Open Thread, May 25 - May 31, 2015

It appears that MetaMed has gone out of business. Wikipedia uses the past tense "was" in their page for MetaMed, and provides this as a source for it.

Key quote from the article:

Tallinn learned the importance of feedback loops himself the hard way, after seeing the demise of one of his startups, medical consulting firm Metamed.

Zvi discusses it a bit on his blog, here

It seems like the business model of charging individuals prices that are that high just doesn't work for a startup without a proven brand.

I have something sort of a potential explanation to it, but it is difficult to formulate it in a way that it will be not misunderstood in the wrong way. Please everybody try to take this post with maximal charity and benefit of doubt.

1. History tends to swing from one extreme to another, as people tend to OVERreact to the problems they see.

2. Given that it is an OVERreaction, they are usually wrong, but it also points out a problem. You can diagnose the original problems from the overreactions to them.

3. These overreactions are sometimes exaggerated only in "quantity", in which case a more moderate version of them would be okay, or they often get the direction completely wrong, still they point out how something is a problem and the issues they raise often have SOME truth to them.

4. For example, Communism/Bolshevism was a huge OVERreaction to the condition of workers under capitalism, it was not a good solution at all, and even making it more moderate (a moderate, limited dictatorship of people who call themselves proletarians?) would not help much, but it pointed out a problem and now we have better solutions to that problem, such as unions striking when they want a wage raise or something. Or some laws like minimum wages.

5. In the same vein The Red Pill / Manosphere is an OVERreaction to a problem, yes it is wrong, both it tone and content, misogynistic and so on, misrepresenting history etc. wrong in both quantity and direction, yet it DOES point out a problem, and some ideas when saner and kinder people work them over and remove the jaded or hateful elements of them, are actually useful.

Essentially this is the problem:

1. Dating is hard for young straight men, not for everybody. Few gays complain, and of women only seriously overweight ones complain and even that is changing, there is more fat acceptance now. And being a straight male 35+ is far easier, have some achievement and don't be fat and you almost see women 32+ throwing themselves at you.

2. One issue is that a lot of straight young men lack the experiences that would turn them into, well, it depends on your point of view, but you could say: masculine men, or you could say: grown-ups, adults. Being a grown-up or being masculine / manly is NOT the same, but they have a common opposite: a child, a boy is NEITHER. And that is what we have, many young men stay children because their formative experiences are school and videogames, which is not formative at all in this sense. They lack a lot of things, like challenges that require grown-up self-responsibility, or dangerous feeling things that would make them build courage and confidence.

3. SOME, not all, some women are indeed hypergamous. And SOME, not all, men are polygamous. This basically means that instead of having 100% attention and dedication from one man of lower attractiveness, they rather have 25% of a very attractive man. Although the "spinning plates, soft harems" the RPers speak about are probably exaggerated bullshit, I do see highly attractive men have really fast series of hookups and breakups, lots of fast and short mini-relationships that in practice end up with multiple women "orbiting" one man. (I am NOT talking about real, serious "poly" people, they are still a minority, I am talking about people who think they are monogamous, just they end up starting and ending three relationships during one month.)

4. This distorts the dating "market". As a very broad model, you have the top 50% women with the top 25% men, you have the next 25% of women and next 25% of men having the usual kinds of monogamous relationships, and you have the bottom 50% of men trying to chase the bottom 25% of women, and that bottom 25% is, not to be too offensive, but these days tends to be... "big". Of course the bottom 50% of men are often not a big catch either, videogaming man-boys without any confidence or adult responsibility. At any rate, the bottom 50% men often give up as they don't think having to compete for the "big" girls 2:1 is better than porn (and pot: a powerful combination), and the "big" girls often seek refuge in cats and sugar too.

4/B) To give you a good example how inequal is the dating market: when people describe sexual relationships as "I don't know, we just got drunk and it happened", very roughly this happened with 80% women and 40% men, at best. At least half the guys are not attractive enough to "just happen", many of them won't even get to the point where it could, as not getting drunk with women or not going out at all. "Just happened" is a narrative of women and handsome / attractive / grown-up / masculine / confident men, it is not a universal human one and for the bottom 50% of men it looks like something happening from a sci-fi.

5/A). There is another issue. RPers tend to blame feminism, I guess it is better to blame the inbalanced social adaptation to feminism, but basically the bottom 50% of guys think "well, I am not much as a man, but I can get an engineering degree, hold down a job, make money and could support a family, does that count for something?" and the answer is today "nothing AT ALL" because now almost every woman can make enough money. Even when they complain about making 77% of what men make or some similar figure, in a first-world society that is still enough to live comfortably without children. And now women rarely want children before 32. In the past, a man could be unattractive but being a breadwinner helped him a bit in finding a mate, now it is not the case. Now a degree in software engineering may still increase a mans chances in India, but not in the US, Canada or Germany.

5/B) The point is here, that since women can make a living on their own, men should probably adapt into being less of a worker bee and more focusing on his attractiveness. Yet it is far harder for the bottom 50% of men than just getting a software engineering degree and working. Besides, his parents may still push him towards this breadwinner role. And frankly this all sometimes feels "unnatural" probably because we are trying to undo thousands of years of historical adaptation to social roles, so it is learning a really uncharted terrain here. We don't have much historical experience in how to make all men attractive to women of a similar income and social status. Formerly it was not really needed. About half the men figure it out sooner or later, but the other half does not.

Maybe things get easier, if feminism, if ever, fully wins 100%. Currently it is totally confusing because it won in some things but not in some other things. Women can now do almost everything men can, yet it seems the most attractive guys are still the ones conforming more or less to traditional concepts like being strong, tall, brave, unfazed / no-fucks-given, and so on.

One good example in how the current kind of feminism-won-halfway-not-fully makes things confusing. Sheryl Sandberg, a highly powerful and successful woman, really a feminist role model, saying "When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them." So basically she is saying that although not for marriage, for dating still the old, pre-feminist male archetypes, the traditional masculine archetypes are ideal! Sheryl is a feminist at work/career but not at dating, although at marriage probably yet again! Of course it confuses a young man who has no idea how to be attractive anymore! Be her bad cool crazy commitment phobic (i.e. treating women as sex objects only) boy which is an old-fashioned, 1950's on a motorbike, pre-feminist and borderline misogynistic or be marriagable nice guy in which case wait until 35 or so?

RP is wrong, but it is pointing us towards real actual problems that are begging for a better explanation and solution.

Tangentially, how much is it a problem of "dating", and how much a problem of "dating with sane people", when the pool of sane people is already small?

When I was younger, I wanted to have a romantic relationship with a person whom I would perceive as intellectually equal (plus or minus the LessWrong level). Since I barely knew such people... not much luck.

If I could send a message in time back to myself, it would be: "It will take decades until you find someone you can have meaningful conversation with. Meanwhile, relax, and try to fuck any nice body, but don't get attached. Otherwise you will later regret the wasted time." The only problem is, my younger self would be horrified to hear such advice.

I think it makes sense for us to try dating and relationships more, because there may not be as much time and opportunity as we hope later in life.

How do you suggest people actually implement this 'just date more'?

Most of my friends and acquaintances are committed to long-term relationships (mid-late 20s age group). I've had trouble in this area due to certain personal reasons, but my personal observations lead me to believe that I'm atypical in this regard.

It still seems single people aren't seeking or successfully finding relationships at a rate which corresponds well to genuine preferences for a relationship. Why aren't single people trying harder to find relationships?

It's possible they just don't know what they're doing or are paralyzed by anxiety when it comes to romance.

How do young people get into sexual relationships, any way? I had literally no experience with this in my youth, and not because I spent decades in prison starting around the age of 20 or anything like that. The women I knew as a young man walked around me as a physical object because they couldn't walk through me, but in general they treated me as socially invisible.

My first thought is that the lack of strategic approach isn't surprising - there are tons of instances in which people are extremely unstrategic, and this doesn't seem to be too particularly unstrategic.

My second thought is that this is an area in which it's particularly easy to procrastinate. Because initiation is hard and scary (to most people).

A lot of Millennials have moved back in with their parents (boomerang generation). Especially for men, this makes any kind of romantic life very difficult. Mostly I think many Millennials have serious anxiety/social dysfunction and a bad case of Peter Pan Syndrome. For example, cultural favorites of Millennials include superhero/comic book movies and My Little Pony.

Personally, I'm indifferent to EA. It seems to me a result of decompartmentalizing and taking utilitarianism overly seriously. I don't really disagree with it, just not interested. As I've mentioned before, I care about myself, my family, my friends, and maybe some prominent people who don't know me, but whose work makes my life better. I feel for the proverbial African children, but not enough for anything more than a token contribution. If LW had a budget, /r/EA would be a good subreddit, though one of those I would rarely, if ever, visit. As it is, I skip the EA discussions, but I don't find them annoyingly pervasive.

On my part, it strikes me as the greatest and most important contribution this place has had on my life.

(Disclaimer: My lifetime contribute to MIRI is in the low six digits.)

It appears to me that there are two LessWrongs.

The first is the LessWrong of decision theory. Most of the content in the Sequences contributed to making me sane, but the most valuable part was the focus on decision theory and considering how different processes performed in the prisoner's dilemma. Understanding decision theory is a precondition to solving the friendly AI problem.

The first LessWrong results in serious insights that should be integrated into one's life. In Program Equilibrium in the Prisoner's Dilemma via Lob's Theorem, the authors take a moment to discuss the issue of "Defecting Against CooperateBot"--if you know that you are playing against CooperateBot, you should defect. I remember when I first read the paper and the concept just clicked. Of course you should defect against CooperateBot. But this was an insight that I had to be told and LessWrong is valuable to me as it has helped internalize game theory. The first year that I took the LessWrong survey, I answered that of course you should cooperate in the one shot non-shared source code prisoner's dilemma. On the latest survey, I instead put the correct answer.

The second LessWrong is the LessWrong of utilitarianism, especially of a Singerian sort, which I find to clash with the first LessWrong. My understanding is that Peter Singer argues that because you would ruin your shoes to jump into a creek to save a drowning child, you should incur an equivalent cost to save the life of a child in the third world.

Now never mind that saving the child might have postive expected value to the jumper. We can restate Singer's moral obligation as a prisoner's dilemma, and then we can apply something like TDT to it and make the FairBot version of Singer: I want to incur a fiscal cost to save a child on the other side of the world iff parents on the other side of the world would incur a fiscal cost to save my child. I believe Singer would deny this statement (and would be more aghast at the PrudentBot version), and would insist that there's a moral obligation regardless of the other theoretical reciprocation.

I notice that I am being asked to be CooperateBot. I don't think CFAR has "Don't be CooperateBot," as a rationality technique, but they should.

Practically, I find that 'altruism' and 'CooperateBot' are synonyms. The question of reciprocality hangs in the background. It must, because Azathoth both generates those who are CooperateBot and those who exploit CooperateBots.

I will also point out that this whole discussion is happening on the website that exists to popularize humanity's greatest collective action problem. Every one of us has a selfish interest in solving the friendly AI problem. And while I am not much of a utilitarian, I would assume that the correct utilitarian charity answer in terms of number of people saved/generated would be MIRI, and that the most straightforward explanation is Hansonian cynacism.

Seeing as, in terms of absolute as well as disposable income, I'm probably closer to being a recipient of donations rather than a giver of them, effective altruism is among those topics that make me feel just a little extra alienated from LessWrong. It's something I know I couldn't participate in, for at least 5 to 7 more years, even if I were so inclined (I expect to live in the next few years on a yearly income between $5000 and $7000, if things go well). Every single penny I get my hands on goes, and will continue to go, strictly towards my own benefit, and in all honesty I couldn't afford anything else. Maybe one day when I'll stop always feeling a few thousand $$ short of a lifestyle I find agreeable, I may reconsider. But for now, all this EA talk does for me is reinforce the impression of LW as a club for rich people in which I feel maybe a bit awkward and not belonging. If you ain't got no money, take yo' broke ass home!

Anyway, the manner in which my own existence relates to goals such as EA is only half the story, probably the more morally dubious half. Disconnected from my personal circumstances, the Effective Altruism movement seems one big mix of good and not-so-good motives and consequences. On the one hand, the fact that there are people dedicated to donating large fractions of their income is a laudable thing in itself. On the other hand...

• I don't believe for one second that effective altruism would have been nearly as big of a phenomenon on LessWrong, if the owners of LessWrong hadn't been living off people's donations. MIRI is a charity that wants money. Giving to charity is probably the biggest moral credential on LW. Coincidence? I think not.

• Ensuring the flow of money in a particular direction may not be the very best effort one can put into making the world a better place. Sure, it's something, and at least in the short term a very vital something, but more than anything else it seems to be a way to patch up, or prop up, a part of the system that was shaky to begin with. The long-term end goal should be to make people less reliant on charity money. Sometimes there is a shortage of knowledge, or of power, or of good incentives, rather than of money. "Throwing money at a cause" is just one way to help -- although I suppose effective altruist organizations already incorporate the knowledge of this problem in their concept of "room for more funding".

• We already have governments that take away a large portion of our incomes anyway, that have systems in place for allocating funds and efforts, and that purport to promote the same kinds of causes as charities, yet often function inefficiently and even harmfully. However, they're a lot more reliable in terms of actually ensuring the collection of "enough" funds. To pay taxes and to give to charity (yes, I'm aware that charitable giving unlocks tax deductions) is to contribute to two systems that are doing the same job, the second being there mostly because the first isn't doing its job as it should. In this way, and possibly assuming that EA would be a larger movement in the future than it is now, charity might work to mask government inefficiencies and damage or to clean up after them.

• In the context of earning to give, participating in a particularly noxious industry as a way of earning your livelihood, and using part of that money to contribute to altruist causes, is something that looks to me like a tax on the well-being you thus cause into the world. I'm not sure that tax is always smaller than 100%. And it's more difficult to quantify the negative externalities from your job than it is to quantify the positive effects of your donations, because the first are more causally distant.

To take the discussion back to the meta level, I'm but one user with not so much karma and probably a non-central example of a LessWronger, so I don't demand that anyone accommodates me and my preferences not to discuss EA. However, knowing that other users basically come from an effective altruism mindset makes discussion with them somewhat difficult, since we don't have the same assumptions about the relationship between money and welfare. The most annoying of all is the very rare and very occasional display of charitable snobbery, or a commitment not to aid first world people who are not effective altruists, or who don't donate enough. (I've seen that, but Google seems to fail me at this moment.) It seems easier and more pleasant to discuss ethical matters with people who don't come from an EA worldview, and personally I'd like to see more of a plurality of approaches on the matter on LW.

tl;dr It's a rich people thing and therefore alien to me; as for objective merits, I've got mixed positive and negative feelings about it. But in the end, to each their own.

I know this may come across as sociopathically cold and calculating, but given that post-singularity civilisation could be at least thirty orders of magnitude larger than current civilisation, I don't really think short term EA makes sense. I'm surprised that the EA and existential risk efforts seem to be correlated, since logically it seems to me that they should be anti-correlated.

And if the response is that future civilisation is 'far' in the overcoming bias sense, well, so are starving children in Africa.

My brain filters it out automatically. Altruism is not even on my mind AT ALL, until I sorted out my own problems and feel the life of me and my family is reasonably secure, happy, safe, and going up and up. I don't feel I have any surplus for altruism.

I guess in practice I do altruistic things all the time. People ask me for help, I don't say no. I just don't seek out opportunities to.

My biggest problem with EA is the excessive focus on a specific metric with no consideration of higher order plans or effects. The epitome of naive utilitarianism.

Every so often someone proposes this (and sometimes someone who thinks they are clever actually carries it out) and it's always a terrible idea. The purpose of peer review is not to uncover fraud. It's not even to make sure what's in the paper is correct. The purpose of peer review is just to make sure what's in the paper is plausible and sane, and worth being presented to a wider audience. The purpose is to weed out obvious low-quality material such as perpetual motion machines or people who are duplicating other's work as their own. Could you get fraudulent papers accepted in a journal? Of course. A scientist sufficiently knowledgeable of their field could definitely fool almost any arbitrarily rigorous peer review procedure. Does fraud exist in the scientific world? Of course it does. Peer review is just one of the many mechanisms that serve to uncover it. Real review of one's work begins after peer review is over and the work is examined by the scientific community at large.

Do you have any doubt that it's very easy to get fraudulent work accepted?

I would be concerned that including fraud-detection processes would also bring in biases of "I don't like this work and therefore we shouldn't publish it". I also agree with the points of the purpose of peer review is to check for sanity of method and soundness of scientific process; not fraud.

I wouldn't mind reading if someone took a crack at a Sequences 2.0, or something completely different.

One way of looking at the failure mode of Scientology is that they lead with genuinely useful material, which hooks people and establishes them as a credible source of wisdom. They then have a progressive structure that convinces you new epiphanies are just around the corner, you just need to put in a little more effort / time / cash--but there is no epiphany waiting that will be as useful as the original epiphanies.

This happens lots of places. I recall reading about some Alexander Technique expert, who continued doing lessons in the hopes of recapturing the first moment when he experienced lightness in his body. He never could, because the thing that was shocking about the first time was the surprise, not the lightness, and no matter how light he got, he could not become as surprised by it.

The healthy approach is to have a purpose, to pursue a well of knowledge for as long as doing so enhances that purpose, and then to abandon that well of knowledge as soon as it no longer enhances that purpose.

But here we run into the issue that, while rationality may be the common interest of many causes, the "something new" is unlikely to be a specifically rationality thing. It's more likely to be something that some people find interesting and some people find boring, and so the people split into different taskforces to solve different problems. (That is, the Craft and the Community sequence really does anticipate lots of these issues.)

is that the community is in need of growth. My interpretation of this is as follows: the Sequences are not updated, and yet they are still referenced as source material.

I don't see any connection between growth and updating unless significant cognitive science breakthroughs were made since. But I think growth would depend on presenting it in a popular, digestible format. Not HPMOR, not one book and not a book for SF/F nerds anyway... but more going to say changemyview.reddit.com and engaging in debates and when people make cognitive mistakes linking to the article here. For example. Or people who have commit privileges to popular newspapers could write articles like "10 things LW taught me".

Try doing whatever it is you need to do (not sure from your posting) physically with other people doing the same thing. I've found that this is both the lowest effort and most effective way for me to overcome akrasia. If you feel like you can't motivate yourself, put yourself somewhere where your goals are downhill from you and let gravity carry you.

Not sure what your exact goals are, but feel free to ask if you want more help.

Have you looked at whether there are times when your capacity for action and/or enjoyment is better? When it's worse? This might give you some hypotheses to test to get some improvement.

I'll tentatively recommend a diet that's low in simple carbs (refined sugars and refined grains)-- too much sugar knocks me out in a way that looks like an emotional problem, when what's actually going on is that I'm being poisoned.

If you're very fond of simple carbs (it seems to me that the taste of sugar cuts through depression more than a lot of other sensations), start by adding more high protein, high fat, and high fiber foods rather than trying to cut back on the simple carbs directly. I may be assuming that you have more flexibility about what food is available than you're actually got, though.

There are a lot more things you can try. You could look for supplements that might help improve your mood. Examine.com seems like a good resource. Also, consider trying Bulletproof Coffee. A low cost approach might be saying an affirmation to yourself several times as day such as "I will be happy and productive!" You could also do neurofeedback, buy an inversion table, or go paleo. (I'm not a medical doctor.)

What happened when you attempted to do pomodoros?

I personally switched to pomodoros by setting low goals at the beginning. The goal was simple to complete one pomodoro per day. Successful completion then allowed me to raise the number.

Well, I found that extremely relatable. In fact, you might as well have been describing me, except my financial situation is a bit worse and my vision is a bit better. A solution sure would be nice.

Oh, huh, umm. I certainly didn't want to cause anyone panic attacks by writing that, though in retrospect I should have realized that it's a bit of an information hazard.

I'm sorry.

If it's any comfort, I feel that my arguments in that article are pretty plausible, but that predicting the future is such a difficult thing filled with unknown unknowns that the vast majority of "pretty plausible" predictions are going to be wrong.

Ask most people what they imagine a better life and a better world might be, and they will rarely imagine anything more than the present evils removed. Less disease, less starvation, less drudgery, less killing, less oppression. Their positive vision is merely the opposite of these: more health, more food, more fun, more love, more freedom.

When cranked up to transhuman levels, this looks like no ignorance, instant access to all knowledge, no stupidity, unlimited intelligence, no disease, unlimited lifespan, no technological limits, unlimited technological superpower, less environmental cramping, expansion across the universe.

What will people do, when almost everything they currently do is driven by exactly those limits that it is the transhuman vision to eliminate? Think of everything you have done today -- how much of it would a transhuman you in a transhuman world have done?

I got out of bed. Sleep? What need has a transhuman of sleep? I showered, unloaded the washing machine that had run overnight, ate breakfast. Surely these and a great deal more stand in the same relation to a transhuman life as the drudgery of a 13th century peasant does to my own. I am typing on a keyboard. A keyboard! How primitive! Later today I will have taiko practice. Practice? Surely we will download such skills, or build robots to do them for us? I value the physical exertion. Exertion? What need, when we are uploads using whatever physical apparatus we choose, which will always run flawlessly?

The vision usually looks like having machines to do our living for us, leaving us as mere epiphenomena of a world that runs itself. We might think that "we" are colonising the galaxy, while to any other species observing, we might just look like a madly expanding sphere of von Neumann machines, with no valuable personhood present. Such is the vision of Utopia that results from imagining the future as being the present, but better, extrapolated without bound.

The Fun Sequence (long version, short version) says a lot about what sort of thing makes for a genuine Utopia, but I don't think it contains examples of a day in the life. Perhaps it cannot, any more than a 13th century peasant's dreams could contain anything resembling the modern world. One attempt I saw, which I can't now find, imagined (this is my interpretation of it, not the way it was presented) a future that amounted to better BDSM scenes. This strikes me as about as realistic as a million years of sex with catgirls.

I don't know that there is a rebuttal. Wireheading goes all the way back to Homer:

They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home

--The Odyssey

The solution there seems to be not to do it in the first place. It has long been a theme of dystopian fiction that our technology will erode or destroy what it means to be human. Playing around with the brain is definitely going to change things, most likely in ways we can't quite predict--not to mention any accidental damage caused by novel methods. The only rebuttal I can think of is that our current technology is too crude and barbarous to make such modifications worth the drawbacks.

I think there's still some solace though. There's always a reaction to technology that tries to become too invasive. Many are willing to use drugs to regulate their moods, but there's also strong counter-pressure. New technology doesn't spread overnight. We'll have plenty of examples of brain-modified people before the methods become widespread. I'd like to think people will be able to decide whether it's worth the cost before they jump headlong into it.

I don't believe that it's mainstream transhumanist thought, in part because most people who'd call themselves transhumanists have not been exposed to the relevant arguments.

Does that help? No?

The problem with this vision of the future is that it's nearly basilisk-like in its horror. As you said, you had a panic attack; others will reject it out of pure denial that things can be this bad, or perform motivated cognition to find reasons why it won't actually happen. What I've never seen is a good rebuttal.

If it's any consolation, I don't think the possibility really makes things that much worse. It constrains FAI design a little more, perhaps, but the no-FAI futures already looked pretty bleak. A good FAI will avoid this scenario right along with all the ones we haven't thought of yet.

A few rebuttals. Race to the bottom only works in a universe where there is a reason to keep getting lower. where in a petri dish; if you don't replicate fast enough you die; thats a strong selective pressure; in human-world reality there is no such pressure of equivalence. (I also disagree with rat-island) for this reason. Where there is not a benefit to get lower; it won't happen. Evolution seems to happen by two main pressures; slow selection of the most-fittest and sudden selection by major environmental factors (with a range of both in between). For the sake of argument; the cutest of humans procreate; and the lesser ones - less so; but no one survives the next meteor strike. only the cockroaches which then have to grow under slow pressures until the next big pressure.

as for distinct mind - we (as humanity) would only go down the path of non-distinct mind if we wanted to. It may seem like a bad thing from our perspective now; but its a bit of a strawman argument that it will certainly be something we do not want when the time comes that it is possible to do so. I am not concerned for such far-away situations that are framed as problems.

Was there any particular point that you would like refuted?

I find myself conflicted about this. I want to preserve my human condition, and I want to give it up. It's familiar, but it's trying. I want the best of both worlds; the ability to challenge myself against real hardships and succeed, but also the ability to avoid the greatest hardships that I can't overcome on my own. The paradox is that solving the actual hardships like aging and death will require sufficient power to make enjoyable hardships (solving puzzles, playing sports and other games, achieving orgasm, etc.) trivial.

I think that one viable approach is to essentially live vicariously through our offspring. I find it enjoyable watching children solve problems that are difficult for them but are now trivial for me, and I think that the desire to teach skills and to appreciate the success of (for lack of a better word) less advanced people learning how to solve the same problems that I've solved could provide a very long sequence of Fun in the universe. Pre-singularity humans already essentially do this. Grandparents still enjoy life despite having solved virtually all of the trivial problems (and facing imminent big problems), and I think I'd be fine being an eternal grandparent to new humans or other forms of life. I can't extrapolate that beyond the singularity, but it makes sense that if we intend to preserve our current values we will need someone to be in the situation where those values still matter, and if we can't experience those situations ourselves then the offspring we care about are a good substitute. Morality issues of creating children may be an issue.

Another solution is a walled garden run by FAI that preserves the trivial problems humans like solving while but solves the big problems. This has a stronger possibility for value drift and I think people would value life a bit less if they knew it was ultimately a video game.

It's also possible that upon reflection we'll realize that our current values also let us care about hive-minds in the same way we care about our friends and family now. We would be different, alien to present selves, but with the ability to trace our values back to our present state and see that at no point did we sacrifice them for expediency or abandon them for their triviality. This seems like the least probable solution simply because our values are not special, they arose in our ancestral environment because they worked. That we enjoy them is an accident, and that they could fully encompass the post-singularity world seems a bit miraculous.

As a kid I always wondered about this in the context of religious heaven. What could a bunch of former humans possibly do for eternity that wouldn't become terribly boring or involve complete loss of humanity? I could never answer that question, so perhaps it's an {AI,god}-hard problem to coherently extrapolate human values.

I don't know if it's the mainstream of transhumanist thought but it's certainly a significant thread.

Information hazard warning: if your state of mind is again closer to "panic attack" and "grief" than to "calmer", or if it's not but you want to be very careful to keep it that way, then you don't want to click this link.

I wonder if a movie with an AI box-based story would have any potential? Perhaps something treated as more of a psychological horror/thriller than as a guns-and-explosions action movie might help to distance people's intuitions from "AI is 'The Terminator', right?"

There's bipolar disorder. Getting a depressive in a manic phase doesn't help him.

We need a science of happiness which is largely about finding the ideal jolts of fun to input in our brain.

How much of positive psychology have you actually read?

No formal studies to share.

I know a lot of poly folk in N-way relationships who seem reasonably happy about it and would likely be less happy in monogamous relationships; I know a lot of monogamous folks in 2-way relationships who seem reasonably happy about it and would likely be less happy in polygamous relationships; I know a fair number of folks in 2-way relationships who would likely be happier in polygamous relationships; I know a larger number of folks who have tried polygamous relationships and decided it wasn't for them. Mostly my conclusion from all this is that different people have different preferences.

As to whether those differing preferences are the result of genetic variation, gestational differences, early childhood experiences, lifestyle choices made as adolescents and adults, something else entirely, or some combination thereof... I haven't a clue.

I don't see where it matters much for practical purposes.

I mean, I recognize that there's a social convention that we're not permitted to condemn people for characteristics they were "born with," but that mostly seems irrelevant to me, since I see no reason to condemn people for preferring poly relationships regardless of whether they were born that way, acquired it as learned behavior, or (as seems likeliest) some combination.

In general, I approve of book reviews of LWish content, and I have found the primary beneficiaries are people who wouldn't have come across that book otherwise (and thus aren't the sort of people who will say "yes, review that book!").

If you thought it was good, that's enough evidence for me to be interested in reading a review.

It is why I used to doodle in class, especially history class, instead of making notes. If I tried to make notes, the words I was writing down interfered with the words I was listening to, so I'd miss what the teacher was saying next.

I haven't worked with math in years, but yes, lyrics disturb my reading.

I now prefer to pair verbal music with non-verbal tasks, and non-verbal music with verbal tasks.

Dave Asprey managed to have lose weight at >4000 calories per day. A QS friend I know replicated this and found that adding 1000 calories per day in butter for a month didn't raise his weight either. My own attemts to raise my weight by throwing ~800kcal of maltrodextrin per day into my tea also didn't raise my weight.

Metabolism is not only important between individuals but also changes day to day due to different hormones.

Both are important, some more so for some people than others. I and members of my family are lucky enough to lose weight rapidly with food restriction and exercise; many other people not so much. WHAT is eaten rather than its sheer energy content can also make a big difference.

Why can't anything in biology ever be simple...

Are the people who favor those policies simply stupid and lack understanding of economics or is it possible to steelman their position?

The steelman is that their actual position is that they live there, and do not want to to either not live there anymore, deal with more people living there, or have to pay more to live there. The more friction in the housing market, the less things change (and, of course, the more deadweight loss and inefficiencies there are).

Get enough luxury apartments in an area and all of a sudden the neighborhood becomes a lot more attractive to people with money. This puts pressure on landlords to renovate their buildings to cater to the new customers (and charge a lot more). Even with rent controls in place, there are loopholes to be exploited.

This is six years old.

Doesn't it? IIRC you need 2 karma to post a top-level thread in discussion, more than that to post a top-level thread in main, but none to comment.

I'm not sure I accept your premises? I could certainly be wrong, but I have not gotten the impression that comments can be prevented by low karma, only posts to Discussion or Main. (And I recall the minimum as 20, not 2.*) The most obvious way to get the karma needed to post is by commenting on existing posts (including open threads and welcome threads), and new users with zero initial karma regularly do this without any apparent difficulty, so unless I'm missing something, I don't think it's a problem?

*ETA: It seems that 2 is the minimum for Discussion, while 20 is the minimum for Main.

My understanding is that restrictions like this exist so that all scrapers / spiders / etc. can be banned or blocked at will if they become bothersome. If you put a restriction like "Don't use a spider, scraper, or other automated technology that interferes with the operation of the website" now you might have a fight on your hands over whether or not something actually "interfered" with the website.

Both, I think.
It surely is a nice formalization of Occam's razor, and Solomonoff himself said that he found his distribution while looking for a nice prior over the set of all computable hypothesis. But you can also show that Solomonoff distribution is in a class called dominant semi-measures, which are able to approximate any computable prior with an error that goes to zero very fast.
See for example "Solomonoff induction" by Legg.

You first need to realize that Turing machine were invented before the first computer was ever built, and they were born as a mathematical model, an ideal construction.
The problem at the time was that there were certain natural classifications of functions on natural numbers, the recursive functions, and the Turing machine model helped to understand that partial recursive functions = computable functions.
Computable, at the time, meant that a human being was able to calculate them with the aid of pen and paper.

Nowadays, depending on the branch of computer science you want to study, either recursive functions or Turing machines are used as the default general model of 'computability', either to study specializations of that concepts (complexity) or to show that some class of functions cannot be computed (Turing jumps, oracles, etc.)
You can think of them as idealized computer, and they are a big deal in the sense that they are the cornerstone upon which all computer science is built, the same way 'the continuum' is a big deal for calculus.

Turing machines are a big deal because when you change the definition of a Turing machine (by letting it use arbitrarily many symbols, or giving it multiple tapes or a multi-dimensional tape, or letting it operate nondeterministically, or making its tape finite in one direction...) it usually can still solve exactly the same set of problems, which strongly suggests that Turing completeness is a "natural concept". A lot of computational systems are Turing-complete, and all of the discrete computational systems we've built are no more powerful than Turing machines. Physical reality might also be Turing-computable (Church-Turing-Deutsch principle), though we don't know that for sure (for instance, physics might involve infinite-precision calculations on non-computable numbers).

If that is too extreme a formulation, then a toned-down version of the idea just coincides with bog-standard "diversity politics" liberalism, doesn't it?

There days people who speak for "diversity" quite often advocate policies like hate speech laws that reduce diversity of voiced opinions.

Pluralism seems to me the better label.

"Business" means entrepreneurship. But that does not mean small companies, nor are all employees of companies entrepreneurs.

This old comment says business is a notoriously all-male province in what I suppose is the United States.

Obviously business isn't "notoriously all-male" in the United States. Typically HR skews heavily female. Customer support is heavily female. Most accountants and bookkeepers are women. Women are dramatically underrepresented in C-level positions, but even there "all-male" is clearly exaggerated. And C-level positions are a tiny, tiny fragment of total positions in business.

Even leaving room for hyperbole, "notoriously all-male" is comically overstated. It's also easy to check. So why didn't you check it?

... Are you sure that your three related posts on this topic in this open thread alone wouldn't warrant their own top-level post?

Those who I know who engage in poly have no interest in pushing their views on others and hold the belief that the way they are doing things seem to be working for them. (And from time to time they change their minds and drop out of the poly community and so its hard to say how often that happens to people). Of the people I know; its a learn-by-trial method of being. Also being aware that some people are better at life (and interactions) than others will help you decide whether to stay or go in a relationship.

As a model; I like the model of "X works for some people but does not work for others". to keep in my toolbox of ideas for whenever someone suggests something that I think works for them but will not work for me; or before I suggest something that works for me but might not work for them. (also known as "Your mileage may vary").

[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/m8o/open_thread_may_25_may_31_2015/cehm

It is proper Legalese.