awful!). Thus much garbage advice gets generated, and much of this garbage advice gets followed, or becomes conventional wisdom somehow.

The Eurythmics said it best:

I travel the world and the seven seas

Everybody's looking for something

Some of them want to use you

Some of them want to get used by you

Some of them want to abuse you

Some of them want to be abused

You might also want to work on eliminating embarrassment.

It's time to stop rationalizing, and instead try the approach that's overwhelmingly recommended.

Have you considered not running as your primary exercise program? If you aren't specifically going for the performance of running, I would shelve it and instead cut calories (assuming you have extra weight to lose) and lift heavy things at the gym. Distance running is great for distance running.

I have been in multiple running groups and they are great for achieving goals like 26.2 miles, but after that, I wanted to optimize for looks and not for long distances (any more).

The best general advice I can give you is:

1. Be honest with yourself when determining your current abilities. There's no shame in building slowly. It just means you get to improve even more.

2. Not every day is a hard day. There are huge benefits to varying your workouts. If you're running about the same distance each day you run, you're doing it wrong. Some days should be shorter, more intense intervals broken up by very slow jogs or walks, while other days should be "active recovery" days of short, slow runs, while other days you might go for distance and a sustained pace. Just to give an idea, even elite athletes will not usually do more than 2-3 hard (interval) days each week. You will want to start with 0 or 1.

3. Watch your volume: Slowly increase your total miles / week over time. Make sure you start low enough not to get repetitive stress injuries.

I was once a fairly successful runner and have a lot of experience with designing training programs for both distance running and weightlifting. I'd be happy to help you design your running program or to look over your program once you do some research and put something together. Let me know!

I've continued to run intensely and in short bursts

Do you mean walk-run-walk-run in a single session? Or that you do short intense sessions with no walking?

Is there any specific reason why you've been avoiding those approaches (e.g. where you slowly increase)? You mention that you told yourself "It isn't for me," but haven't told us why.

because I felt embarrassed to have to walk any

Something I've had trouble with now that I'm starting to run is finding a running/jogging speed that takes as little energy, while still not walking. The last time I ran I finally found it and severely decreased the time I spend walking. It might be helpful to find that speed. I can guarantee you that it will feel very slow.

there's evidence that it isn't-- going to sleep is the opposite of being mindful, and a mindfulness practice can make sleep more difficult.

It's opposite in some regards but not all of them. Both sleep and mindfulness meditation usually lead to very little beta wave activity in the brain.

I don't have a Zeo myself but it wouldn't surprise me if I could reach a state in meditation where I'm mindful but the Zeo labels me as sleeping.

As far as researching whether meditation improves how well you feel, I think that's hard. 5 years ago, if you asked me how I'm feeling than a real answer might be good or bad. Maybe even 7 different stages of a Likert scale. Today a full answer might take 5 minutes because I have awareness of a lot of stuff that goes on inside myself. If you simply compare the values towards those 5 years ago I don't think that would tell you very much. There was a while when I tried to keep numbers about my daily happiness level but after a while I simply gave up because it didn't seem to provide useful insight because they reference points aren't stable.

After I started meditating mindfully, my anxiety got worse, a lot worse. I talked about this on meditation forums and they said it means that "I'm working on my problems" and I should just keep doing it more and more and I would somehow overcome it. Well, I tried to, but my anxiety only got worse. Currently I have a small break from meditating.

Thanks, this is one of the very few meditation papers that seem to be worth reading, since as they observe:

The important thing to understand about the report is that they were looking for active control groups, and they found that only 47 out of over 18,000 studies had them, which is pretty telling

In your list you didn't mention the topic of getting children. If you marry someone with the intention of spending the rest of your life together with them, I think you should be on the same page with regards to getting children before you marry.

What exactly do you think/hope will change between the current situation (which I assume involves you two living together) and the situation if you were to marry?

Don't get married unless there is a compelling reason to do so. There's a base rate of 40-50% for divorce, and at least some proportion of existing marriages are unhealthy and unhappy. Divorce is one of the worst things that can happen to you, and many of the benefits of marriage to happiness are because happier people are more likely to get married in the first place.

She has said that she doesn't want to marry me if she's just my female best friend that I sleep with.

What are her feelings about you? Are you "just" her "male best friend that she sleeps with"? Your post comes across as rather asymmetric.

We both are concerned that I've not really had a relationship not with her, so there are no points of comparison for me to make.

Aren't you "both concerned" that she had too many relationships and so may decide that you are not for her precisely because she has these "points of comparison"? I suspect that she is the dominant partner in this relationship, possibly because she is more mentally mature, and this is often a warning flag.

She sometimes gets mad at me for things I'm "just supposed to know" to do, not do, say, or not say. I'm not sure if she's right and I'm a jerk.

Do you get mad at her for things she is just supposed to know to do, say or not say?

Anyway. DO NOT GET MARRIED YET until you figure out how to be an equal in this relationship (and if you think that you are, then you are fooling yourself).

I don't know what is the significance of marriage for you, except symbolic. IMO the truly critical point is having kids. You probably want to have stable income before that.

Regarding things you're "just supposed to know": same thing happens to me with my wife. Haven't stopped us from being together for 10 years and raising a 4 year old son. Different people see things differently and have different assumptions on what is "obvious". The important thing is being mutually patient and forgiving (I know it's easier said than done, but it's doable).

Regarding the "extra feeling". Don't really know what to tell you. It is difficult to compare emotional experiences of different people. When our relationship started, it was mad, passionate infatuation. Now it's something calmer but it is obvious to me we love each other.

I had few relationships apart from my wife and virtually no serious relationships. Never bothered me.

Married guys make more on average, but the arrow of causality could point in either direction or come from something else.

And married women make less, so even assuming the arrow of causality is entirely from marital status to income it's not clear to me what would happen to your combined income.

As a starting point, run through this: http://www.justfourguys.com/female-divorce-risk-calculator/

Also, you should be the reluctant one, not her.

And, if neither of you are willing to live an at-least vaguely biblical marriage, then civilization would probably be better of with you just donating sperm to a sperm bank, keeping her from sleeping around, and encouraging her to marry someone who is stereotypically Christian and for whom she would be willing to convert.

She sometimes gets mad at me for things I'm "just supposed to know" to do, not do, say, or not say.

Well, you are. Pending more life experience, find the most un-politicallycorrect Game blogger you can stomach and start there.

Not like I have anything against AI and machine learning literature, but can you give examples of misconceptions?

Do you have a recommendation for a resource that explains the basics in a decent matter?

What would you consider the "very basics"?

there are a lot of misconceptions in this regard.

What are some of the most blatant? Sorry to ask a question so similar to Squark's.

Shouldn't Banzen's second question be something like "For a Tyvar of Arlos, is making friends frumful, flobulent, grattic, or slupshy?"?

I don't really know anything about the Tyvar of Arlos, so I'm pretty confused on this front, but I'm fairly sure you're relating a Talmudic anecdote, not a Zen one ;-). "Forbidden, permissible, laudable, or obligatory" says to me that we're contemplating halachah.

Sounds to me like the master's jumping to more conclusions than the student is, here. His response makes sense if he wanted to break a sufficiently specific deontology (at least at interspecies scope), but there are a lot of more general things you could say about morality that aren't yet ruled out by the student's question.

How is this a failure of imagination? Why is the question parochial?

It worked reasonably well for me.

There's no standardized list.

Basically it turns out that it's really hard to get people to measure specific stuff and it's often a lot more useful if people measure value that they care about.

I think that Quantified Mind provides some high-value tests. So long as you're willing to sit down and take a test, you can get data on:

• Reaction Time
• Visuo-spacial memory
• Executive Function
• Working Memory
• Verbal learning
• Motor function

Also, looking at what Gwern tracks, it seems helpful to have long-run data on subjective mood and energy. I randomly sample myself on that with PACO. PACO can allow you to poll yourself on any kind of thing you can imagine, like whether you're sitting, standing, or walking, or whether you're in public or private.

Edit: Added detail on QM.

I wonder what the person who submitted the number 1488 was thinking. (Maximizing their answer, perhaps.)

The quiz seems to target at people who are different then me. I don't watch TV so, it's hard for my to give an answer about channel surfing. I don't listen to the radio. The same goes for renting videos.

That quiz looks like it could use an update to fit modern society. It was hard to answer questions about "channel surfing" or "renting videos" in the modern era of hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. Also, thinking back to the days of actual video rental stores, it was much easier to choose a movie there than it is to choose one on Netflix. Possibly because the Netflix selections tends towards "second rate movies I've never heard of OR first rate movies that I've already watched or am not interested in")

Anyways, I am a natural maximizer, which causes lots of stress towards decisions, so I've trained myself towards being a satisficer. I often try to think of decisions in the framework of "it doesn't matter that much WHAT I decide to do here, so long as I just make a decision and move forward with it".

I think about research where they show that the hardest decisions are the least important (if it was obvious which option was significantly better, then it wouldn't be a hard decision.) I think about research where they show that people are happier with decisions when they can't back out of them, so don't second-guess them. I think about cost-benefit analysis and how maximizing that particular decision probably isn't worth the time or stress.

A specific example: I tend to have trouble deciding what to order at restaurants. Knowing that whatever they serve at a restaurant is going to be relatively good, it's not that important what I decide. So when the waitress asks if everyone is ready to order I say "yes", even though I'm not ready, knowing that I will have to choose SOMETHING when it gets to me, and in reality I would be happy with any of the options.

Giving neutral answers to every question is 'maximizer tendencies', which seems odd.

You must have excellent compartmentalization skills.

I'm an Orthodox Jew (Modern Orthodox). Since Mr. Yudkowsky's work is - obviously - apikorsus of the highest level, I read it l'havin ul'horos, mostly, but enjoy the thinking in it anyway.

My Straussian reading of Tyler Cowen is that a "serious" MIRI would be assembling and training a team of hacker-assassins to go after potential UFAIs instead of dinking around with decision theory.

A "serious" MIRI would operate in absolute secrecy, and the "public" MIRI would never even hint at the existence of such an organisation, which would be thoroughly firewalled from it. Done right, MIRI should look exactly the same whether or not the secret one exists.

Excerpts and discussion on MR: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/04/nick-becksteads-conversation-with-tyler-cowen.html

Hackers / assassins would at best postpone the catastrophe, not avoid it.

My Straussian reading of Tyler Cowen is that a "serious" MIRI would be assembling and training a team of hacker-assassins to go after potential UFAIs instead of dinking around with decision theory.

If you ideas of being serious is to train a team of hacker-assassins that might indicate that your project is doomed from the start.

parts of the US government that trained people to infiltrate the post-collapse Soviet Union and then locate and neutralize nuclear weapons."

As far as I know there are still nuclear weapons in the post-collapse Soviet Union.

"the parts of the US government that trained people to infiltrate the post-collapse Soviet Union and then locate and neutralize nuclear weapons."

What is he talking about? Sam Nunn?

training a team of hacker-assassins

A team of slightly more sophisticated Terminators, right?

Oh, wait... :-D

To put differently, given two actions A & B with expected utilities U & V, you should choose A over B iff U > V. Only the relative ordering of U & V is meaningful, not the absolute difference (the utility function can be scaled arbitrarily anyway).

UPDATE: somervta with a large chunk of story

Discussed occasionally: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=%22simulation%20argument%22%20site%3Alesswrong.com

The argument falls apart once you use UDT instead of naive anthropic reasoning: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jv4/open_thread_1117_march_2014/aoym

I've seen it. It seemingly ignores the possibility that humanity will not go extinct [EDIT: in the near future, possibly into the tens of megayears] but will also never reach a 'posthuman state' capable of doing arbitrary ancestor simulations.

When I was a kid, our cats used a similar tactic to escape the laundry room with a closed door. One would sit on the dryer and turn the handle with both paws and the other would push against the door with their head.

Hey, I have good news for you. I just tried those practice problems and timed myself to see if I could give you something to compare to (and for fun). I completed the first four in about an hour and 10 minutes (though I am a bit out of practice). Those practice problems are not trivial; they take some thought. I didn't have to use any outside resources, but I did have to test quite a few things out in the terminal as I was coding it.

For background: I am self taught, but I've been programming for almost 2 years. I have done freelance rails programming. I have built multiple rails apps from the ground up by myself. One of these is still in use by multimillion dollar company as a part of their client onboarding program. I've been offered a job as a rails developer, though I didn't end up taking it as I had a higher paying offer on the business end of things.

So I say don't worry if you have a bit of trouble with it. If you felt like you were looking things up all the time, then you just need some more practice. For the algorithm design part (especially the mathy ones), look into Project Euler. It's a great list of problems to get practice and you can use whatever language you want to find the answer, so use Ruby. Practice taking the problems apart into pieces, using helper functions, and writing the pseudocode before you actually code anything. That will make this style of thinking feel more natural.

Feel free to PM me if you want to talk more.

Use the try harder Luke.

What do you mean by "not new to programming at all"? How many hours programming have you done? How many projects have you completed? Because unless you've had a job as a programmer before or you did CS as a college degree your previous experience will be utterly swamped by App Academy. If you feel insecure about algorithms specifically practice them specifically. If you want more practice with Ruby maybe do Hartl's book. The Codecademy Ruby course is not the end of the world. If programming appeals to you prepare, apply and let App academy do the judging.

Edit: Remember, many people who have had jobs as programmers can't do FizzBuzz if asked to in an interview. Retain hope.

The Feeling Good Handbook. It focuses specifically on Depression and Anxiety, but could probably be useful for anyone.

For someone skilled enough to choose your location and who thinks long-term enough to live very cheaply for a number of years, higher nominal wages means higher absolute savings amounts.

Live somewhere expensive when you're getting started, and move somewhere cheap when you're slowing down.

Cost of living is an overblown statistic because dumb people spend their money poorly. You can live in expensive areas on the cheap without that much effort. This isn't to say that living in the bay area isn't more expensive than many other areas, but it certainly isn't as expensive as the cost of living calculations would make it seem.

In some fields, doing freelance work for clients in a country with low purchasing power while living in one with high purchasing power is an option.

Living standard as quantified is not particularly helpful to the individual. Someone might be comparatively far better off living in malaysia with a long-distance high paying freelance programming job, but I think you'll find that being around cultural compatriots is not to be ignored.

Alright, i'm going to get enough karma and just start this myself until some one stops me. I also kind of need this, so I don't destroy my life through some other unspecified means.

I was diagnosed non-hyperactive ADD as a kid, though I haven't done meds for that since middle school. It's been suggested that it was a misdiagnosis for asperger's.

LifeTracking

Sleep as Android is what I use on a tablet under my pillow to keep track of how long i actually spend trying to sleep, as well as if my sleep cycle seems to contain coherent deep-to-not-deep cycles.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/

Drawing from the real life is especially useful for someone who is learning to draw. It teaches you that drawing is not simply about holding a pen and drawing the correct lines, but it's also about seeing and thinking correctly. We tend to think in terms of shapes, outlines and symbols, but such things don't represent the reality very well. You should be thinking in terms of form and contour.

Here's a good video about it.

I think this post is a good start:

So forget drawing humans for a while and start painting simple primitives. Cylinders, spheres, spheres with a section sliced off, cylinders which end with a sphere, stuff like that. Don't even color them, just work in grayscale and try to get the lighting right. Use real cylinders or photos of cylinders as reference. Buy some clay, sculpt some simple primitives and draw those. Do it over and over again while looking at what you see instead of drawing what you think you see. The more you do it, the faster you'll get better.

And when you feel comfortable with basic forms, you can start combining them into more elaborate forms. When you use reference, try to see the basic shapes of which your reference form consists of. A human head is like a sphere, with both sides sliced off, attached to a cylinder. Of course, there's a LOT more to human heads. Keep it simple until you're comfortable with drawing tens, if not hundreds of primitive contours together, because that's what heads consist of.

If you're drawing from reference (which you should be doing), try flipping the reference image upside down before drawing a single stroke. This can trick your brain into actually looking at form instead of sticking with the symbolic shapes which are deeply ingrained with how you look at the world. Crop the reference image to a tiny area, then try to replicate it as closely as possible. Then do it again even better. And again and again etc.

So draw a lot, draw from the real life and draw from reference and begin to think in 3D.

I think Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is probably pretty effective because one of its main point is the above - that you should just draw what you see and not think in terms of symbols when you draw. The underlying idea about the brain hemispheres is pseudoscience, but that doesn't mean it can't still teach useful lessons.

There's an (unfinished) set of posts about rationality and drawing written by Raemon, Drawing LessWrong p2 p3 p4 p5 that might answer your questions (in the articles or comments.)

What's the current policy on bare downvoting, as in downvoting a comment/post without giving at least a short explanation for why one did so?

There ain't no policy. People up- and down-vote as they please.

If the alternative is no feedback at all, downvoting without explanation is a better option.

This is a common question from the new participants. First, there is no policy on downvoting. There can't be, because there is no enforcement mechanism. There are, however, recommendations, like "downvote something you would like to see less of", which is often mixed up with "downvote everything I disagree with", or worse, with "downvote every comment by a user I dislike, regardless of content, to force them post less". At least one prominent regular has been accused of this last one. Second, commenting on why you downvote tends to result in the comment being downvoted, which discourages such comments very effectively.

it's frustrating and a poor feedback mechanism.

Yes, but only in the beginning. Once you have a few hundred karma, a downvote is just an indication that someone disliked your post, nothing more. And if all your comments are universally liked, you must be doing something wrong.

I'd say that even more important than giving explanation is not downvoting merely because you disagree. The signal transmitted by downvoting is "I don't want the hear this" or in simpler language "shut up". This should be reserved to fight content which is offensive, spam, trolling, rampant crackpottery, blatant off-topic etc. Mistakes made in good faith don't deserve a downvote. I'd say it is an extension of the "Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever." rule. The alternative is death spirals, blue-green politics and plainly ruining the community experience for everyone.

I personally made a rule of upvoting any content with net negative score which doesn't deserve a downvote, even if I disagree, especially when it's a comment of a person I'm currently arguing against. I want arguments that are discussions in which both sides are trying to arrive at the truth, not fights or two-people-showing-off-how-smart-they-are (is there a name for it?).

What's the current policy on bare downvoting, as in downvoting a comment/post without giving at least a short explanation for why one did so?

Well, Eliezer's policy tends towards "replying to downvote-worthy comments tends to start flame wars and is thus discouraged".