Open thread, 3-8 June 2014

I recognize this in myself and it's been difficult to understand, much less get under control. The single biggest insight I've had about this flinching-away behavior (at least the way it arises in my own mind) is that it's most often a dissociative coping mechanism. Something intuitively clicked into place when I read Pete Walker's description of the "freeze type". From The 4Fs: A Trauma Typology in Complex PTSD:

Many freeze types unconsciously believe that people and danger are synonymous, and that safety lies in solitude. Outside of fantasy, many give up entirely on the possibility of love. The freeze response, also known as the camouflage response, often triggers the individual into hiding, isolating and eschewing human contact as much as possible. This type can be so frozen in retreat mode that it seems as if their starter button is stuck in the "off" position. It is usually the most profoundly abandoned child - "the lost child" - who is forced to "choose" and habituate to the freeze response (the most primitive of the 4Fs). Unable to successfully employ fight, flight or fawn responses, the freeze type's defenses develop around classical dissociation, which allows him to disconnect from experiencing his abandonment pain, and protects him from risky social interactions - any of which might trigger feelings of being reabandoned. Freeze types often present as ADD; they seek refuge and comfort in prolonged bouts of sleep, daydreaming, wishing and right brain-dominant activities like TV, computer and video games. They master the art of changing the internal channel whenever inner experience becomes uncomfortable. When they are especially traumatized or triggered, they may exhibit a schizoid-like detachment from ordinary reality.

Of course like with any other psychological condition there's a wide spectrum: some people had wonderful childhoods full of safe attachment and always had somebody to model healthy processing of emotions for them, some people were utterly abandoned as children, and many more had something between those extremes. The key understanding I've gained from Pete Walker's writing is that simply being left alone with upsetting inner experience too often as a child can lead to development of "freeze type" defenses, even in the absence of any overtly abusive treatment.

I suspect that using a combination of TV shows, games and web browsing as emotional analgesics (at various levels of awareness) is very common now in wealthy countries. This is one of the reasons I would like to see more discussion of emotional issues on Less Wrong.

This is kind of funny because I came to this open thread to ask something very similar.

I have noticed that my mind has a "default mode" which is to aimlessly browse the internet. If I am engaged in some other activity, no matter how much I am enjoying it, a part of my brain will have the strong desire to go into default mode. Once I am in default mode, it takes active exertion to break away do anything else, no matter how bored or miserable I become. As you can imagine, this is a massive source of wasted time, and I have always wished that I could stop this tendency. This has been the case more or less ever since I got my first laptop when I was thirteen.

I have recently been experimenting with taking "days off" of the internet. These days are awesome. The day just fills up with free time, and I feel much calmer and content. I wish I could be free of the internet and do this indefinitely.

But there are obvious problems, a few of which are:

• Most of the stuff that I wish I was doing instead of aimlessly surfing the internet involves the computer and oftentimes the internet. A few of the things that would be "good uses of my time" are reading, making digital art, producing electronic music, or coding. Three out of four of those things rely on the computer, and of those three, they oftentimes in some capacity rely on the internet.

• I am inevitably going to be required to use the internet for school and work. Most likely in my graphic design and computer science classes next year I will have to be able to use the internet on my laptop during class.

• If I have an important question that I could find the answer to on Google, I'm going to want to find that answer.

It's hard to find an eloquent solution to this problem. If I come up with a plan for avoiding internet use that is too loose, it will end up getting more and more flexible until it falls apart completely. If the plan is too strict, then I inevitably will not be able to follow it and will abandon it. If the plan is too intricate and complicated, then I will not be able to make myself follow it either.

The best idea I have come up with so far is to delete all the browsers from my laptop and put a copy of Chrome on a flash drive. I would never copy this instance of Chrome onto a hard drive, instead I would just run it from the flash drive every time I wanted to use it. This way, every time I wanted to use the internet, I would have to go find the flash drive. I could also give the flash drive to someone else for a while if I felt like a moment of weakness was coming on. I've been using this for exactly one day and it seems to be working pretty well so far.

The other thing I've been doing for a few days is writing a "plan" of the next day before I go to bed, then sticking to the plan. If something happens to interrupt my plan, then I will draft a new plan as soon as possible. For example, my friend called me up today inviting me over. I wasn't about to say "No, I can't hang out, I have planned out my day and it didn't include you". So when I got back, I wrote a new one. Most of these plans involve limiting internet use to some degree, so this also seems promising. I might also do something where I keep track of how many days in a row I followed the plan and try not to break the chain.

In my experience adderall can ameliorate this problem somewhat.

I've experienced similar feelings, and find some exercises from "The Now Habit" to help.

There's an exercise he calls the focusing exercise which involves taking five mintues to get in flow state before starting, which helps, and also found the advice to reframe "How soon can I finish" to "When can I start?" to help as well.

It sounds pretty familiar to me. My version seems to be background anxiety, and it can help to check my breathing and let my abdomen expand when I'm inhaling.

One aspect of perceptual adaptation I do not often hear emphasized is the role of agency. I first encountered it in this passage:

The first hours were very difficult; nobody could move freely or do anything without going very slowly and trying to figure out and make sense of what he or she saw. Then something unexpected happened: Everything about their bodies and the immediate vicinity that they were touching began to look as before, but everything which could not be touched continued to be inverted. Gradually, by groping and touching while moving around to attain the satisfaction of normal needs, participants in the experiment found that objects further a field began to appear normal to the participants in the experiment. In a few weeks, everything looked the right way up, and they could all do everything without any special attention or care. At one point in the experiment snow began to fall. Kohler looked through the window and saw the flakes rising from the earth and moving upwards. He went out, stretched out his hands, palms upwards, and felt the snow falling on them. After only a few moments of feeling the snow touch his palms, he began to see the snow falling instead of rising.

There have been other experiments with inverted spectacles. One carried out in the United States involved two people, one sitting in a wheelchair and the other pushing it, both fitted with such special glasses. The one who moved around by pushing the chair began to see normally, and after a few hours, was able to find his way without groping, while the one sitting continued to see everything the wrong way.

--- Moshe Feldenkrais, "Man and World," in "Explorers of Humankind," ed Thomas Hanna

I read about an experiment (no link, sorry) where people wore helmets that gave them a 360 degree view of their surroundings. They were apparently able to adapt quite well, and could eventually do thinks like grab a ball tossed to them from behind without turning around.

from my experience with focusing on the senses I already have the mere availability of the data is not sufficient. You really need to process it. The glass intervention works well because it also takes away the primary way of interacting with the world. If you only add sense most of it can be pretty much ignored as it doesn't bring any compelling extra value except for being cool for a while. Color TV was kinda nice improvement but not many are jumping on the 3D bandwagon.

So if you really want to go three eyed it could be a good bet it could be good from sense development perspective to go only new-eye mono for a while. Another one would be have a environment where the new capabilities are difference makingly handy. I could imagine that fixing and taking apart computers could benefit from that kind of sensing. You could also purposefully make a multilayered desk so that simply looking what is on the desk would require hand movement but many more documents could be open at any time.

Your brain is already mostly filtering out the massive amount of input it takes, making it quite expensive to make it bother paying attention to yet another sense-datum The sense would also require their own "drivers". I could imagine that managing a moveable eye would be more laboursome than eye focus micro. Having a fixed separation of your viewpoints makes the calculations easy routine. That would have to be expanded into a more general approach for variable separation. There is a camera trick where you change your zoom while simultanously moving the camera in the forward backward dimension keeping the size of the primary target fixed but stretching the perspective. Big variance to the viewpoint separation would induce similar effects. I could imagine how it could be nausea-inducing instead of only cool. Increased mental labour and confusion atleast on the short-term would press against adopting a more expanded sensory experience. Therefore if such transition is wanted it is important to bring the tempting good sides concrete in the practical experience.

I've thought about taking this idea further.

Think of applying the anklet idea to groups of people. What if soccer teams could know where their teammates are at any time, even if they can't see them? Now apply this to firemen. or infantry. This is the startup i'd be doing if I wasn't doing what I'm doing. plugging data feeds right into the brain, and in particular doing this for groups of people, sounds like the next big frontier.

if you always carry a wearable camera on your wrist

Better: put it on your personal drone which normally orbits you but can be sent out to look at things...

I have magnets implanted into two of my fingertips, which extend my sense of touch to be able to feel electromagnetic fields. I did an AMA on reddit a while ago that answers most of the common questions, but I'd be happy to answer any others.

To touch on it briefly, alternating fields feel like buzzing, and static fields feel like bumps or divots in space. It's definitely become a seamless part of my sensory experience, although most of the time I can't tell it's there because ambient fields are pretty weak.

There's already some brain plasticity research which does this for people who have lost senses. Can't remember a specific example, but I know there are quite a few in the book "The Brain That Changes Itself"

Well, technologies like BrainPort allow one to "see" with their tongue.

I would guess strongly (75%) that the answer is yes. There are incredible stories about people's brains adapting to new inputs. There is one paper in the neuroscience literature that showed how if you connect a video input to a blind cat's auditory cortex, that brain region will adapt new neural structures that are usually associated with vision (like edge detectors).

I think the nearest thing is the Brain Preservation Foundation. If you want to donate money towards that purpose, they are a good address.

The last point is particularly important, since on one hand, with the current quasi-Ponzi mechanism of funding, the position of preserved patients is secured by the arrival of new members.

Downvoted because if I remember correctly, this is wrong; the cost of preservation of a particular person includes a lump of money big enough for the interest to pay for their maintenance. If I remember incorrectly and someone points it out, I will rescind my downvote.

Find & read good self-help type stuff (relevant books by psychologists, Less Wrong posts, Sebastian Marshall, Getting Things Done, etc.) and invent/experiment with your own techniques in a systematic way. Do Tiny Habits. Start meditating. Watch & apply this video. Keep a log of all the failure modes you run in to and catalogue strategies for overcoming each of them. Read about habit formation. Brainstorm & collect habits that would be useful to have and pair them with habit formation techniques. Try lots of techniques and reflect about why things are or are not working.

Have you asked CFAR whether you could hire one of their instructors to give you one-on-one training over Skype? I expect it would be expensive, but they are flexible with people who are willing to pay thousands of dollars.

Ideas for how to simulate the small group interactions. This is mainly what LW meetups are for, but for various reasons I can't usually make it to a meetup.

One of the best things that happened to me was getting into a tumblr rationalist group on skype. The feeling is a bit like a meetup, except people are available all the time.

So, anybody interested in being a rationality tutor?

Yes, but I'm not yet versed enough in the Art to help anyone except a novice. If you have specific things you want to discuss I can probably point you in the right direction.

This is also what the skype group (or meetups) are good for. There will always be someone who can help you with a particular issue.

On a related note, is there a reason why Less Wrong, and seemingly no other website, would suffer a catastrophic memory leak when I try and append a JSON-P script element to the DOM? It doesn't report any security policy conflicts; it just dies.

Ooh, ooh, thought of another cluster of danger phrases (inspired by a recent Yvain blog post, I forget which): "studies have shown", "studies show", "studies find", and any other vague claim that something's corroborated by multiple scientific studies which the writer mysteriously can't be bothered to reference properly, or even give a clear description of.

So is this script somewhere we can try it?

This seems very interesting, maybe someone can look into this in depth. The costs are much more manageable and there are hopefully fewer legal issues with preserving brain only. Not sure why they only talk about "next of kin". Anyway, "chemical preservation" of the brain only for $2500 seems like an interesting alternative to Alcor or CI. It is also more likely to go over better in an argument with people reluctant to opt for the "traditional" cryonics, such as parents of some of the regulars complaining about it.

I am not qualified to judge the quality of their "Instructions for Funeral Director":

Embalm the entire body, paying special attention to the brain. Use arterial fluid on the brain rather than cavity fluid. If 10% Neutral Buffered Formalin is readily available, that is preferred for the brain. Wait one hour and then pump more fluid through the brain again. Since the body will never be displayed at a funeral service, there is no need to perform any cosmetic procedures at all. Those would simply delay shipment.

Someone from OC came by the RationalWiki Facebook group asking if it was of interest to us ... um. I suggested they should definitely say hi on LW.

Learn all the maths to be able to get a job at MIRI :)

Intern under a specialist in heat-straightening of damaged steel members.

Writing a novel.

It's a feature, not a bug. The friendly algorithm that creates that column assumes you would rationally prefer Atlanta or Houston to anywhere within 40 miles of Detroit.

'Nearest meetups' ignores where your location is set to, and tries to work it out from your IP address. (Source, my location is set to London.) Perhaps your IP address is misleading about that?

Two sites that try to work out your location from your IP:

http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation (says I'm in Budapest)

http://www.ip-adress.com/ (says I'm in London)

I'm not sure what system LW uses for this, right now it gives me "upcoming" instead of "nearest".

(Edit: now that I'm at home instead of work, these respectively say London and Glasgow, and I have "nearest meetups" back.)

c'n'p with link to original, really. (So no.)

An Omega is physically impossible

I don't think it's physically impossible for someone to predict my behavior in some situation with a high degree of accuracy.

An Omega is physically impossible

The idea that we live in a simulation is not a physical impossibility.

At the moment choices can often be predicted 7 seconds in advance by reading brain signals.

I believe the application was how a duplicable intelligence like an AI could reason effectively. (Hence TDT thinking in terms of all instances of you.)

Do you think that someone can predict your behavior with maybe 80% accuracy? Like, for example, whether you would one-box or two-box, based on what you wrote? And then confidently leave the $1M box empty because they know you'd two-box? And use that fact to win a bet, for example? Seems very practical.

So as several people said, Omega is probably more within the realm of possibility than you give it credit for, but MORE IMPORTANTLY, Omega is definitely possible for non-humans. As David_Gerard said, the point of this thought exercise is for AI, not for humans. For an AI written by humans, we can know all of its code and predict the answers it will give to certain questions. This means that the AI needs to deal with us as if we are an Omega that can predict the future. For the purposes of AI, you need decision theories that can deal with entities having arbitrarily strong models of each other, recursively. And TDT is one way of trying to do that.

I understood that people here mostly do care about them because of mathematical interest. It's a part of the "how can we design an AGI" math problem.

For all the emphasis on Slytherin-style interpersonal competence (not so much on the main site anymore, but it's easy to find in the archive and in Methods), LW's historically had a pretty serious blind spot when it comes to PR and other large-scale social phenomena. There's probably some basic typical-minding in this, but I'm inclined to treat it mostly as a subculture issue; American geek culture has a pretty solid exceptionalist streak to it, and treats outsiders with pity when it isn't treating them with contempt and suspicion. And we're very much tied to geek culture. I've talked to LWers who don't feel comfortable exercising because they feel like it's enemy clothing; if we can't handle something that superficial, how are we supposed to get into Joe Sixpack's head?

Ultimately I think we focus on contrarian technocrat types, consciously or not, because they're the people we know how to reach. I include myself in this, unfortunately.

The hardline secularism is probably alienating (and frankly, are there not many people for whom at least the outward appearance of belief is rational, when it is what ties them to their communities?) to many people who could still learn a lot. Science can be promoted as an alternative to mysticism in a way that isn't hostile and doesn't provoke instant dismissal by those who most need that alternative.

The hardline secularism (which might be better described as a community norm of atheism, given that some of the community favors creating community structures which take on the role of religious participation,) isn't a prerequisite so much as a conclusion, but it's one that's generally held within the community to be pretty basic.

However, so many of the lessons of epistemic rationality bear on religious belief that not addressing the matter at all would probably smack of willful avoidance.

In a sense, rationality might function as an alternative to mysticism. Eliezer has spoken for instance about how he tries to present certain lessons of rationality as deeply wise so that people will not come to it looking for wisdom, find simple "answers," and be tempted to look for deep wisdom elsewhere. But there's another very important sense where, if you treat rationality like mysticism, the result is that you'll completely fuck up at rationality, and get a group that worships some "rational" sounding buzzwords without gaining any useful insight into reasoning.

Keep in mind that insofar as Less Wrong has educational goals, it's not trying to reach as wide an audience as possible, it's trying to teach as many people as possible to get it right. If "reaching" an audience means instilling them with some memes which don't have much use in isolation, while leaving out important components of rationality, that measure has basically failed.

If the sequences were being repackaged as a self-help book targeted towards the widest possible audience, what would they look like?

More simple language, many examples, many exercises.

And then the biggest problem would be that most people would just skip the exercises, remember some keywords, and think that it made them more rational.

By which I mean that making the book more accessible is a good thing, and we definitely should do it. But rationality also requires some effort from the reader, that cannot be completely substituted by the book. We could reach a wider audience, but it would still be just a tiny minority of the population. Most people just wouldn't care enough to really do the rationality stuff.

Which means that the book should start with some motivating examples. But even that has limited effect.

I believe there is a huge space for improvement, but we shouldn't expect magic even with the best materials. There is only so much even the best book can do.

Some of the material is essentially millenia old, self-knowledge and self-awareness and introspection aren't new inventions.

The problem is, using these millenia old methods people can generate a lot of nonsense. And they predictably do, most of the time. Otherwise, Freud would have already invented rationality, founded CFAR, became a beisutsukai master, built a Friendly AI, and started the Singularity. (Unless Aristotle or Socrates would already do it first.) Instead, he just discovered that everything you dream about is secretly a penis.

The difficult part is to avoid self-deception. These millenia old materials seem quite bad at it. Maybe they were best of what was available at their time. But that's not enough. Archimedes could have been the smartest physicist of his time, but he still didn't invent relativity. Being "best" is not enough; you have to do things correctly.

LessWrong's focus on the bay-area/software-programmer/secular/transhumanist crowd seems to me unnecessary.

I don't understand what this means. LW is composed mostly from people of these backgrounds. Are you saying that this a problem?

But when people here tie rationality to being part of that subset, or to high-IQ in general, it seems a bit silly.

If by rationality you mean systematic winning (where winning can be either truth seeking (epistemic rationality) or goal achieving (instrumental rationality)) then no one is claiming that we have a monopoly on it. But if by rationality, you are referring to the group of people who have decided to study it and form a community around it, then yes most of us are high IQ and in technical fields. And if you think this is a problem, I'd be interested in why.

I also find the near-obsession with IQ a bit unsettling

In other words, my opponent believes something which is kind like being obsessed with it, and obsession is bad. If you have a beef with a particular view or argument then say so.

Some of the material is essentially millenia old, self-knowledge and self-awareness and introspection aren't new inventions

Eliezer has responded to this (very common) criticism here

I don't know why you want LW to be packaged to a wide audience. I suspect this would do more harm than good to us, and to the wider audience. It would harm the wider audience because of the sophistication bias, which would cause them to mostly look for errors in thinking in others and not their own thinking. It takes a certain amount of introspectiveness (which LW seems to self-select for) not to become half-a-rationalist.

LessWrong's focus on the bay-area/software-programmer/secular/transhumanist crowd seems to me unnecessary.

What practical steps do you see to make LW less focused on that crowd? What are you advocating?

If the sequences were being repackaged as a self-help book targeted towards the widest possible audience, what would they look like?

The book that Eliezer is writing? (What's the state of play on that, btw?)

I don't have a full answer to the question, but if you do feed the dog meat, one starting point would be to prefer meat that has less suffering associated with it. It is typically claimed that beef has less suffering per unit mass associated with it than pork and much less than chicken, simply because you get a lot more from one individual. The counterargument would be to claim that cows > pigs > chickens in intelligence/complexity to a great enough extent to outweigh this consideration.

I'm curious: are there specific reasons to believe that dogs need meat while humans (also omnivores) do not? A quick Google search finds lots of vegetarians happy to proclaim that dogs can be vegetarian too, but I haven't looked into details.

Well you see the government comes to you with a closed box that they say they have already filled with either a totalitarian government if they predicted you would not vote, but it is filled with a relatively free republic if they predicted you would vote. They filled the box long ago, however...

Up until 2011 in Canada, Parties would receive by-the-vote subsidies to their budgets. This was strongly defended by the center and left parties as a way to keep big money out of politics and a measure of true democracy in our first past the poll system.

I once saw an argument that if you compare the chance of an election being decided by 1 vote to the benefits of getting your preferred party/candidate in power, which may be billions/trillions, then voting can be worth thousands of dollars - at least if you value those benefits at full rather than only for their affect on you (which is dubious).

Political parties will change their policies to capture more voters. So even though your vote won't change who wins the election, you will still shift the policies of the parties towards your own views.

The only reasons I can think of are your #1 and #2. But I think both are perfectly good reasons to vote...

What is she ultimately trying to achieve? More aggressive reminders than a normal calendar app can give you?

Also: computer or smartphone?

Google Calendar does this, I think.

I use Apple's iCal, which of course is only for Apple devices. It pops up a notification showing the "description", "location", and time of the event. I put the quotes in because you can use those strings for whatever you like. If the calendar is shared in iCloud then an event entered on any of your devices pops up on all of them.

You can do this in Windows using Task Scheduler.

@echo off
set /p MESSAGE=What do you want to be reminded of?^

^>
set /p ALERTTIME=When do you want to be reminded (hh:mm:ss)?^

^>
set TASKNAME=%DATE:/=_%_%TIME::=_%
set TASKNAME=%TASKNAME:.=_%
schtasks /create /sc once /tn %TASKNAME% /tr "msg * %MESSAGE%" /st %ALERTTIME%
pause

/ru username /rp password

How familiar are you with this area? I think that this sort of thing is already well-studied, but I have only vague memories to go by.

As an aside, you only need (AND and NOT) or (OR and NOT), not all three; and if you have NAND or NOR, either of those is sufficient by itself.