Well, here at LessWrong, we follow a thirty-something bearded Jewish guy who, along with a small group of disciples, has performed seemingly impossible deeds, preaches in parables, plans to rise from the dead and bring with him as many of us as he can, defeat evil, and create a paradise where we can all live happily forever.

So yeah, getting away from Catholic habits of thought may be tough. With work, you'll get there though...

Speaking from experience: don't kneejerk too hard. It's all too easy to react against everything at all implicitly associated with a religion or philosophy that you now reject the truth-claims of and distort parts of your personality or day to day life or emotions or symbolic thought that have nothing to do with what you have rejected.

Don't forget that reversed stupidity is not intelligence; a belief doesn't become wrong simply because it's widely held by Catholics.

Similarly, there's no need to be scared of responding positively to art or other ideas because they originated from a religious perspective; if atheism required us to do that, it would be almost as bleak a worldview as it's accused of being. Adeste Fideles doesn't stop being a beautiful song when you realize its symbols don't have referents. I think of the Christian mythology as one of my primary fantasy influences—like The Lord of the Rings, Discworld, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant or Doctor Who—so, if I find myself reacting emotionally to a Christian meme, I don't have to worry that I'm having a conversion experience (or that God exists and is sneakily trying to win me over!): it's perfectly normal, and lawful, for works of fiction to have emotional impact.

What others already said: Don't try to reverse stupidity by avoiding everything conected to Catholicism. You are allowed to pick the good pieces and ignore the bad pieces, instead of buying or rejecting the whole package. Catholics also took some good parts from other traditions; which by the way means you don't even have to credit them for inventing the good pieces you decide to take.

If you talk with other religious people, they will probably try the following trick on you: Give you a huge book saying that it actually answers all your questions, and that you should at least read this one book and consider it seriously before you abandon religion completely. Of course if you read the whole book and it doesn't convince you, they will give you another huge book. And another. And another. The whole strategy is to surround you by religion memes (even more strongly than most religious people are), hoping that sooner or later something will "trigger" your religious feelings. And no matter how many books you read, if at some moment you refuse to read yet another book, you will be accused of leaving the religion only because of your ignorance and stubbornness, because this one specific book certainly did contain all answers to your questions and perfectly convincing counterarguments to your arguments, you just refused to even look at it. This game you cannot win: there is no "I have honestly considered all your arguments and found them unconvincing" exit node; the only options given to you are either to give up, or to do something that will allow your opponents to blame you of being willfully ignorant. (So you might as well do the "ignorant" thing now, and save yourself a lot of time.)

Don't try to convince other people, at least not during the first months after deconversion. First, you need to sort out things for yourself (you don't have a convincing success story yet). Second, by the law of reciprocation, if the other people were willing to listen to your explanations, this in turn gives them the moral right to give you a huge book of religious arguments and ask you to read it, which leads to the game described above.

Basicly, realize that you have a right to spend most of your time without thinking about Catholicism, either positively or negatively. That is what most atheists really do. If you were born on another planet, where religion wasn't invented, you wouldn't spend your time arguing against religion. Instead, you would just do what you want to do. So do it now.

I recommend this list:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki_Atheism_FAQ_for_the_Newly_Deconverted

I find myself to have a much clearer and cooler head when it comes to philosophy and debate around the subject. Previously I had a really hard time squaring utilitarianism with the teachings of religion, and I ended up being a total heretic. Now I feel like everything makes sense in a simpler way.

Biotech x-risk is a tricky subject, since research into how to prevent it also is likely to provide more information on how to engineer biothreats. It's from nontrivial to know what lines of research will decrease the risk, and which will increase it. One doesn't want a 28 Days Later type situation, where a lab doing research into viruses ends up being the source of a pandemic.

Note that Friendly AI (if it works) will defeat all (or at least a lot of) x-risk. So AI has a good claim to being the most effective at reducing x-risks, even the ones that aren't AI risk. If you anticipate an intelligence explosion but aren't worried about UFAI then your favourite charity is probably some non-MIRI AI research lab (Google?).

I used to have the same, to the extent that I wouldn't ask even ask teachers, people paid to help me, for help. I hated the feeling that I was a burden somehow. But I got over it in the space of a couple months by getting into a position where people were asking me for help all the time - and that made me realize it wasn't an unpleasant or annoying experience, I actually liked it, and others were probably the same. In most cases you're doing people a favor by giving them a chance to get warm-fuzzies for what's (usually in the case of rejection therapy) a relatively simple request to fulfill.

Of course, there are still certain requests that might be uncomfortable to reject, and my thoughts on those are that they're usually the ones where you feel like you've left someone out who really needed your help. So to get over this, don't choose things to ask that are going to go bad if you don't get it - for instance asking for a ride when it's pouring out, or telling someone you need some money to call your kids at home so they don't worry (instead of just 'I need to make a call'). As long as what you ask is casual and you don't seem desperate, people should have no problem rejecting it without feeling bad, and to lessen any impact even more you can smile and say 'no problem, thanks anyway' or something similar to show you're alright without it.

Also use your sense, if you ask and they look uncomfortable going 'oh, umm, well...' you should be the one to jump in and say 'hey, it's no problem, you look busy so I'll check with someone else' or something like that, rather than waiting for them to have to say outright 'no'. Some people don't mind just saying no outright, some people do, so be attuned to that and no-one should be uncomfortable. Good luck!

In general, people in a public space are to an extent consenting to interact with other humans. If they aren't, we have a system of recognized signals for it: Walking fast, looking downward, listening to music, reading, etc. I don't think you should feel too guilty about imposing a brief few seconds of interaction on people out and about in public.

Can't help you out with an easy moniker, but I remember that problem being brought up as early as in Olaf Stapledon's novel Last and First Men, published 1930.

I remember a short story posted on LW a few years ago about this. It was told from the perspective of people in a society of pre-industrial tech, wondering how (or even if) their mythical ancestors did these magical feats like riding around in steel carriages faster than any horse and things like that. The moral being that society hadn't reached the required "escape velocity" to develop large-scale space travel and instead had declined once the fossil fuels ran out, never to return.

I can't for the life of me find it though.

It's also argued that, fossil fuels being literally the most energy-dense per unit-of-infrastructure-applied energy source in the solar system, our societal complexity is likely to decrease in the future as the hard-to-get ones are themselves drawn down and there becomes no way to keep drawing upon the sheer levels of energy per capita we have become accustomed to over the last 200 years in the wealthier nations.

I recommend Tom Murphy's "do the math" blog for a frank discussion of energy densities and quantities and the inability of growth or likely even stasis in energy use to continue.

From personal observations

"Do your job and do it well"

most emphatically does not top the list. Certainly you have to do an adequate job, but your success in a corporate environment depends on your interpersonal skills more than on anything else. You depend on other people to get noticed and promoted, so you need to be good at playing the game. If you haven't taken a Dale Carnegie course or similar, do so. Toastmasters are useful, too. In general, learning to project a bit more status and competence than you think you merit likely means that people would go along with it.

Just to give an example, I have seen a few competent but unexceptional engineers become CEOs and CTOs over a few short years in a growing company, while other, better engineers never advanced beyond a team lead, if that.

If you are an above average engineer/programmer etc. but not a natural at playing politics, consider exploring your own projects. If you haven't read Patrick McKenzie's blog about it, do so. On the other hand, if striking out on your own is not your dream, and you already have enough drive, social skills and charisma to get noticed, you are not likely to benefit from whatever people on this site can tell you.

One particular simple and easy to follow tip, to add to the Toastmasters and taking leadership type courses advice, is that you should also you signal to those around you of your interest in these things as well. Some of the other advice here can take time and be hard to achieve, you don't just turn a switch become charismatic or a great public speaker. So in the meantime while you work on all those awesome skills, don't forget to just simply let others know about your drive, ambitions, and competency.

This is easier to pull off than the fake-it-till-you-make-it trick. It's more about show-your-ambition-till-you-make-it. It's easy to do because you don't have to fake anything. It reminds me of this seduction advice I read from Mystery's first book that went something along the lines of, you don't have to be already rich to seduce somebody, you just have to let them know you have ambition and desire to one day be rich/successful.

I recently read this piece on meritocracy - rung quite true to me from personal experience. I work with a guy of similar ability to me, but I think I would beat him on most technical and simple people skills. However, he still gets ahead from being more ambitious and upfront than I am, and while he's a bit more qualified on paper it's used to far better effect. (No bitterness, he's still a good guy to work with and I know it's up to me to be better. Also I'm in kind of mid-level finance rather than coding.)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jsp/political_skills_which_increase_income/ is an article by a LessWrong person that lists factors. Political abilities are important. That means signal modesty, making apologies when necessary and flattering people above you in the chain of command.

Will add this to my list of ed-tech start-up ideas to validate.

Student Relationship Management software? Sounds like a neat idea.

For a minimal product, perhaps just start with the dependencies and priorities side of things? That seems to be the core of such a product, and the rest is dressing it up for usability.

http://cognitiveengineer.blogspot.com/

by jimmy, our resident evil hypnotist

"Monsters & Magical Sticks: There's No Such Thing As Hypnosis?" is a fine book for explaining what hypnosis is.

The recurring punchline is that there's no Hypnosis but there are hypnotic phenomena. Being a good hypnotist is basically about using a bunch of hypnotic phenomena to go where you want to go.

Framing an interaction is something very important. A hypnosis therapist I know says that the hypnosis sessions for quitting smoking begins with the call.

The patient calls to make an appointment. He answers and asks whether the person has made a decision to quit smoking. If the patient says "no" he tells the patient to call again once he made the decision. Hypnotherapist do a lot of stuff like this.

The most important writer of Latin American science fiction.

See http://lesswrong.com/lw/g94/link_your_elusive_future_self/ for a reason you can't know.

I have no idea. (Is that a bad thing?)

ROI in learning a foreign language is low, unless it is English. But if you must, I would say the next best thing to immersive instruction would be to watch spanish hulu as an aid to learning. You'd get real conversions at conversational speeds.

I'd like to be your conversation partner. My Spanish is Colombian. PM me for contact details.

If you are willing/able, the best way is to go to a Spanish school in Mexico or Central America and live with a host family for a month or two. I learned more in two months doing that than my first four university classes combined. This probably doesn't fall under "teaching yourself," but if you are serious the other things can't even touch the ROI of an immersive experience, in terms of time and money to Spanish acquired

Fluenz is a great computer-based program, but it's expensive. I used Rosetta Stone a bit, this is way better.

Pimsular audio tapes for car rides or MP3 player

Duolingo is free, but isn't for active conversation.

Look on Meetup.com for a spanish conversation meetup.

italki is a good option for a conversation focus.

http://markmanson.net/foreign-language

http://www.andrewskotzko.com/how-to-unlock-foreign-languages/

The last two links are about principles/suggestions. I agree with most of them. This is my advice: say anything that you can, whenever you can. Embarrassment is often the biggest obstacle. When you are beginning with conversations, say anything you can, even if it is a single word, grammatically incorrect, or irrelevant.

With regard to what niceguyanon said about low ROI on languages aside from English, I think there are social capital benefits, self-confidence benefits, cognitive functioning benefits that are valuable. Not to mention travel benefits--Spanish makes travel in many countries easy.

You could look into volunteering at a charity that serves Hispanics, or find an ESL conversation group and see whether they would interested in spending time speaking Spanish with you.

Check these out.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gx5/boring_advice_repository/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/i64/repository_repository/

You are bound to 'find' that BPD is overrepresented here by surveying in this manner. (hint: medical student syndrome)

There are probably checklist to diagnose Borderline Personality Disorder that are much better than simply reading a Wikipedia article and thinking about whether it applies to you.

People with borderline personality disorder generally lack "insight," i.e. they are typically unaware that they have BPD; will deny having it; and will get extremely defensive at the suggestion they have it.

One can contrast with, for example, obsessive/compulsive disorder sufferers who usually do have pretty good insight.

So a survey based on self-reporting is not going to be very helpful.

Anyway, I doubt that there are many people on this board with BPD. This is based on my interactions and observations.

Also, this discussion board doesn't seem like it would be very attractive to someone with BPD since it doesn't offer a steady stream of validation. For example, it's common on this board for other posters, even those who agree with you on a lot of stuff, to challenge, question, or downvote your posts. For someone with BPD, that would be pretty difficult to handle.

The main mental issue I sense on this board (possibly disproportionate to the general population) is Asperger's. There also seems to be a good deal of narcissism, though perhaps not to the point where it would qualify as a mental disorder.

According to the Wikipedia article: "People with BPD feel emotions more easily, more deeply and for longer than others do."

To me that doesn't seem like the LW crowd, what would make you think that there's an overrepresentation?

I had an impulse to answer "very descriptive," but I controlled it.

I seem to feel emotions less pronounced as average persons. Would have been interesting to add that as an option.

In that scenario, how much does it really matter? It's free to send email at one time of week rather than another, so your only cost is the opportunity cost of picking a bad time to email people, which doesn't seem likely to be too big.

OK, here's a proposed solution I came up with. Start with the overall open rate for all emails regardless of time of the week. Use that number, and your intuition for how much variation you are likely to see between different days and times (perhaps informed by studies on this subject that people have already done) to construct some prior distribution over the open probabilities you think you're likely to see. You'll want to choose a distribution over the interval (0, 1) only... I'm not sure if this one or this one is better in this particular case. Then for each hour of the week, use maximum-a-posteriori estimation (this seems like a brief & good explanation) to determine the mode of the posterior distribution, after you've updated on all of the open data you've observed. (This provides an explanation of how to do this.) The mode of an hour's distribution is your probability estimate that an email sent during that particular hour of the week will be opened.

Given those probability estimates, you can figure out how many opens you'd get if emails were allocated optimally throughout the week vs how many opens you'd get if they were allocated randomly and figure out if optimal allocation would be worthwhile to set up.

Not Bayesian, but can't you just do ANOVA w/ the non-summarized time of day vs. open rate (using hourly buckets)? That seems like a good first-pass way of telling whether or not there's an actual difference there. I confess that my stats knowledge is really just from natural sciences experiment-design parts of lab classes, so I have a bias towards frequentist look-up-in-a-table techniques just because they're what I've used.

Rant for a different day, but I think physics/engineering students really get screwed in terms of learning just enough stats/programming to be dangerous. (I.e., you're just sort of expected to know and use them one day in class, and get told just enough to get by- especially numerical computing and C/Fortran/Matlab).

Suppose you have three hypotheses: (1) It's better to email in the morning (2) It's better to email in the evening (3) They're equally good

Why do you care about (3)? If you're just deciding whether to email in the morning or evening, (3) is irrelevant to ranking those two options.

The full-fledged Bayesian approach would be to identify the hypotheses (I've simplified it by reducing it down to just three), decide what your priors are, calculate the probability of seeing the data under each of the hypotheses, and then combing that data according to the Bayesian formula to find the posterior probability. However, you don't have to run through the math to see that if your prior for (1) and (2) are equal, and the sample is skewed towards evening, then the posterior for (2) will be larger than the posterior for (1).

The only time you'd actually have to run through the math is if your priors weren't equal, and you're trying to decide whether the additional data is enough to overcome the difference in the priors, or if you have some consideration other than just choosing between morning or evening (for instance, you might find it more convenient to just email when you first have something to email about, in which case you're choosing between "email in morning", "email in evening" and "email whenever it's convenient to me").

"Statistical significance" is just a shorthand to avoid having to actually doing a Bayesian calculation. For instance, suppose we're trying to decide whether a study showing that a drug is effective is statistically significant. If the only two choices were "take the drug" and "don't take the drug", and we were truly indifferent between those two options, the issue of significance wouldn't even matter. We should just take the drug. The reason we care about whether the test is significant is because we aren't indifferent to the two choices (we have a bias towards the status quo of not taking the drug, making the drug would cost money, there are probably going to be side effects of the drug, etc.) and there are other options (take another drug, have more drug trials, etc.) When a level of statistical significance is chosen, an implicit statement is being made about how much weight is being given towards the status quo.

You could use some sort of cloud service: for example, Dropbox. One of the main ideas behind of Dropbox was to have a way for multiple people to easily edit stuff collaboratively. It has a very easy user interface for such things (just keep the deck in a synced folder), and you can do it even without all the technical fiddling you'd need for git.

If the deck format is some kind of text like XML you could look into using git for distribution and a simple text editor for editing.

I've seen them and believe the correct descriptor is "ridiculous".

Given that it's fanfiction copyright isn't straightforward. Harry Potter is sort of owned by J.K. Rowling. If you want to do something with HPMOR, sent Eliezer an email to ask for permission and he will probably grant it to you.

Good question. I thought http://hpmor.com/info/ would cover the licensing, but nope. Some googling doesn't turn up any explicit licensing either.

There's a lot of credit cards that will give a fix percentage of money to charity whenever you use them but I don't think any will go up to the amounts I bet you want.

Bit of a smorgasbord of a post (or a gish-gallop, if I'm not mincing words). Sorry to say, but much of your reasoning is opaque to me. Possibly because I misunderstand. Infinite priors? Anthropic reasoning applied to 'higher beings', because we emphatize with such a higher being's cogito? You lost me there.

In order for a lower being to evolve into a higher being the lower being has to eventually believe the higher being is possible so that they can work toward becoming or creating it. From the point of view of the higher being, this belief is a requirement for it to exist and be sentient.

I'd say that the possibility of a non-expected FOOM process would be a counterexample, but then again, I have no idea whether you'd qualify a superintelligence of the uFAI variety as a 'higher being'.

If time is cyclical (...)

Didn't see that coming.

It may be that you've put a large amount of effort into coming to the conclusions you have, but you really need to put some amount of effort into bridging those inferential gaps.

I think your post is a bit rambling and incoherent but I very much support your style of making long comments in the fashion of posts with BOLD section headings etc.

I am down voting this because:

a) I don't want to see people pushing politics on LW in any form.

b) It is entirely nonobvious to me that this is either evil or stupid.

Well I am apparently too stupid to understand why the quoted article is stupid or evil, not to mention incredibly stupid or naively evil.

In any consequentialist theory combined with some knowledge of the actual world as it functions that we live in I don't see how you can escape the conclusion that a politician running has a right to lie to voters. An essential conclusion from observing reality is that politicians lie to voters. Upon examination, it is hard NOT to conclude that politicians who don't lie enough don't get elected. If we are consequentialist, then either 1) elected politicians do create consequences and so a politician who will create good consequences had best lie "the right amount" to get elected or 2) elected politicians do not create consequences in which case it is consequentially neutral whether a politician lies, and therefore morally neutral.

If you prefer a non-consequentialist or even anti-consequentialist moral system, then bully for you, it is wrong (within your system) for politicians to lie to voters, but that conclusion is inconsequential, except perhaps for a very small number of people, presumably the politician who's soul is saved or who's virtue is kept intact by his pyrrhic act of telling the truth.

A lot of the superficial evilness and stupidity is softened by the follow-up post, where in reply to the objection that politicians uniformly following this principle would result in a much worse situation, he says:

The fact that most people would botch applying a theory does not show that the theory is wrong. So, for instance, suppose—as is often argued—that most people would misapply utilitarian moral standards. Perhaps applying utilitarianism is too hard for the common person. Even if so, this does not invalidate utilitarianism. As David Brink notes, utilitarian moral theory means to provide a criterion of right, not a method for making decisions.

So maybe he just meant that in some situations the "objectively right" action is to lie to voters, without actually recommending that politicians go out and do it (just as most utilitarians would not recommend that people try to always act like strict naive utilitarians).

How is lying like this ethical under it?

Consequentialism has no problems with lying at all.

Given that the guy is a professional philosopher I doubt ignorance is a good explanation. It's probably a case of someone wanting to be to contrarian for his own good. Or at least the good of his cause. Given that he wrote a book to argue that most people shouldn't vote, he might simply troll for academic controversy to get recognition and citations.

For utility maximizers there is no "outweigh". There is only "better" and "worse".

Why the heck do Effective Altruists need to be singled out for this? You seem to be punishing people for wanting to be effective altruists, which is super weird.

It's easy to be cynical about the military, but consider the simple fact that we live in one of the most peaceful ages ever. The Middle East conflicts of the last decade-plus involving the US have resulted in far fewer deaths than, say, the Vietnam War. You might say there should have been none of these conflicts to begin with, but things certainly could have been worse as well!

Veteran benefits

I was medically discharged from the military. The Veteran benefits that are paid for by taxes paid for my schooling (since I couldn't stay in the military I had to get a different education to make a living), and also provide me with a disability check every month. So those taxes probably count as some sort of altruism.