Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015

Artificial lighting (mainly blue light) inhibits melatonin and affects sleeping. Try turning off the lights, dimming screens, using f.lux, or wearing yellow tinted goggles.

Just in case it helps to know you aren't alone: I have a similar problem (and always have, to varying degrees; I'm substantially older than you are). I don't think mine is as severe as yours.

The good news is that it doesn't seem to have wrecked my life too badly. The bad news is that after all these years I haven't fixed it. The good news is that I haven't really tried super-hard. The bad news is that if your character resembles mine in other ways you probably also won't try super-hard. Make of all that what you will.

Have a schelling point for going to bed, get f.lux on your computer, use melatonin a half hour before your schelling point, use an alarm to remind you of your schelling point and use stayfocusd to block your browsing. A combination of these strategies is what worked for me.

Again the problem is not with sleeping itself, the problem is with letting myself stop doing things and actually go to bed.

Maybe you should introduce a non-work step between the work and sleep. Exercise (something easy like yoga) or meditation or whatever. Because then it will not be "from work to sleep" (which is difficult for you now), but "from work to meditation" and "from meditation to sleep" (which could be easier).

I have an alarm that goes off at 8:30 pm, at which point I begin winding down my computer use, and eventually switch to reading under a red light for approximately 30 minutes, then I go to bed.

There are people who have success taking melatonin 30 minutes before they want to go to bed, because that makes them tired enough to want to go to bed once it kicks in. This does not work for me because my ability to resist fatigue is greater than melatonin's ability to fatigue me, but I expect it's worth trying, and is likely to help with building up the previous suggestion as a habit.

There are general-purpose self-modification techniques to shift your preferences and habits, and I think restedness is important enough to pull out the big guns. (Commitment contacts, daily affirmations, hypnosis, etc.)

(1) Set a bed time for yourself for the next week. (2) Promise to give me $1000 if you do not keep your bed time. (3) If you stick to your bedtime be mindful if you feel happier and more productive. (4) If the answer to (3) is yes then use this to motivate yourself to get to sleep on time in the future.

I've been lurking for a while and wasn't going to join the discussions until I'd finished the sequences, but it doesn't look like anyone has mentioned the possibility of just switching to a 28 hour sleep cycle. I've wanted to try one for years, but college or work always conflicted.

Basically, you go to sleep 4 hours later each night. Your first bedtime is midnight, then 4AM, then 8AM, etcetera. By the 6^th sleep cycle, you will have slipped back a total of 24 hours. Because of this, the crossover point occurs after 7 days. This means it is possible to maintain a relatively normal schedule, so long as you can leave work early on Mondays, and get to work late on Fridays due to sleep.

Xkcd has a rather nice graphical illustration, and the comic explanation is a bit more thorough than I was.

Ways to develop habits: start small, give yourself positive reinforcement, give yourself negative reinforcement, get someone else to force you... Try committing to no matter what go to bed without devices at midnight on Sundays? Try taking short naps at predetermined times and rewarding yourself with chocolate chips when you successfully lie down with an alarm prepped to get you back up? Try putting aside $100 in singles each month and burning one whenever you stay up after thinking "I should go to sleep"? Do you have a roommate? Can you get someone to call you at 11:30 PM each night and stay on the phone until you're tucked in? :) Have you tried reframing sleep to yourself as a productivity booster rather than a time-waster? "Okay present self, you know future you will think you could have gotten more done if you just went to sleep now rather than staying up trying to do things, so hop to bed now"

I'm not exactly sure about the kind of lab research that you are doing. Are you doing research where it's essential to sometimes work at 3 AM?

If that's not the case you could have a hard rule of not doing research, browsing the internet or talking to people after 12PM.

It quite easy to put scripts on a computer that automatically shut down the computer at a specific time.

Try to hack your body into feeling more relaxed so your scholarly zeal calms down a bit and lets your mind rest.

I'll tell you what works for me.

1. Start dimming the lights as you approach bed-time. You can buy electric tea candles (as you may have seen in restaurants) to provide low lighting so you can still get around your home. The candle-like flickering of the light is pretty calming.
2. Install f.lux (or its ilk) on any PC or mobile device with a screen.
3. If you listen to music, make sure it's relaxing. Playing nature sounds or whatever YT returns for "meditation music" works pretty well.
4. Don't underestimate olfactory senses. Buy an aroma diffuser and pick up some essential oils. Grapefruit or ginger scented mist can be seriously relaxing.
5. Keep some kind of whimsical treatise next to your bed so you have an outlet for what should now be sleepy intellectual curiosity: Godel-Escher-Bach is perfect for this.

Good luck! :)

EDIT: Oh, also what about psychoactive stuff like coffee and alcohol? Coffee in the afternoons can cause tossing and turning at night even though the wakefulness benefits are long gone. Alcohol is considered a CNS depressant but it can still lead to some difficulty sleeping because of other related effects.

You are not alone. I also have enough concentration to still work 16 hours straight - if I'm interested. At some point in time it degrades but that can be as late as 4 o'clock and then I'm screwed because my children (which also need less sleep than their age average) will wake me in any case. So my motivation to go to bed is much stronger than yours but nonetheless every now and then I will have to make do with 4.5 hours. Luckily my required average amount of sleep is 6,5 hours a day. I use multiple tricks mostly mentioned in other comments too: Red glasses at a fixed time (22:30) , schelling point at midnight, commitment to get up before 6:50 on the first ringing of the alarm (used simulation recently to make that work). All to varying degress of continuity (I form habits slowly). I guess you have to experiment, live with it or indeed use commitments. Partners can be strong motivator on this.

I have had this for the last 10 years. Given that you are a graduate student like me, I think there's no better solution than simply scheduling your day to start in the afternoon. It's far easier to ask that a meeting be held in the afternoon than doing all sorts of crazy stuff to revert your natural sleep cycle. Wiki article on this disorder: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder

The original source is Reusser 1986 p25 (26), who reports that 3/4 of first and second graders give a numerical answer. I learned that from Kaplinsky's 2013 replication, not with eight-year-olds, but with eighth graders (video). He credits Merseth 1993 with popularizing it. Kaplinsky via Gwern.

A late descendent of the joke appears in Science Made Stupid (1986), which I highly recommend.

If you feel silly about the particular example or doubt its provenance or application, there is also the New Cuyama sign adding up numbers in an even worse way, the classic riddle where the answer is "you're adding the wrong things," or Scott's latest post with similarly bad math being applied to public policy.

I'm particularly fond of the New Cuyama sign as an illustration of the principle because so much online discourse seems to involve using funny pictures to illustrate points. Your quote works well for a Less Wrong audience, as we seem to be mostly text-based here.

In the "remarkable coincidence" department, I just saw this morning an advert for a (UK) PhD studentship on this very topic: "Enabling Success on Science and Maths Problems; The Role of Local and Global Processing".

... The student will investigate the relationship between success on maths and science misconceptions (e.g. naive conceptions, scientific misconceptions, perceptual bias, overgeneralisations) and: 1) the ability to inhibit local vs. global misleading information; 2) the ability to adaptively switch between local and global processing.

Full info is at this link (eligibility: UK/EU, application deadline 13 March). I am not affiliated with this research group/institution but thought there was enough potential overlap with LW readership to be worth posting.

Also consider risks from future technology. For example, we might be able to "deanonymize" various public data records.

Somebody is going to mention cryonics here, so it might as well be me: Cryonic preservation! We don't have the brain scanning technology that would be needed to reproduce someone's mind based on physical access to their brain yet, but we can preserve the brain in good condition such that someone's mind could be reproduced/revived after their death in the future.

Also, about the getting lots of voice data for machine learning purposes: I'm sure the NSA has been doing something like that. If you just want to record yourself, a typical iPod Touch has good storage capacity for hours of audio and can record from inside a bag. The one thing is that some states require 2-party consent before a private conversation can be legally recorded, so even if you consent to record yourself, you might have to ask the other person for permission or stop recording. On the other hand, you probably wouldn't get in trouble for having an illicit audio recording unless you do something with it that leads to you getting caught, so just recording a conversation for personal use and not using it as evidence or posting it online would probably not get you in trouble.

Use a bunch of resources, with the expectation that future technology will be enough more efficient to clean it all up.

I've talked with someone who keeps a record of components of his blood. I'm not sure whether he saves blood samples or just numerical records.

His theory is that, since different healthy people can have very large differences in blood factors (sorry, i don't know which ones), he wants a record of his normal in case there's rejuvenation tech.

In general collecting data is cheap and we're getting better at sorting and using it, so bias towards collecting data

Also focus on developing skills in areas unlikely to be automated anytime soon

A potential current example, suppose we recorded a ton of our day to day vocal communication. Then, some day in the future, a new machine learning algorithm could make use of the data.

That's a huge ethical issue is you likely don't have the permission from everyone with whom you are communicating. Storing the recordings safely is also an issue.

And the complementary question: What should we not do because it will likely be superfluous in the future?

Examples:

• Learning all kinds of facts (this is already mostly the case thanks to search engines)

• Learning any languagse (except possibly a mainstream language like English if you speak only an endangered language)

• Tagging images on your hard-drive

• Entring data in a highly structured form for 'easy' retrieval (like person data as firs/last name, age, occupation...)

More can be inferred from http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/lor/discussion_of_concrete_neartomiddle_term_trends/

This is a major reason why I keep a private journal hosted online. Also why I won't lie on any part of my future security clearance application (because I'm sure most of the illicit things I've done are mentioned somewhere on facebook's/skype's servers, outside of my immediate account).

This raises an interesting question: What is a population measure of sanity?

As you point out, stated beliefs might not be a great measurement. And even if a less-than-sane belief is genuine, the belief may be so compartmentalized that it isn't a leading cause of irrational behavior.

A while back, I found this study: pdf which tried to correlate performance on a test of cognitive biases with the likelihood of reporting a bunch of different real-world "bad decisions", like having been in jail or default on a loan. They found some modest correlations after adjusting for SES and an IQ-proxy.

I think this is likely.

But I also think you may be overestimating the "sanity water line" because there are lots of professed "rational" beliefs that people don't actually believe.

I don't know whether, on net, that will raise or lower the line.

Secrets require cognitive effort. You need to keep track of what you can say to whom. Who told you what and when and why. It often involves lying or omitting information, both of which require additional effort and care in your conversation. I also find that it messes up some interpersonal relationships and habits. I'm not prone to keeping secrets and withholding information to my partner, family or friends, so if friend X tells me not to tell something to friend Y it forces me to act different from what feels natural.

I think it's an evolved mechanism that favors group cooperation. If people feel emotionally motivated to be open and honest with each other, and maintain a history of doing so, they're more trustworthy to each other and can coexist more peacefully and productively

Because they enjoy sharing info. Getting things "off their chests". Having an extra mind to think about the issue. Getting help from people, which they are only able to give inasmuch as they are clued in. Having other people relate to the experience, or running a sanity check against them. Difficulty in maintaining the illusion of the contrary; especially when you're lying about something that is essential to other people's understanding of your true self, that's basically life on hard mode. There are plenty of advantages, really, even in spite of incentives to keep some info secret.

I was overall happy with my life up to age 12. This was probably a bad thing.

I managed to replace happiness with smug indignation for the next ~8 years.

Ever since, I've pretty much been waiting for a miracle. Oh, I try and create one from time to time, but it never works. Trying less because it inevitably ends in failure.

I feel like I really do need a miracle or three to be generally happy again. At absolute minimum, a means to defeat Akrasia would go a long way.

I am. There are exactly zero humans with whom I would seriously consider changing situations under the most charitable of circumstances and I frequently just giggle about how awesome (perhaps not wrath of God literal use of awesome but not these fries are awesome level either) my life is. How can I be of assistance?

I'd say I'm very far from 'chugging along' -- I have ups and downs, I'm high-energy, etc. But I do have worries, anxieties, bouts of sadness, so I'm not sure how to quantify how 'truly happy' I am.

I feel 'average' from the inside, but when I compare my external behavior to others', I often look like I have deeper reservoirs of energy, enthusiasm, patience, adaptiveness-to-pain, adaptiveness-to-disaster, etc. That makes me think I'm cognitively and affectively privileged in ways that give me an above-average number of spoons, wherewithal tokens, stamina points, etc.

I would guess that my median experiences are in the top 15% of a typical American's experiences, but I'm not confident because it might be that people are still having a pretty fun time in absolute subjective terms even when they act grumpy.

I can't recall anyone I've ever met who appeared to be "really and genuinely" happy on a day-to-day basis.

I think I've met at least one man like this, and several women. I describe myself as "content," and having a remarkably narrow emotional range, which seems like it might be cheerier than "chugging along" but perhaps that's the wrong dimension to compare them on.

I have a stable, comfortable and pretty satisfying life. Overall I feel I'm pretty happy all the time, although there are of course times when I'm worried or a little bit anxious, and when I'm extatic or overly enthusiast with something.

I think that I have the capacity to be genuinely happy on a day-to-day basis.

There are times when I'm generally on top of things. I've got my GTD system functioning, I've got an exercise/food/sleep routine that I like. I've "goal-factored" and feel like I know what I'm doing with my life. ETC. All that really remains for me to do in times like these is to DO things.

Though, I would say that I don't feel like this too often. For the past few months, I've felt somewhat anxious/uncertain about what my life plans were. So, I wasn't as happy on a day to day basis. But, I feel like in the long-run, I'll be able to get into the "on top of things" state more consistently.

There are days when I am more happy, and days whan I am less happy. I can imagine having those good days more frequently, or less frequently. For example during vacation I usually mostly have the good days. Since most of my unhappiness comes from various smaller and greater frustrations at work, I believe that e.g. winning a lottery could improve my life significantly. (There are also other possible solution I could think of; the lottery is just an easy example.)

If I could have more autonomy about how I spend my days, and if I would be rational enough to spend a lot of that time with people I like, I believe I would be genuinely happy on a day-to-day basis.

It also raises worrying considerations about how passwords are stored in the database. Passwords should never be stored in plain text, nor with reversible encryption. Instead, each account should store a password verifier value (and a salt, unique to the user).

A password verifier is the result of running a password, its salt, and possibly another input that isn't kept in the DB all through a function that produces some deterministic value that is nigh-impossible to brute force. A property of password verifiers is that they produce output of a constant length, regardless of the input length. This makes it easy to allow arbitrary-length passwords because any actual limit you impose is artificial and exists for some reason other than your database schema.

For those familiar with hash functions: a raw hash, even a long or fancy one like the new SHA3 family, is a bad password verifier function. However, it does exhibit the desired properties with regard to length. In fact, you can build a decent PVF out of cryptographic hash functions; see PBKDF2.

      <input id="passwd_${op}"
             name="passwd_${op}" type="password" maxlength="20"/>

I know that Val from CfAR at least used to run meditation retreats though they weren't aimed specifically at rationalists.

I think it would be interesting but I see no good reason to do a retreat for specifically for rationalists. I'm not sure whether there are people in this community who are at the 10,000 hour skill level. It's probably easier to find that outside.

I'm apologizing in advance for a bit of bit irreducible spirituality. I try to keep it to a minimum.

I have two experiences of group meditations among rationalists. On was last year at the European Community Camp in Berlin. It felt like there was nobody in the room who gave the thing stability. In the dose of 15-20 minutes that's not harmful but I wouldn't expect a few days in that state to be good.

I lead a meditation during the solstice celebration in Leipzig and only used 20 minutes of 30 that I had asked for on the agenda, because that felt enough.

In total that leads me to think that meditation makes a decent agenda item at an LW event but no good program for a complete day. At least without someone to lead the event who really knows what they are doing.

I don't know to what extend happiness without side effects makes sense.

I found it difficult to "feel" the no addiction and no risk things. If I spend a full week on pure bliss, is the rest of my life going to feel drab or painful by comparison? If you do something that makes you happy, you generally want more of that so if Mac's Wirehead Homestead makes you perfectly happy for a week, aren't you going to crave more of it?

I voted yes, but largely because it will probably have very positive effects on my life after the vacation.

Here's my somewhat related question:

I am offering you the possibility to take the world's greatest year-long vacation. Pure enjoyment and happiness, no side effects or risks. However, when you're finished I'm going to give you this pill here that will make you completely forget the entire thing, and will also completely remove any possible subconscious or physiological benefit you might have otherwise gotten from the vacation. For that matter, for all you know you may have already taken the vacation and the pill and you've just forgotten about it.

Don't like that idea? Well, if you want an alternative I can give you a half-decent one day vacation instead. Not so great, no great life-changing experiences or lifelong memories, but at least you'll probably enjoy it and you will remember it when you're finished.

Which do you prefer?

[pollid:818]

I want to say no purely because of my default suspicion of anyone offering me a free vacation.

Nah. Bliss sans content doesn't seem fun or interesting.

I would vote no. One of the major benefits of going on a vacation is collecting memories to look back on later. If my vacation consisted only of wireheading, then when I was done, the memory of feeling bliss would be the only thing I gained. Instead of reminiscing "remember that time we went swimming at vacation spot?", the only thing I would have is "remember that chemically induced feeling of pure bliss?"

This doesn't seem like a useful experience to have gained; thinking about an actual event later on could bring back some of that happiness, but reminiscing about the platonic ideal of pure bliss doesn't seem like a valuable use of my time, nor would it rekindle some of that feeling every time I remembered it. If it could, why don't I just think about the feeling of pure bliss right now, and get the same effect without needing to go on the vacation?

Now if the vacation induced pure bliss by simulating an awesome adventure instead of just through chemical means, I would probably say yes. This would be the equivalent to going to see an paid week-long entertaining movie. I could relate this to other people, or think about how awesome it was at a later date and get back some of that feeling. But without an actual substantial memory to go with that feeling, I don't think it would be valuable after it ended. This isn't even considering the standard arguments against wireheading, which I tend to agree with.

Considering the "no addiction" guarantee, it's hard for me to see the downside. I like sleeping, and a vacation in which I could spend >10 hours/day sleeping sounds nice, but sleep doesn't lead to friendship, or knowledge, or novelty, or any of that other stuff that people typically state that wireheading lacks. Since I don't consider the happiness caused by sleeping to be bad or fake, there's no real reason why I should reject wire-headed bliss as fake. (This is assuming that I don't have important stuff to do, and wireheading isn't dangerous to me.) The main reasons to reject it seem to be rejecting it as a permanent state.

I might be inclined to sample a few seconds of the wirehead machine, but only if it is clear (beyond whatever "guarantees" Mac offers) that people in fact do not find the experience, once sampled, irresistable. Beyond that, absolutely not.

A week, sure. Two weeks, maybe. A month, I could be convinced. A year, no thanks.

No. What does a week of bliss give you? Nothing but a fond memory. (I'm assuming you don't gain the mental regroup and recovery affect associated with vacations)

A week of bliss builds nothing, and a wirehead bliss does not improve yourself. You have learnt nothing from that week. As far as future prosperity goes it is the same as a week of work drudgery in which no growth happens.

Lacks a neutral option in the pool. Having a neutral option is quite useful to get good data, where some people don't want to decide.

We can only infer that something bad has happened. In the worst case scenario (as HPMOR is so fond of recommending), the company has been taken over by hostile aliens and is now pumping out poisons to destroy as many humans as possible.

archive.is ignores the robots file.

I think an optimal system is resources are no issue is to have an app that allows the teacher to ask every student in attendance questions.

It creates makes the teaching process more interactive and it also requires attendance.

Some thoughts —

High schools have logos, mascots, school colors, and the like. Putting the school's logo on the sign-in sheet for that school might help students avoid signing the wrong one.

Students could use some other means to authenticate their attendance to their teacher — such as taking a selfie at the lecture (with the date on a piece of paper) and sending it to their teacher. Doesn't work for all students, though — not everyone can afford a phone.

Take a big group picture of the students in attendance and mail the picture to the teachers; let the teachers work it out. "Everyone who wants credit, stand up by the whiteboard with your classmates."

The late arrivals problem could be fixed by having the sign-in before the lecture. "If you would like to receive extra credit, you must show up 10 minutes early. If you don't, you will not get extra credit."

Hand out index cards (a different color each month) at the entrance. Each student who wants credit puts his or her name, school, and teacher's name on the card, then at the end of the lecture puts it in a box at the exit. (If there are several exits, have several boxes. If you're worried about box tampering, station a host at each exit if you have enough hosts. And yes, you have to bin the cards by school and teacher afterward.)

If the students have class the next day, stamp their hands with a hand-stamp with long-lasting ink. Then they just show up to class the next day and show the teacher they got the stamp.

Enlist one trustworthy student from each class to report their classmates' attendance.

I've thought of this solution, it requires coding and a somewhat elaborate technical setup, but also eliminates lots of waste, both in time and paper.
Have a webform / app where student can sign in with their name, school and teacher. Upon signing, the system gives the student a unique id.
Where the lecture is given, setup a free wifi from which students must log in with their unique id at the beginning and at the end of the lecture.
Attendance can then be checked in this way: students that attended are only those whose unique id is present at the beginning and at the end of the lecture, according to time stamps and wi-fi origin.
Students can still comunicate each other their unique id and forge their attendance, but you can setup incentives against cooperation: indeed, make credits transferable, so that if one student knows more than one id, s/he can rob other students and give the credits to him/her.

Conversly, if you'd pay much more than this, you are absurdly risk averse: Here's a pdf of a classic paper by Rabin: Risk Aversion and Expected-Utility Theory: A Calibration Theorem

Abstract:

Within the expected-utility framework, the only explanation for risk aversion is that the utility function for wealth is concave: A person has lower marginal utility for additional wealth when she is wealthy than when she is poor. This paper provides a theorem showing that expected-utility theory is an utterly implausible explanation for apprecia- ble risk aversion over modest stakes: Within expected-utility theory, for any concave utility function, even very little risk aversion over modest stakes implies an absurd degree of risk aversion over large stakes. Illustrative calibrations are provided

Improper measurements. You can't compare a time-based number (annual income) to a one-time decision (lump sum of $0, $20 or $200). W should be something like "expected future lifetime spending" in order for this to be a reasonable risk-preference calculation. Further comments assume these are quite poor folks who'll only ever consume $100k in the rest of their lives.

I guessed high by about 5x. The choice is even more trivial than I thought. I will continue happily playing credit card roulette :)

Shouldn't your link have "latex" in place of "download"?

This seems to disregard time preferences. Losing $200 now hurts a lot more than the joy of earning $200 over the course of the following year.

If I set w to "amount currently in my checking account that I consider available for random impulse buys" - say $400 - then I get an answer that's almost exactly in line with my intuition.

The key idea to use here is linearization: even if a function is substantially non-linear overall, it is usually going to be linear in the small region around a point. Since the meal price is small compared to income, utility is just a linear function in that region.

If you haven't done the math in a while, it's a good exercise to see that when you do the Taylor approximations for the two functions, they are equal to first order.

I tried to follow the link and it asked me to download something. Can you post the formula?

I got within 10% of the correct answer!

Yeah, people often run arguments like this without actually considering the magnitude.

gwern's approach may be a good place to start.

Hm, reading up a bit about SSL/TLS, it seems this will not work. Apparently it uses a Message Authentication Code to ensure authenticity, not a signature. But that means that even if you have all the data sent by the server, you still can't prove to a third party that you didn't modify it.

I'm not sure, but possibly you could prove that you did an SSL handshake with the server at a given time, so you can prove that the server sent "something", but not necessarily the particular thing you have. :)

One possible solution is to use a proxy. There are a number of specialized HTTP[S] or SOCKS proxies, some of which may be ideally suited for this use or at least easily adaptable to it. The proxy I use most often is called Burp Suite, and is intended for web site testing and isn't really ideal for your use, but it could technically be coerced into doing what you want.

Preserving the actual TLS traffic including authentication and integrity is a bit of a weird/tricky thing to do. You can record it easily enough using any tool capable of packet capture, but unless you store handshake, the traffic, the symmetric (bulk) encryption key, and the integrity metadata, it will be tricky to prove any given server sent that data.

I don't have an answer, but I think the idea of leveraging https to get a proof of authenticity is a really good idea. If there isn't a standard utility for doing this, there ought to be!

It's not exactly what you're looking for, but I use evernote for a similar purpose (an easily searchable database of websites I visit sorted by tags and available, locally, on every device, as well as in the cloud.

The difference being you have to choose to save the pages, it's not automatic.

Have you been going to AI conferences or reading AI/ML journals recently?

The old way is to employ someone to serve as a front man. Everything is in their name, but you run it and collect the paychecks.

For a more modern approach, you can find a country that's happy to host your business and won't ask questions. If you do it right you could obfuscate it enough that one would have to obtain warrants in three different countries to discover your involvement. But unless you're running a drug cartel or terrorist network, it's probably more trouble than its worth.

I don't want people who will play my games to effortlessly find who I am and what other things I do online.

Let's flip this around:

I want to get other people to run my software on their computers without them being able to readily find out who I am.

Which sounds fine if you're publishing that software as open-source to people who can inspect it ... but not so great if you're publishing it to people who don't have any way of telling what that software is up to!

(Which isn't to say that you're up to anything bad; just that the market is such that a lot of people are up to something bad, and this leads to market operators taking some measures against eagerly supporting untraceable authors.)

You need what's known in the industry as a "threat model". You want to be pseudonymous against whom?

Let me offer you examples of answers:

• A random person on the 'net
• Someone with excellent Google-fu
• An investigative journalist
• Hackers who are not specifically interested in you
• Hackers who are specifically interested in you
• Law enforcement
• etc.

I don't want people who will play my games to effortlessly find who I am and what other things I do online.

This sounds like more anonymity than Scott Alexander has. Scott's real name is easy to work out from reading his blog. What you can't easily do is google his real name and find SSC.

(OTOH, I suspect it wouldn't be too difficult to go from SA levels of anonymity to the level you want. Someone who didn't know Alexander was a pseudonym could probably read much of SSC without ever realizing. Don't quote news articles about your brother, and don't link to other websites controlled by you, and you're probably safe unless you get a determined stalker.)

Whatever pseudonym you choose, don't say it here.

Google Play not only requires a home address but also a credit card for payment (you can't pay with Google Wallet). Credit cards are connected to identities by banks who in turn spend effort into people not having faux cards. There are also laws, that punish you for lying to banks to get credit cards under false names.

I will keep this aspect of my life separated from everything else, because I want this identity to appear as a more or less one-dimensional personality: a simple guy who makes games and has absolutely no controversial opinions (e.g. about politics or religion) ever.

Why? App publishing is mostly anti-fragile against criticism. Scott jobs as a doctor on the other hand isn't anti-fragile, so he has to care about his job not getting messed up by blog articles he writes.

Write that novel, please.

Both your description and the title sound like clickbait. Would you mind adding one sentence saying what the linked thing is about?

Perhaps "Collating widely available time/money trades" from November 2012?

Don't see it, but this might be inspiring: http://fourhourworkweek.com/outsourcing-life/

It takes a lot of effort and you don't see immediate results. I'm sure most people have encountered book-smart individuals with neither common sense nor social skills. Or pretentious types who read a few chapters of Kant and feel the urge to let everyone know how philosophical they are. There are loads of people who learn a little rationality and act as though they are perfectly logical beings. Pedantry, arrogance, and pretentiousness trap many a beginner; such types make poor ambassadors. This essay, for example, got me to really reflect on my writing style and how I was presenting myself.

In short, people are liable to generalize from bad examples and associate rationality with quarrelsome pedants spewing forth incomprehensible jargon.

I don't think getting people to learn about rationality is even a goal. We rather want people to learn to be more rational.

Actually Audi and Mercedes (German) also have very far advanced self-driving programs. In January 2015 an Audi drove itself from the middle of Palo Alto, California, to the convention center in the middle of Las Vegas, Nevada, a distance of about 870 km. Reporters took turns sitting behind the wheel doing nothing.

Have you read "Errors vs. Bugs and the End of Stupidity"?

Do you mean in casual social situations? Or is this people doing stupid things that directly harm you (e.g an incompetent coworker you still need to rely on; a roommate that keeps destroying stuff)?

Focusing by Eugene T. Gendlin is a good framework of handling emotions.

I try to just keep reminding myself that it's simply an optimization problem.

Dealing with your own emotions as an optimization issue is seldom the best approach.

When the state is genuinely counterproductive to your goals, remind yourself of that while suppressing it. If you're worried about lashing out and yelling at people, try to redirect your anger towards your irritating endocrine system that was involved in you being angry even though you don't want to be. Pretending that reductionism implies more than it does is useful: the mantra "just because I'm in a physical state associated with anger doesn't mean I have to be angry" is pretty good for suppressing reactions.

This still holds when the people in question are harming you, as long as anger is genuinely counterproductive. I used this method when an opposing team was cheating and purposefully running out the clock during a Mock Trial scrimmage. I had every right to be angry, but my anger was only impairing my competitive ability, so I just told myself that I needed to shut down this anger, and even though I had trouble trying to tone down my physical reactions (heart rate), I managed to stay calm and compete well.

If the anger is partially productive, trying to suppress all of it will not work because you are incentivized to fail. Try to suppress the parts that are problematic, and tell yourself things like "I'm allowed to be angry in this situation, but I'm not allowed to have [problem-causing component of anger], because it's just counterproductive."

The Luminosity sequence has some stuff on this, though its been long enough since I read it that I don't remember the details very well. Acceptance and commitment therapy has some really good stuff on dealing with anger/frustration (I recommend the book Get Out of Your Mind and into Your Life). Learning acceptance and commitment for just this problem is probably overkill, on the other hand its pretty useful for life in general.

Depends on the purpose of the interaction. In general, accept that stupid people exist and that it is not in your power to change them. That viewpoint saves much effort.

Is there anything specific you had in mind?

How about trying to make some of them less stupid? Educating people through blog articles, lectures or simply informed discussions helped me with the same problem.

Try to figure out a way to kill them and get away with it. It will distract you from your anger.

Back of envelope: suppose one 200-byte comment/post per minute every day for 5 years (I guess 200b is below mean length, 1/minute is above mean frequency, and I think LW is older than 5 years but younger than 10). That's 5 x 365 x 24 x 60 x 200 bytes. Round everything off to powers of 2 and 5: 5 x 400 x 25 x 50 x 200 = 500MB. So, less than a gigabyte, never mind a terabyte.

The English Wikipedia is less than 10 Gigabyte.

Size of LW won't be an issue. The issue is rather having a friendly script that transfers the data.

The review sounds to me like: "He is an abusive psycho, but he is commited and pays attention. Guys, you should learn from him, because this is cool."

Okay, this is a dangerous territory, but this review is a part of what I hate: media sending mixed messages to men, demanding contradictory things, then criticizing men for failing to do the contradictory things. On Monday, you are told to make sure that your t-shirt is politically correct, never invite a woman to a coffee, and stop being an entitled whiny nice guy. On Tuesday, you are told to look at this charming psycho and realize how inferior you are compared with him.

The solution for me is to ignore what media say, which probably is a generally good strategy.

Most of the complaints I've heard about it have nothing much to do with feminism (unless you define that term really broadly). The complaints are (1) that it's really badly written and (2) that it appears to celebrate abuse in the guise of BDSM. (I am told that actual BDSM folks are generally very, very careful about consent, for obvious reasons.)

I am not endorsing either criticism, not least because I haven't read the book. (It seems to me that #2 might be an unfair criticism, on the grounds that FSOG shouldn't be thought of as a book about domination fantasies and how people play them out, but as a domination fantasy itself.) But unless "sexual abuse and rape are bad" has become a specifically feminist (or even faux-feminist) claim now, I don't see that feminism should get either credit or blame for these criticisms.

There's a content-neutral signaling dynamic too: Some BDSM fans (for lack of a better term?) are signaling sophistication by loudly complaining out that the recent "pop music hit" is crap. So there's an opportunity for hipster counter-signaling if anyone with in-group credibility defends some aspect of the book.

Facebook isn't a dating website. It would be strange for a facebook profile to look like a dating profile as that suggests you don't have a social life. A facebook profile normally grows organically over time.

There are three main photos:

(1) Your Avatar/profile picture. It should show your face. Humans use the availability heuristic. Make it easy to recognize yourself on the small thumbnails in conversations.

The avatar is placed at the left of the screen. As a result it makes sense that the body is turned towards the right, in the direction of the text.

Have open body language. You don't want to be turned inward but you want to be turned outward. It's good if the facial muscles are relaxed. It might be worthwhile to spend 30 minutes before taking the photo to get into a good physical state.

Wear clothes that signal what you want to signal. Logos can signal tribal affiliations. Depending on who you are and who you want to express different choices can make sense.

(2) Cover photo. I don't have a good idea and probably will soon choose a new one for myself. A good strategy would be to illustrating a hobby or value that you have.

(3) General tagging. Go to a few social events that produce photos. Get photos of you participating in any hobby that you like. Photos are often made for event promotion.

Salsa Congress for example usually have a photographer that posts pictures on facebook that show of that the event is cool.

What's the best way to make a facebook account?

Define "best". What are you specific goals for having a FB account? An "attractive facebook profile" -- attractive to whom? potential dates? employers? random stalkers? NSA?

My two cents -- don't.

But if you're hellbent on selling out just to look cool to others, well. If you're physically attractive, play up the photos. And, importantly, if you're not, downplay them. Try to have all or most pics taken by someone other than you, even if it's just the camera on a tripod and a timer. Save the "Like" button for stuff you really truly like; any four-digit Likes number is one or two orders of magnitude too much. Refrain from drama-queen status updates. Limit the number of pictures of random crap to about 15% as many as those of you. Don't pull ridiculous or self-conscious poses or faces in photos; try to look natural, relaxed, and as if you're having fun. (A workable alternative is the aloof bitchface they make models put on in photoshoots, but I don't have you figured for a model, lad.) Have a selection of photos to choose from, and pick the most flattering for the profile. Untag yourself (is that possible? I don't know) from unflattering or embarrassing photos of you your true and loyal friends have kindly made available to the general public. Expose little of yourself; you have no idea how much you can learn about someone just by regularly stalking something seemingly innocuous such as their public Recent Likes. Facebook is not a place to pour your heart out; everything you do leaves the digital analogue (ahem) of fingerprints. Emphasize instead the more impressive parts of yourself. Got a lot of books you read and liked? Great, put them all in there.

If you're good at online image management, Facebook can take you far, perhaps farther still than your meatspace self. That's probably the only reason I've ever considered making an account (the other would be access to everything beyond the Great Wall of Friends-Only Data), but it first has to lose the fight against the fear of surrendering personal data, forever, to a company I sure as fuck don't trust. Of course -- if you're bad at that, it's nothing but a new venue for making a fool of yourself.

In terms of photos, I use a self-portrait that is artistically edited to the point of near-unrecognizability (and is unsearchable via Google Images) for my profile picture, and used to use a silhouette. My cover/background picture is something I made in Apophysis and Photoshop that I thought looked nice. You may not actually need a photo at all. If you want a less artificial cover/background image, take a nice close-up photo of some plant or something else visually appealing in your area, then edit it a bit.

For a "good photo", you may want to take a passable photo, apply the basic touch-ups (the Spot Healing brush is great for acne, small cuts, and out-of-place hair), and then perhaps overexpose or otherwise apply a visually appealing edit to the image such that it looks like you, but obviously edited. (Here's an overexposed picture.) It's hard to go too wrong with taking a shower and wearing some of your nicer clothing, standing in front of a white wall, and getting a friend to take a picture while you smile a bit.

Your avatar/profile pic should look good at small scales. You want your face, not your body.

You don't need to post a lot of pictures: just enough to make people know who you are, and using a real name with a location should be sufficient for that.

In terms of other content: you don't care about listing what movies/books/games you like, just write a good description of yourself. Follow some accounts you like, join groups that you participate in IRL. Post interesting links with commentary occasionally. Don't use the account to get into too many comment-section arguments.

My view: status is what social species organizing along feudal lines feels like from the inside. I think your definition does not capture the dominance/submission or perhaps vassal/liege aspect of status.

Your definition looks like an economics heuristic. There are advantages to that frame but it's worth remembering that the human brain doesn't run on rational self-interest. There are a lot of

Status in bamboo tribes get's investigated by scientists by looking at eye gazes. Which bamboo looks at which one for how long.

Humans quite frequently use heuristics driven by who would win a physical conflict even if that's not important in the context where they want to judge status.

Status is social.

There are things you prefer. Positive things like "I like ice cream" and negative things like "I hope that strong guy will not kill me". This is the individual level.

But there are social aspects, such as "people like this thing, so even if I personally do not like it, it is useful to trade", or "people are afraid of this guy, so even if I personally do not care about him, if I make him angry, I will make a lot of additional enemies". When people perceive each others' perceptions, on a social level the perceptions become 1-place words: "this is nice" (they say, although I personally do not like it), "this is respected" (generally, although I personally do not respect it), etc.

But even this was just an explanation on a game-theoretical level. This is how a paperclip maximizer trying to trade with humans would perceive the situation. "I will collect these golden coins, althouth they are meaningless, because I can trade them with humans for paperclip-making tools. I will respect human gods, because otherwise humans will get angry and will destroy many paperclips to punish me." As a social species we have instincts for this. We feel the status (that is: our heuristics evaluate it quickly and provide us the result). For some people this instinct works better, for other people it works worse. In some situations, the heuristics fail.

Here are lists of articles, sorted by date, 250 per page: main discussion.

The closest thing I could find is a list of all the posts by year which can be found in the sidebar of the wiki, of all places. I don't know if a subdivision by month exists.

I think you've missed an important distinction in libertarian groups. Goldbugs tend to be more Malthusian than Cornucopian. In fact, Goldbugs are usually bulls on all commodities and perma-bears on everything else. Goldbugs tend to be paleo-libertarians like Mises Institute/Lew Rockwell etc. The Cornucopian libertarians tend to be cosmotarians like Reason Foundation/Cato Institute, etc. E.g. Julian Simon was a member of Cato.

I don't think its super fair to use works of fiction to illustrate supposed contradictions in belief systems, particularly since libertarians aren't objectivists.

Firstly, I'm not sure what libertarianism has to do with an alleged incompatibility between the gold standard and cornucopianism. It is perfectly possible to be a cornucopian supporter of the gold standard without being a libertarian. You seem to have a hobby-horse of bringing libertarianism into questions where it is irrelevant. I have been unable to find survey data of libertarian views on the gold standard, but the monetary policy views I most closely associate with libertarianism are Monetarism and Free Banking.

Secondly, your alleged contradiction doesn't seem to work, or at least, is insufficiently developed. Why would it be a problem for a hypothetical gold standard if in the future we have mountains of gold alongside our mountains of copper, wheat, etc? As long as improvements in gold output track the improvements in all other goods, that would imply a constant price level, and the gold standard is vindicated. The major drawback of the gold standard is precisely the opposite worry - that there might be changes in gold output not reflected in the output of other goods, resulting in unanticipated shocks to the price level. But this is equally true in cornucopian and Malthusian worlds, and defenders of the gold standard nevertheless think that this policy is the best available option. So I really don't see how the addition of a cornucopian belief creates any added (dis)advantages for support for the gold standard.

Historically, gold had a lot of attractive properties for use as currency:

1. Compactness: high value/volume ratio.
2. Low upkeep/maintenance cost (due to chemical unreactivity)
3. Difficulty to counterfeit. This applies to all the elements really, although you could in theory produce sub-Nickel elements economically through nuclear reactions. However physical law prevents this for heavier elements.
4. Ease of verification (distinctive color plus chemical resistance allows easy 'field tests')
5. Inherent value independent of legal status as currency (jewellry, electronics, etc.)

Even today I doubt you could find an element that combines all these properties together. Platinum and a few others might qualify.

These properties make gold attractive as currency when a stable currency-issuing government doesn't exist, even today. This is why it fits in well with libertarian philosophy, since it's based on the assumption of small and limited government.

About your second question, I don't see the contradiction. Gold can also be produced, and in fact it has to do so in a growing economy based on the gold standard. The key phrase is 'proper political order.' The idea is to have a currency that can grow when things are good but be immune to things going bad.

By the way, I am most definitely not a libertarian, but the gold standard is hardly the biggest issue with libertarianism. The current monetary system might be better than the gold standard but that's only because the political climate is much different.

Perhaps, because you need two fast rotating neutron stars to brush one against the other. Only this creates gold, a simple supernova explosion isn't enough. ;-)

I'm a libertarian, and I think you've got an interesting question there. Libertarianism was developed when technology wasn't changing as fast as it is now, and the gold standard is a solution to a real problem of serious inflation.

I've still not sure it makes sense that people need to be fooled(?) into making sensible purchases and investments though mild inflation.

However, cheap oil does support the cornucopean hythpothesis, and it didn't take a libertarian society-- just modern tech and governments that aren't extremely oppressive.

Anyway, I don't know if there's a libertarian consensus about gold these days, or whether an electronic currency is a reasonable substitute.

Before the big drop in the price of oil, I saw people doubting peak oil (the idea was that exploration is regulating by the expectation of returns, so it wasn't going to look as though there was more than 30 years worth of oil), but I didn't see anyone predicting cheap oil. Has anyone seen that sort of prediction?

Incidentally, there's oil from shale in Atlas Shrugged-- with no hint of what tech would be needed to get the oil out.

Libertarians are opposed to fiat money, in line with their general dislike of government regulation. If you reject paper money, where to next? Gold has a lot of very nice properties that made it useful as a medium of exchange in the past, so why not go back to something that worked? If you can explain away the problems with the old gold standard as a consequence of poor financial planning, then the rational choice seems to be the gold standard. Electronic currencies, like Bitcoin, have various issues of security and not really "existing" that just don't apply to physical objects.

How to resolve this with cornucopianism of natural resources? Honestly, I haven't seen any libertarian works addressing this question. It seems to me that the big push for gold has mostly historical reasons.

You see this contradiction in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, where the Operating Objectivists can create mountains of goods - copper, coal, steel, petroleum, wheat, etc. - when they live under a proper political order. But they mysteriously can't seem to do this trick for gold.

The gold standard has an interesting history. The World Wars and the Great Depression uncovered many practical problems with the gold standard and Rand lived to see the various debates and policy shifts that arose during this time. The emphasis on gold in Atlas Shrugged is likely a yearning for the good old days before contemporary politicians mucked everything up.