Open Thread, Jul. 6 - Jul. 12, 2015

Ask rationalists for Skype conversations! I'll set one up with you if you wish!

"searching for groups to join that are at least adjacent to my interests." Why limit it even to these? To extend your analogy: if you're about to fall over dead from starvation, you'd accept most any food.

Common hardship is great for quickly cementing group relationships. You could volunteer time at a charity that will throw together a random group of people at sweaty, repetitive work for an afternoon. You could join a sports team and coalesce around hatred of your rivals.

I'm a relatively new addition to the LessWrong community with high innate intelligence and lower-than-average education. This leaves me at a sour spot between flourishing in the LW community and flourishing among normal people. I've felt similar things as a result. Hit me up whenever.

Am I missing something glaringly obvious? Please tell me I am.

You are. If life gives you lemons, etc. What you need to do, instead of exploiting the fuck out of your town for your current interests, is aiming at exploring new interests.
Volunteer at an animal shelter. Learn to dance. Attend a gym.
It's not the case that you already know all the things that interest you.

Depending on your free time, engage in some hobbyist activity.

E.g. subscribe to a foreign language course, where you'll meet some people and gain the additional benefit of learning (at least the basics of) a foreign language (might not be applicable if you are in the USA).

Are you a college student or in academia in any way? That would mean you probably know about someone who you would find interesting to talk to. If so, don't hesitate to contact them (unless there is a specific reason why you should not.)

Besides the good advice you already got, try OkCupid.

Specifically, look into possible contacts in another town less than one hour away that you could visit on evenings, or in towns less than three hours away that you could visit on weekends.

You aren't possibly within range of Slate Star Codex meetups, by any chance?

(I am painfully aware that being in the same state (never mind country) is insufficient to provide easy access to people/events, but it seemed worth asking.)

Taboo "psychdelic". What kind of images they are?

Leaves the euro which causes an economic collapse which causes a political collapse and the emergence of a new government which makes nice with Germany and gets lots of money from the EU. (25% likely)

Gets a big loan from Russia that prevents an economic collapse (20% likely)

Comes to an agreement that locks in its bad but not horrible economic situation for another decade. (35% likely)

If anyone would have a way of knowing, that kind of methodology would have made us mega-rich long ago by investing, shorting etc.

Sort of if you don't see millions of dollars suddenly going to effective altruism and MIRI then LW is probably not that much better at figuring it out as anyone else :)

Greece fiats debt, kicked out of EU, economic problems not as severe as expected. Other small nations are emboldened to cancel their debts.

I was thinking of visiting the Greek islands this September. Is this looking unwise? I would have booked already if not for the crisis. I've no problem taking enough cash with me for the whole trip, but what will the state of the infrastructure and public order be in two months?

The most important fork is whether Greece will stay in the Euro zone (we're not talking about EU, but about the zone of the shared currency, the euro) or will leave it and go back to drachmas.

Keep in mind that leaving euro and introducing drachmas is not a single action, but a process that takes at least a few months. Arguably, Greece has already started on this way.

I am pretty sure we will see Greek government IOUs (scrip) in circulation soon.

The Tsipras government doesn't look to be either willing or able to come to an agreement with the Troika. The interesting question is whether it will be kicked out of power before the conversion to drachmas becomes irreversible (in the medium term). Keep in mind that there are valid economic reasons for Greece to prefer having its own currency.

EY made a whole series of posts about this idea. A Human's Guide to Words. Specifically see the Cluster Structure of Thingspace.

I've yet to read the paper, so forgive me if it's repeated there (but I will read it), but the situation is similar to NP problems: hard to find a solution, easy to check a solution.
Maybe concepts are NP problems encoded in our brains.

Do they make you angry and defensive when you contemplate them on your own? When you read a book making those claims? When discussing them privately with someone else? Only when you discuss them in company?

If the answer isn't "all of those" then maybe it would be helpful to try to evaluate those claims in a context that doesn't stir up anger and defensiveness.

I think it's very easy to go from "person has made claim which, if it actually became policy and was followed through harshly, would make my life very bad" to "that inimical policy is right here and much be opposed with all available force". It can be worth checking on the actual threat level.

You might want to examine what sort of in-group out-group dynamics are at play here, as well as some related issues. I know I run into these things frequently--I find the best defense mechanism for me is to try to examine the root of where feelings come from originally, and why certain ideas are so threatening.

Some questions that you can ask yourself:

1. Are these claims (or their claimants) subtly implying that I am in a group of "the bad guys"?
2. Is part of my identity wrapped up in the things that these claims are against?
3. Do I have a gut instinct that the claims are being made in bad faith or through motivated reasoning?
4. If I accept these claims as true, would I need to dramatically reevaluate my worldview?
5. If everyone accepted these claims as true, would the world change in a way that I find threatening or troubling?

None of these will refute the claims, but they may help you understand your defensiveness.

I find it helpful to remind myself that I don't need to have a strongly held opinion on everything. In fact, it's good to be able to say "I don't really know" about all the things you're not an expert in.

A useful tool when you try to leave a defensive "I believe that..." stance is to leave it in a specific direction: The aggressive "I want to find out if..." stance. Because the anger means it is a strongly motivated behavior, and you can't simply stop being motivated - but sometimes you can build up an alternative motivation that happens to compete with the one you want to let go of, and pursue it. Of course this only works if you actually "want to know if" more than you want to defend "your" position - but since you're on LW, there's a good chance your thirst for knowledge is way above average, so maybe it can win out.

I don't know if the following is true for you specifically, but for some people, issues like you're having can be the result of having had past confrontations about specific topics that went bad. More to the point, confrontations with people who were not open to sober evaluations and a search for common ground. In such situations, getting angry can be adaptive in that it at least gets you out of an unwinnable argument, so maybe you learned that behavior in that kind of situation. Does that ring a bell?

If it does, simply recognizing that's what's happening is much of the work needed to change it. The rest could be to very consciously remind yourself who you're talking to, who you're not talking to, and be aware of the differences between them.

Sometimes it can help to understand where the person is coming from, why they have formed the impression that they have. It doesn't mean that they are right about the claims. But it can make it less frustrating to listen to them, and may provide an opportunity for gently nudging them in a better direction, or educating them as to a more accurate picture of the situation.

Defensiveness is what John Gottman calls one of the 4 Horsemen of Relationships. Gottman studies couples in his lab, so his ideas about relationships are based on data. There is discussion of defensiveness in his books, and several posts on the Gottman Institute blog, such as this post http://www.gottmanblog.com/archives/2014/10/31/self-care-defensiveness?rq=self%20care

The other thing to look into is why it stings so much. If you can figure out why it bothers you more than more neutral topics, then you might be able to see past the things that are making it difficult to evaluate the claims.

It's also possible that all of the specific claims are not true, but that there is nevertheless a problem, just in a different area than the person who is making the claim thinks there is. There might be something else you could do that seems unrelated, but fixes whatever issue you are having, and adjusts your behavior enough that the person stops wanting to make those claims.

Look up mindfulness. T here's books like The Power of Now, apps like headspace, etc that focus on the concept of not becomig attached to your thoughts, beliefs, and emotions.

I have noticed that certain claims make me angry and defensive.

Not sure if this question will help - can you explain why you care so much?

I would expect AirBnb to be the best option.

Is Dust Theory any different from the idea that any brain states you want would appear as Boltzman Brains?

I think the validity of Dust Theory and Big World scenarios depends on how much probability they assign to worlds like ours. For now we don't have a good estimate of that probability. Egan assumes that it should be low, but I don't know how to check that.

Creating a post in Discussion only requires "a few" points of karma; creating one in Main requires 20. I believe 20 is also required for creating a Meetup post; in most ways those appear to be treated as posts to Main (for example, up- and down-votes on them count for 10x the usual amount of poster karma).

Source: The LW FAQ, specifically http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ#Why_do_I_want_high_karma.3F

I would guess there's a group of people who are just more likely to buy newer, less tested things. These people bought into Zune, but they also got a facebook before nobody else did. AKA, early adaptors.

Some people have started compiling that list.

Unless you're planning to put your articles in a new place each time, it sounds like you want a professional-looking blog. Maybe look into Medium?

You want to keep the articles you write forever?

Not necessarily, not all of them. But the ones I put on my public blog I would like to stick around, with my name attached, unless I deliberately delete or disown them. As it happens, the oldest post there is just shy of five years old. I'm not bored or embarrassed by it.

Pastebin?

I go over my old articles all the time and find interesting concepts. Sometimes I read them specifically to get back into the mindset that I was at the time.

That said, I mostly have a personal and professional blog for marketing purposes.

How about Tumblr?

High frequency trading is not about having complex machine learning algorithms. It's about computers making decisions in very short amounts of time.

So, if they are so smart how come they ain't superrich yet?

Looks like it has been addressed in Conjunction Controversy (Or, How They Nail It Down):

A further experiment is also discussed in Tversky and Kahneman (1983) in which 93 subjects rated the probability that Bjorn Borg, a strong tennis player, would in the Wimbledon finals "win the match", "lose the first set", "lose the first set but win the match", and "win the first set but lose the match". The conjunction fallacy was expressed: "lose the first set but win the match" was ranked more probable than"lose the first set". Subjects were also asked to verify whether various strings of wins and losses would count as an extensional example of each case, and indeed, subjects were interpreting the cases as conjuncts which were satisfied iff both constituents were satisfied, and not interpreting them as material implications, conditional statements, or disjunctions; also, constituent B was not interpreted to exclude constituent A. The genius of this experiment was that researchers could directly test what subjects thought was the meaning of each proposition, ruling out a very large class of misunderstandings.

See what Kaj_Sotala posted above: http://kajsotala.fi/2015/07/deepdream-today-psychedelic-images-tomorrow-unemployed-artists/

I have given a lot of thought to this subject before, but I didn't think the technology was good enough yet. Now with deep dream and facebook's Eyescream, DRAW, and Google's DeepStereo, generated images are becoming practical.

Someday we will have something like a totally automated photoshop. You can just ask it to make a photo, and it will produce it. Then you can tell it how to tweak it. Or it can give different versions and you can pick which you like most, and repeat (see http://picbreeder.org/, which also uses neural networks, but imagine it has an actual model of natural images instead of starting from scratch.)

It need not be limited to static images and could eventually do videos.

Generated porn that meets everyone's weird fetish is the most obvious application.

I also think colorizing black and white photos will become a popular niche application. And all sorts of other simple photo enhancements and tools.

I am interested in accessing more data on the karma of Lesswrong users without going to each user profile.

Between (1) the 15 all-time top users listed in the sidebar, (2) the 15 last-month top users listed in the sidebar, and (3) a few minutes' clicking on the usernames attached to recent posts and comments, it's hard to see that you're in danger of missing a lot of high-karma/high-profile users. How much value is there in what you're looking for, really? (If it isn't obviously trivial -- which I'm pretty sure it isn't -- then it's probably quite a lot of work to get more, because supporting LW isn't a very high priority for the people who do it.)

(If you've found that the posts you've found most interesting tend to be from high-profile users, that suggests that your preferences match fairly well with those of the LW community as expressed through karma, which in turn suggests that you can probably find promising articles to harvest promising usernames from just by running through the recent-articles list and picking out ones with high scores.)

Note, though, that any process that uses karma to select which users or articles you'll investigate further may introduce a selection bias that will corrupt your estimates of the relationship between karma and interest-to-you.

If you are interested in something specific, search by topic, not by user.

Real world feedback. If you actually ask out girls for whom you have a crush you might very soon learn that you don't have much control over their decisions.

Man, like, anthropics is hard. Sometimes, when trying to propose an anthropic argument, you end up conditioning on something that is basically what you're trying to elicit a probability of, and things get weird.

I suppose it really depends on your values; some people value cultural cohesion and continuity of their historical traditions more than increasing the GDP growth rate. I guess I would support trying this out somewhere though, ideally an ultra-liberal country where racist wreckers won't sabotage the noble experiment. Maybe Sweden?

Conversation is a team sport, with a minimum of two players. A "boring" person can be characterized as someone who does not contribute interesting anecdotes or facts to a conversation, or asks no interesting questions. Like most team sports, a bad player can be "carried" to victory by sufficiently good team. So while it's certainly possible that you were talking to boring people, a more actionable and probably more rewarding point of view to take is that you were being boring, and strive to learn techniques for making a conversation more engaging for you and your team.

Could you clarify whether you're asking (1) "Is my experience at that event good evidence that I was boring?" or (2) "Am I being boring here on LW?" or (3) something else?

agree with drethelin. even if this were true temporarily there is a solution. if it were true permanently, the solution is to be less boring.

(either actually do more interesting things that you can talk about, or generate a list of interesting topics to talk about that you know interest you - then when you get in the situation; look up the list and ask about one of them. I.e. what do you think of effective altrusim? how far off is the singularity? etc.)

adult male virgins with normal desires have become the freaks, weirdos and expendables

High time you get this: not all news is about you. Obsessing about how everything compares to your situation is only going to hurt you more.

by current standards many people today would have called him a loser

The thing is, he didn't live under our standards. It makes no sense to judge him by the expectations of a culture he never knew.

Why do many adult males derive their sense of (low) worth from their (lack of) sexual success?

Because this is not automatic. There are situations where celibate men are high-status, e.g. Catholic priests in religious countries. And there are much more situations where people simply don't discuss their sexual history. For example, when I read a book by an author I like, or when I play a computer game, I do not care about the author's sexual history. Even when I meet someone and debate with them, I don't ask this type of questions (which may be unusual behavior; maybe the rest of the society is obsessed by it, I don't know).

So how did this "sexual history" become the most important thing about a man... as opposed to e.g. his skills, intelligence, character traits, etc.? Actually, did it, in general? Or is it just a specific subculture? (Let's ask whether things are real before debating their causes.)

Here is a competing hypothesis: Maybe what we are observing here is actually a wave of depression, caused by something other than lack of sex. The lack of sex is the consequence of the depression; and so is the mental strategy of deriving one's own sense of worth from their failures.

For example, this is what my hypothesis would predict: If you take an average depressed young male virgin and somehow manage to get him laid, his problems will not go away. Either he will somehow rationalize that this specific situation does not count, or he will continue to have low sense of worth because of something else. Also, he will probably try to somehow sabotage this opportunity.

In your experience, do the unlucky young male virgins behave like this? Because I know a few examples that do. For example, I know a guy who is unhappy because he can't get a girl, but as soon as a girl he was interested in reciprocates his sexual interest (this happened repeatedly), he finds some stupid excuse and stops being interested in the girl (before having any intimacy); so he keeps being sad and lonely. I know another guy who is otherwise intelligent, but consistently does a few things that completely undermine his social status (such as making self-deprecating jokes, which are completely unnecessary, and usually not even funny), and you can't make him stop doing that. If some girl would express interest in him, my model says he would do something that would most likely send her away.

Why are gay men considered cool? I guess selection bias plays a large role here. For an average gay person, you probably don't know about their sexual orientation. But you heard about gay celebrities, and so did everyone else. So this creates the impression that being gay and being a celebrity correlated positively.

And the best way to reduce this effect would be to tolerate homosexuality in everyday life. Then you would also know many gays who are average or losers. (Ironically, if you know a gay man who has problem finding a boyfriend, and keeps his sexual orientation secret from you, you will probably consider him one of those straight guys who can't find a girlfriend.)

EDIT: To avoid misunderstanding, I am not denying the possibility that average young heterosexual men today may have a more difficult situation finding a girlfriend than their equivalents decades ago. Just saying that the extreme cases (whom you called "freaks, weirdos and expendables") usually have some additional problems.

Rationalists consider Darwin just about the greatest intellectual celebrity on their side, ever, even though by current standards many people today would have called him a loser in his 20's because of his adult virginity.

How much overlap is there between the "rationalists" and the "many people today"? Just because Mohammed is the most common first name and Wang is the most common last name doesn't mean Mohammed Wang is a common full name.

gay men have become the cool guys who receive all this consideration and patronage from elite institutions, now including the U.S. Supreme Court; while the adult male virgins with normal desires have become the freaks, weirdos and expendables, apparently become women say so?

This raises an interesting question, actually. How many of those "gay men" are only being gay because that's their solely alternative to being a loser virgin? After all, that's a common scenario in male subpopulations with no access to women - consider convicts, or folks living in sexually oppressive societies.

Updated to add: I'm not suggesting that our own society is sexually oppressive, at least wrt. gays. I'm only saying that the scenario for male virgin losers is close enough that they should respond in similar ways. If anything, we should expect gay behavior to be even more common (in the affected subpopulation), compared to societies that do repress it - and where it exists nonetheless.