Open Thread, Jun. 29 - Jul. 5, 2015

Related but not the same: deepity (note: link is to RationalWiki, which some folks in these parts don't like much, but this particular article is OK).

Seems like Moving the goalposts, or something from this list.

See the post in the sequence "37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong" called "Sneaking in Connotations. It seems to be roughly what you're talking about.

Is this the same thing as the motte and bailey argument?

Some years ago I reasoned that all Christians are closeted hedonists: sure, they preach against promiscuity and greed in this world, but they eagerly await the infinite delights of heaven. What's more hedonist than that?

Rather than an argument having a broad and a narrow meaning, I construed this as people failing to take their own beliefs to their logical conclusions. If you're sacrificing earthly pleasures, but still wish to experience endless bliss, you're still a hedonist no matter what else you preach.

A similar reasoning led me to conclude that all ethical systems end up inevitably being situationist, want it or not. This is not a defense of situationism, but a statement of fact. Thou shalt not murder all you want, except when your Bible commands otherwise.

Arguments that are used to believe things are also called arguments. It is rather unfortunate that those two sense are not distinguished. There are things that people do in debates where they try to turn the situation to their advantage that are not reasons to believe things ie arguments that are not arguments. An example would be (simply) saying "shut up!". Then there is where it has argument forms and non-argument forms. If you simply beat up anyone that disagrees with you it will affect discussion but if you threaten to beat someone for believing something that is appeal to the stick and actually has a "therefore" in it and is an argument.

Well the technique you are using is working because of equivocation. The concept is used in two different contexts where it actually means different things. I think there has been a lot of discussion about how arguments over definitions are largely pointless and miss the real things. However that is exactly what would combat the usage of this technique. Making formal appeals on why things "proved" for one sense of the word do not apply to its other senses. Off course in order to do that it must first be established on what sense is used in the original argument. The trouble is that most of the time multiple senses can form interesting and potentially critical separate arguments. It doesn't help matters that often their truth is pretty entangled. For example any argument that works against broad hedonism should work against narrow hedonism. Thus it can become tempting to not keep track whether the claim is broad or narrow. The trouble is that sometimes the defensibility/applicability of the argument is sensitive whether the claim is narrow or broad.

Also I would like to point out that it's not that the truth is trivial in the broad sense. While it can be easy to attribute a behavior or attribute to a really broad ism this can fail to be appropriate even if the ism is very very broad. For example a champion trainee might in fact be motivated by sense of duty or being a sporty man being a high virtue for them even if the people around them understand his behavior in hedonistic terms. Or rather than them winning they might feel that it is important that their country wins.

This can form a basis for another maybe coused technique. If you see a hard worker you might tell (yourself) a plausible story about how they are working to get their children fed and struggling to make ends meet. This might let you think that they are motivated by the practical enablingness of money, a form of positive greed. Someone might use the existence of the worker as an argument how a worldview that emphasizes greed ends in positive results. Thus you might be inclined to support heavy privatization schemes. However if you were to ask the worker how they feel about their work they might tell about how they chose their profession so they can see first hand how their work helps others or how the work helps their community. If the reason you attributed for them wouldn't come up and for example they turned down a more paying job because it involved less personal contact it can be obvious that the story you told of them is a work of your fiction and contrary to the fact. By that time you might have used that story to passionately defend the way of life you had empirically witnessed against dubious theoretical alternative systems. But if your "emprical experience" was based on your way of interpreting the existence of the worker it's more case of a word against word. Part of your experience might have been the champion trainee demonstrating how ambition for personal achievement gets you places. But what if the champion trainee did it for national pride?

Just because an explanation works doesn't mean you should understand a phenomenon in those terms. One way of defending against spins that are convenient for third parties is to be interested on direct factual accuracy of psychological claims and not rely on external circumstances alone to infer states of mind. That is that a person works isn't evidence for what reason they do the work. For example a greed arguer might say that if a person didn't desperately need money they wouldn't work so that they work is evidence that they do need it desperately. However if you believe this line of argument you are just taking their word for psychological laws and states about the human mind (while the arguer might want you to focus on the states of the world). Epistemologically (atleast) it would be prudent to recognize this as a claim that might need backing to be believed. Even if you end up accepting the claim you will have rooted in more easily checkable things than the word of a potentially agendafull arguer. If for example your own experience of your own mind backs the existence of these psychological laws you are backing them with direct empirical evidence. In addition you know to be wary of typical mind fallacy and you might be more easily aware that greed is not the be-all-end-all of psychological law.

You're conflating what's popular with what works. Just because something is popular among most people doesn't mean it works for most people. It just means they think it's working. Given their often small sample sizes and only circumstantial evidence for drawing that conclusion, it shouldn't be too surprising that a lot of people are doing things that don't work for them.

For example, most people find their romantic partners through their circle of friends. If you are social, if you have a large circle and hang out with them a lot, it would probably happen to you more or less naturally. If you are like 25 and it did not happen, it suggests something is different - maybe you are not very social, maybe you don't have much of a circle or you have the kind of circle that is not very conductive to this and so on.

FWIW I met my first girlfriend through my circle of friends, at the age of 26. :-)

This was helpful. I have some thinking to do.

I was in a similar situation with my parents in my early 20s (although their motivations and characteristics were probably very different). Looking back I think they were not ready to deal with my independence (I was the oldest) and tried to deal with things in the same way they did when I was a child. Your mention of medical appointments really rang a bell with me - my parents did the same and this made me perhaps the most uncomfortable of all.

In my case, severely limiting contact was a highly successful approach. I didn't do this explicitly; we had no conversation "I am limiting my contact with you". I took a job in a different place, got my own (tiny, horrible) room in a shared flat and just started being more independent in my life. I must admit I used the workload of my new job as a convenient excuse to limit contact - just the occasional phone call to let them know how things were going (back in those days my parents didn't have email). I also didn't visit nearly as often as before --- I found myself reverting back to a teenage mentality, they would treat me like a child, I would get very angry/upset.

Now many years later (I'm approaching 50) I have a somewhat positive relationship with both parents - perhaps in large part because I live in a different country. After a lot of time had passed we were able to discuss the earlier issues more dispassionately (although not entirely) & get a better understanding of each other's motivations.

Instead of simply cutting contact you can tell your parents how you want to be treated. As long as they are willing to act that way you interact with them. If they don't then you don't and you retry after half a year.

Clearly explicitly communicating your personal boundaries isn't easy but it's a very important skill. It's a challenge that provides a lot of personal growth.

Some random thoughts:

My parent always had a number of narcissistic traits, but was never a full-blown narcissist.

Narcissism is one of the "Cluster B" personality disorders. Other disorders have some similarities and some differences. (I don't even know if they are clearly separated in the territory. The psychological definitions keep changing.) So if there seems to be a serious issue, but it only partially fits the definition of narcissism, and partially it doesn't, maybe it is something else. My quick uneducated guess would be borderline personality disorder.

If you are not sure what to do, maybe it would be better to not burn the bridges, only build clear fences. (You can still burn the bridges later if you decide to, but maybe with good fences it will not be necessary.) For example, move to your own place, and visit your parent once in a month, for an hour or two. Also decide which parts of your life you don't want to share with them, and simply don't talk about it. Maybe find a topic that is not painful for you, and always switch to that one (e.g. talk about work, or news, or latest science; don't talk about your health and relationships). Maybe this will work.

Complicating factor

Uhm, I think your decision should not be influenced by this. Solve your personal problems first, optimize the world later. (Having your personal problems unsolved will also harm your world-optimizing abilities.)

My first question is the social equivalent of asking whether you've turned your computer off and on again: Have you spoken with your parent about this? No matter how unpleasant it may be (turning my computer off and on again is a chore :P), it is a good first thought when it comes to interpersonal issues, and one I would highly suggest, especially as by your words they do not seem to be aware of how they're hurting you with their lack of trust.

The answer to your questions depends mainly upon your values. How much do you value your family? How much do you value (close) non-members of your family? If the amount that you value each of those is similar, ask yourself instead if your obligation toward a friend would prevent you from breaking contact with them if they were (seemingly) toxic to you as your parent is.

The obligation you have to maintain in touch with your parent depends mainly upon: how much you value them; how much you value those that would judge you poorly based upon your disownment of them; and how much of your identity is tied up in the situation. I find myself personally incapable of ending a somewhat toxic friendship with two people I care deeply about because it would be difficult for me to fathom not having their company at times, and I don't want to see myself as the kind of person that would be willing to abandon them for their issues.

Regarding the complicating factor, there's a lot that would go into a cost-benefit analysis. How much do you value your happiness compared to what the small amount of money you contribute might do? How do you factor in how poorly the stress affects your health? You might get sick because of a compromised immune system because of how stressed you are. Or you might die five years younger, and your charity of choice would lose those years of income. Regardless, I don't think that it should factor too much into your decision, though that's more a personal belief than anything.

Feel free to answer any of these questions, or not. I provided them more to give you food for thought.

Hello Sithlord_Bayesian.

I’ve also been raised by a parent who was similar to what you described, and have navigated the issue to my liking. I hope what I have found to be a good way to analyze the situation proves useful for yours.

First I might suggest not only considering two options. Might be a better third, in the “middle” somewhere. Now to address your first question; familial obligation. A lot of people start to treat the concept like it is selectively separate from where you in particular are feeling lacking, and end up with a floating belief that says you should stick with family no matter what. But, like your intuitions are pointing out to you, the concept does have real weight, through your interactions. You only need heed familial obligation as much as it is heeded by the other party. If you can take that and run with it, good for you.

If you want a more thorough suggestion, the following is how I came to judge my own relationships. Second question is following, if tl;dr

What is the net balance of interactions?; Here you can consider if you are better off, or not, as a whole. From your entry I suspect your parents feel like a net loss (You have my sympathies, I really hated this being a fact with me). You can also consider trying to isolate portions of the relationship you favor and avoiding situations that hurt. Shabby example being to not tell your parents when appointments are, if you could manage it, but watching movies as a family, if you can manage that.

Which world-state concerning-your-family do you really ultimately wish for?; This can be hard, depending on how far away it is. What do you wish your relationship was like? At what point would you be satisfied? Sorta-satisfied? This is important (obviously), as you’ll see shortly.

How do they fit in with this manipulation of yours?; I know you said they may not be capable of being directly involved in repair efforts (mine wasn’t), but it doesn’t have to be on the core of your issues. If they enjoy things that feel even just vaguely good-family-time, then try to encourage those things, if it suits you.

Methods of Repair; If your going to try at actually fixing the problem at all it is important to maintain a humanly realistic (psychologically) model of them. If they grate on you in their behavior, it is probably for reasons other than bothering you. Internally consistent, is the key phrase. They might think pointing out flaws is useful. I don’t know if they have any behaviors that bother you, that are not aimed at you, but it might be best to “translate” those sorts of occurrences into the language you speak. If they get road rage, why should that bother you? Not like you can explain they are shortening their lifespan, et cetera, and they aren't doing it to fuel Asmodeus, Prince of Devils. I hope. They are probably doing it because they feel stressed, and are venting (right next to your face, but again, not to try and cook you where you sit).

Cost of Interaction vs. Available Energy; Humans are imbedded in the physical universe, so they can be manipulated, and probably to whatever simple aims you care for (like a stable relationship). The question after that becomes how much energy you are willing to put in for this. Depending on what else you are doing with your life you may wish to abstain entirely, or turn efforts up to 11. Most likely something in the middle; cognitive dissonance might bug you if you try either end of extremes. What points on the dial give what results? And remember effort has at least a few sub-efforts, and don't scrap a project that is only failing along one dimension.

Second Question!: I think this consideration, channeling towards a net good in the world, is worth having. BUT; It really depends on the rest of the issue, which is based around system 1 feelings based around system 2 justifications. That system 1 portion does not take well to being ignored, so the effect of altruistic aims, at least concerning this, should probably remain small.

And finally, at the end of all this thinking, you have to settle with what you decide. You are the most foundational portion of this issue (I suspect), so for your own sake, be stable. Message me if you have questions, or want to berate me over some assumption. Hope I helped.

EDIT:ing to fix formatting errors; I'm new here!

If it is not a case of malice but incapability of realising what they are doing you might want to be on the lookout for chances to support their social development whereever possible. That is if you are in a interaction that is clearly hurtful to you but they don't seem to see it as hurtful it would be important to make seeing the hurtfulness as easy as possible. However this should be done in a manner that doesn't step on any triggers (ie being attacking/accusing about it won't likely get results). If it is only a "technical" matter that they simply don't understand some key social fact pointing it out should not be a big drama event. Think of pointing out to someone that they missed a minus sign.

It's also easier to offer people alternative, potentially more effective, ways to get what they care about than to demand that they cease activities that get them what they want currently. It might feel silly to even having to talk about some basic things but if there is a need to talk about it then talking about it is likely to do good. The alternative on relying that people should get some social basics right on their own can leave you uncomfortably adapting to malfunction.

qsz's suggestion of doing it by stealth isn't bad. If you want to make it explicit, though:

If (1) you are considering cutting off contact (near-)completely and (2) they have no idea that this might happen, it seems like an obvious first step would be to tell them that it might. "I don't know how aware you are of this, but it seems to me like you're for ever criticizing me, and you keep making these unreasonable demands. I am finding this unpleasant and difficult to cope with, and if it goes on then I think I'll have to stop communicating with you altogether. That would be an extreme step, and it would be better if we can avoid it, but I'll do it if the alternative is a constant stream of criticism and inappropriate demands. Please think about this, and let me know whether you think you can stop doing those things."

Or something along those lines; I (mercifully) have no experience of negotiating with (semi-)abusive parents and have made no attempt to optimize the wording because I don't know what I should be optimizing for.

If you think they really have no idea, perhaps the first step could be even smaller. "Look, I don't know if you're even aware of this, but it seems to me like you're constantly putting me down and making inappropriate demands. I'm 25 years old, and I really don't need you to accompany me to the doctor or keep me safe online any more. I'm finding it unpleasant, and I'm sure you don't want that. Could you please treat me as the adult I am, and stop doing those things?"

Again, I make no claim that that's a good way to word it. But this lets you make sure they know (at least in theory) without anything they need perceive as a threat. Then, if they don't improve, your next escalation can begin with "You may remember that a few months ago I told you ..." which will give them less excuse to see it as unreasonable.

Complicating factor: if maintaining a good relationship with my parent might slightly increase the amount I expect to be able to donate to effective charities at the cost of (in expectation) making me less happy, does this change my obligations?

I can't lend you any specific advice here, but I'm pretty confident that this is an insane thing to even consider considering in the situation you describe.

I actually see this in my parent; when relating to their parent. My parent still talks to their parent regularly, a lifetime ~45+ years of critical treatment later.

There are two concerns:

1. The world is a darker place with no parent at all. The day they are gone; is the day you wished you asked them for their advice on something more. (or that seems to be the sentiment from many)
2. you need to prioritise your happiness. The parent (while being their own person) wants the best for you. Unfortunately that might mean what is not best for that parent.

I'd like to congratulate you for noticing the problem and identifying it. This step was not easy; but by doing so you make things entirely better from here on in.

I believe there are several good solutions to this problem and several more mediocre or bad solutions.

With puzzles that I personally encounter that involve the different perspectives of different people (which I find this problem to be - your perspective VS your parent's perspective); I find that they can sometimes be solved by folding the puzzle in on themselves. i.e. ask the person of problem (parent) to solve the puzzle for you by clearly sharing the perspective (sometimes via Socratic questioning). You are inside the problem but you can step outside and attack the problem from outside. (its not easy; but I offer my suggestion for you to try).

A technique I would suggest for approaching the problem head on (if you choose to). Develop a spreadsheet, of interactions with the person. consider adding;

• Date, time
• Subject of the interaction
• Either a rating of the interaction (1-10) or a simple scale (positive, negative, neutral)

To do this is to generate evidence. With evidence you can pre-commit to an action given certain evidential findings. i.e. move far away if you find a 10 negative to 1 positive or worse ratio. The second benefit of evidence is it can assist in (as above) folding the problem on itself. By showing an entirely valid perspective, evidence cannot be discounted in the same way an opinion can be (I said, you said, they said, etc evidence).

I would give some weight to a middle-solution. Limited contact (although that may mean you get one day a month of hell-by-critical-parent),

I believe this is a hurdle we must face; overcoming the situations we are burdened by our parents.

Good luck! (happy to add more if you want more clarity on these suggestions)

Fat lot of good it did Larry Summers.

Second lesson: Do not apologize, resign, and so on because it only causes the public perception to damn you further.

James Watson has said some unambiguously politically incorrect, unkind, bad and mean things. With respect to the public face, he barely even flinches at backlash: no apology, no resignations, and no real personal consequences whatsoever for his statements.

In contrast, Hunt merely made a joke in poor taste. I wish he had stood his ground and denounced the accusers. Luckily other respected figures are coming to his aid, but that doesn't always happen.

Is there good reason to think that Tim Hunt's woes have anything to do with inaccurate reporting of what he said?

My solution: absolutely avoid saying anything about gender, race etc. in public with name and face, but really in that 100% literal sense that even avoid saying things that generally support feminism or LGBT rights because even then someone could take offense about one word in a sentence you totally did not mean offensively and then Twitter can blow it out of all proportions.

This is not necessarily a 100% safe strategy forever - things could get to the point where simply ignoring the issues and not commenting on them could get dangerous, kinda like how not applauding the speech of a dictator can get so.

But currently a strictly no-comment policy seems to be safe enough.

Besides it being safe, if a lot of people who would otherwise be supportive decide to keep silent, it may lead to the moderates throwing out the crazies so that they regain that support.

You can find them directly here:

http://lesswrong.com/saved

Or by clicking on the "Saved" tab, right under "Main" and "Discussion" when you click on them.

Too late for this to bear on "prediction" of the Greek referendum, but I had the impression that betting markets pointed strongly at "Yes" while polls tilted a bit towards "No". The divergence is interesting (if real; a quick Google didn't reveal any reliable reports of the original market predictions to confirm my memory).

Not sure if it has been tried before, but I don't think your calculations are complete. For example:

• There is a significant investment to actually make the ad. It needs to be done professionally, if you are hoping to attract large donations.
• Assuming 1/500 viewers will donate $100 seems very optimistic. Maybe if it is targeted properly, but then you will have a really small number of viewers, not enough to justify the investment cost.
• Willingness to donate is likely correlated with the use of an Ad Blocker (conclusion extrapolated from a small sample)
• There may a be PR hit when you are associated with youtube ads

I'd think the better approach is to get more public figures to endorse the goal. Not necessarily the likes Musk and Gates, but lower profile youtube folk. Few examples off the top of my head: Wil Wheaton, Tim Minchin, ViHart, LinusTechTips, etc.

Youtube ads are very annoying. If someone's first acquaintance with existential risk was through youtube ads, he would get a very bad first impression.

I agree with Sherincall that there is a smaller number than 0.2%. try do the numbers on 0.00002% of people donating. see if they still work.

If you tell a pre-industrial farmer about machines, they are likely to form confused ideas. "You want theses "combine harvesters" to be born fully grown? That may sound like a time saver, but I assure you from years of experience that these combine harvesters will never be obedient unless you train them from infancy".

I think the misconceptions people have with AI stems from a lack of familiarity with any intelligent agent besides humans, not from bad terminology. You're going to have trouble talking to foragers about industrial equipment no matter what you call it.

SICP's whole "Computer science is neither about computers nor a science" pontification annoys the heck out of me, but arguments over definitions in general annoy the heck out of me. I mean, who the hell cares what CS is called? We don't title any Physics class Differencial Equations Which Exist in Their Own Platonic Sense And Only Incidentally Can Be Used To Model Our World, even though alien mathematicians whose world runs on cellular atomata might still study the heat equation. "Computer Science" tags a class as something you should study if you want to invent new things related to computers, and another name wouldn't do that much better.

So - should it really be called 'agent safety'? Are the ideas general enough that we could apply them to education and the process of raising moral/desirable children?

but anything I could possibly want to write about has already been written by someone, somewhere on the internet.

That doesn't mean it's easy to find.

Part of blogging is to supply interesting things filtered through a personality so that people who like that filter can find those things easily.

I like writing and would like the public accountability to make me write more often.

I can't think of anything worthwhile to write about.

I would say that those two sentences are in conflict with one another!
If you like to write, who cares if others have already written about the subject? Look at how many tutorials are out there for monads in a functional language...
If you like it, you like it and write about it. The problem may arise if what you like is not writing per se, but you like exclusively the social status that writing gives.

The fact that someone else has already written on a topic doesn't mean that you can't write on it as well.

How do people... get their ideas?

Intellectually engaging with other ideas of other people.

How many books do you read?

I can't think of anything worthwhile to write about

That's your first topic!

Generally, when in doubt, start by describing how specifically you are in doubt.

Oh, and you should probably do it under a pseudonym. So that you can later pretend it wasn't you. You will develop some skills when writing, but then you might want to burn the evidence that your skills used to be low.

Google "writing prompts".

If you know another language, translate obscure public domain material from that language.

Re-make something in a different style: take a sci-fi novel and make it into a pirates short story, for example.

And when your actual idea hits you, drop all of that other stuff and focus.

Almost all of the ideas I have stem from problems in my life and work. Ideas I have on a topic accumulate slowly, and eventually reach critical mass. At that point, I think I have enough to make a coherent post. I might suggest first getting into the habit of incubating your ideas in some system, whether a set of text files under version control like I have or Evernote or whatever works for you. You'll make a lot of connections this way that you would otherwise not make. (Unfortunately I have almost no time to turn my semi-organized outlines into posts at this point, but that's life.)

Some of my other ideas are responses to other things I've read. For books, writing a book review or summary (especially if it includes a bit more than is in the book, i.e., other things you are aware of) might be a good approach for this. Replying directly to things you've read online also is pretty easy.

You can't really write for the sake of writing as a process, especially on a blog. A lot of the motivation to write arises out of the desire to... express, or to do service to some idea. It's an act of communication, and the message is paramount. If there is no message compelling you to communicate it, then maybe you should consider that writing too little is not your main problem here -- rather, not having enough or sufficiently strong interests.

There are times when one would be better advised not to write, such as when one is still a novice student of the subject, that hasn't done the required amount of reading in order to deserve a readership of one's own. However, only you know whether you are in this position with respect to what you mean to write about (other people would have to first see you open your mouth to say something silly before they're in a position to judge).

On the contrary, I seem to have problems getting myself to shut up and not write anything online. After a bout or two of prolonged and especially of hostile debate, I get burned out and consider taking an online "vow of silence" for the time being. And what do I do then? Respect it for a day or two, and then I'm back to my old ways. I have to consciously find fault with what I want to say in order to restrain myself from writing about it -- "oh, this article is half-baked and poorly researched", "this comment is a reply to someone with whom discussion is not usually fruitful", "the central point in this article may turn out to be wrong", "it's not strategic for me to publicly write about this topic, here and now" etc. All of this, without caring a lot about the process of writing; it's just what I do in order to get a message out there.

What do you usually like to think about (that would be of interest to strangers)?

My impression is that doing a bunch of kind actions does tend to increase kindness in the future, and in any case it seems like "a bunch of kind actions" is probably (a perhaps-small subset of) the outcome you're wanting from getting kinder, so doing it seems like an obvious win given your stated goals.

I have been wanting to increase my general kindness lately. If anyone is looking for an accountability partner for random acts of kindness, gratitude journaling, or anything similar (or has good ideas), let me know.

perhaps: make a list of basic kind actions? (and share it with us) then pick 1-2 to try to apply, then search for life situations to apply them in. set a deadline to do so and report back?

also: take up volunteering in an existing charitable group. meta: see if you can help lesswrong.com

Gratitude leads to kindness. Gratitude journaling or meditation should raise kindness. Making a habit of giving other people compliments does so as well.

Click on the little envelope icon in the lower right corner of the comment that you want to see replies from.

a) just stop worrying

b) once in a week or month click on your name, go to "Comments" tab, and click "Permalink" button under your comments to open in a new browser tab. You will see the whole subtree below your comments.

(There is a problem, that when you view a subtree of a discussion, the purple borders around all unread comments in that discussion will disappear, even round the comments that were not displayed to you.)

The surprise comes only to those that try to overload probability with roles it should not have. For example "A implies B" does imply P(B|A)=1 but P(B|A)=1 doesn't imply "A implies B". While it is common that if we know systematically that a certain probability is high it is a promising line of argument for causations and implications it doesn't always carry through (meta-example I am in essence arguing that while an okayish rule of thump, it is actually improper to infer causations from probabilities. I am doing this by pointing out that P(causation|probability) ~ 1 and P(causation|probability)<1 which alone is only suggestive that it is so (or the actual steps are implied)).

Yes, Jaynes talks about this in the first chapter of his book, calling it a "weak syllogism" and using it as a guideline to introduce probability as a kind of extended logic.

See also this.

Goals

You want a status signal, a martial arts partner, a sexual partner, an emotional partner, a psychological partner, a fitness partner, AND a life coach. It seems you're making things very hard for yourself as you are narrowing the pool of possible partners to a very extreme extent. No girlfriend I've had ever had was all of these things; the best and most compatible one was maybe three of these things (sexual, psychological, and fitness partner). There's nothing wrong with having several people around you that fulfil various roles. One person can be a sexual partner and another one a non-sexual fitness partner. This is the arrangement I currently have, for instance.

Strategy

Statistically, most people find their partners through their friends. Thus it seems a good strategy for finding a girlfriend would be expanding your general circle of friends. This has certainly been the case for me - whenever I've had a larger circle of friends I'd had an easier time finding a partner.

Voice

I wouldn't take independent diagnoses of autism very seriously; they aren't doctors (I'm assuming) and 'autism' seems to be a word that gets thrown around too much these days.

looked up monotone voice on google, and found that it has a positive, redeeming side – attractiveness.

My friends tell me that my face is pretty scarred. Research shows that facial scars are attractive. By the word scar, researchers mean healed cut. My friends mean acne hole.

Not all monotone voices are created equal. I'd be really surprised if "autistic" monotone and a "high-status" monotone would refer to the same thing.

Don't read the DailyMail for information about science.

another is to get a martial arts training partner

Have you seen or heard about this working for other people? For me practicing boxing with my wife feels seriously wrong, because while sparring is NOT violence it is kind of a simulation of it, so frankly I would rather do it with some big burly man I feel nothing for than with a woman I feel all kinds of gentle and protective loving sentiments for. Although I did propose training together with mittens / focus pads, that is cool. We dropped the idea because we don't want our toddler see we do this, but obviously for childless people it could work.

If you are 18 - 28 and didn't qualify but probably male, the No. 1 thing I would recommend would be body building. Not this current "squat and deadlift bro" trend although that too, but also the isolation dumbbell stuff, both composite and isolation work, even if it means having to put martial arts on a back burner for a while. When I did this at 17 my biggest surprise was that it also worked for intelligent women! I used to think intelligent people are "not superficial", but one high-IQ girlfriend explained to me she thinks she is simply honest with herself, if a male body makes her go meow, she won't out-clever herself out of it.

However 30+ I felt this thing is getting old, the whole body building stuff just made me feel bad like all stiff and aching and had no joy in it. For people 30+ I think the primary thing is to use any sport you like + diet to not be fat, and wear nice clothes, there is not much more there, at 35 not having a gut makes a man half a demigod. (I have a gut.)

I’ve been calibrating my appearance for a while, but now I’m going to A/B test various things based on feedback from people around my and self-reflection.

There are gains you can get by A/B testing but there a lot that you can't analyse that way. You can't easily A/B test whether growing bigger muscles will benefit.

I think that's many significant factors. it takes a lot of work to make deep changes. Don't just go for interventions that are easy and therefore also easy to A/B test.

1) You may be interested in this article - The Economics of Sex.

2) Have you tried online dating? It seems much more efficient.

I call this, agile social skills development ;)

I like it :)

because my previous approach has yet to work at an age where it has for others!

Some thoughts:

• I doubt that it's because you're not unique enough. There are a lot of non-unique people with girlfriends.
• I doubt that it's because you're not good looking enough. There are a lot of not-so-great-looking people with girlfriends.
• It seems to me that there is some underlying reason why you haven't had success yet. I'd think that strategies involving your uniqueness and/or looks would be mostly fruitless without addressing the underlying reason. My guess is that the underlying reason involves some combo of awkwardness and lack of confidence. If my guess is true, I don't see it as bad news, because I see it as something that is very addressable.
• If it makes you feel any better, I'm 22 and have never had a girlfriend.

The het mating game (I'm told gay folks play their own, much harder, version) is basically governed by the iron law that you resemble your competitors. Ergo, if you see a lady and instantly want to ask her out, she probably gets that a lot. If she does, then she's probably said yes already if she's the sort of person who would do so.

That isn't to say you shouldn't ask out the girl you are most attracted to. Sometimes you are the first guy, after all someone has to be. Rather, you should ask out people you aren't immediately attracted to. Hotness -> dating works more or less like bachelor degree -> career. Its only important right at the start. If you like her it won't matter that she didn't instantly ping as possible match.

One is for signalling, another is to get a martial arts training partner without the awkwardness of physical intimacy with a non-intimate partner, another is for sexual, emotional and social fulfilment and a final one is for a fitness partner, person to share chores with and life coach.

Signalling what, exactly? Sexual desirability? Competent adultness? Showcasing your ability to have a girlfriend? I understand that having a sexual and romantic partner has signalling value, I just don't think it's very useful to have signaling as a major goal. (Unless I misunderstood you and signalling is just considered a side-benefit.)

Also keep in mind that finding a person who is compatible with you in a sexual, emotional and social way is hard enough that finding a partner who is all that and likes the same sort of sports and fitness activities as you do is even harder.

I’m treating this as a business problem because my previous approach has yet to work at an age where it has for others!

You're treating this as a business problem (and I'm unsure if this is the correct approach, but whatever), but what product are you selling? Why would a costumer be interested in consuming your product?

You say you're unique, but let's face it, most humans are. (Not to mention that uniqueness is not a good quality by default.) Why should a potential partner be interested in your uniqueness? What do you have to offer that a competitor doesn't also offer?

I looked up monotone voice on google, and found that it has a positive, redeeming side – attractiveness. In light of this information, I’m no longer interested in adjusting my monotone voice.

Powerful people might have tendency for monotone. This doesn't mean that everyone with a monotone is perceived as powerful. As other have mentioned, there are probably other factors at play here as well. There are probably different sorts of monotone voices.

A promising new friend also mentioned that he abandoned pickup because it wasn’t working for him. He spoke about vulnerability and how he doesn’t exert so much control on himself now, thus avoiding analysis paralyses.

I only have minimal knowledge of the whole pick-up thing, but I think there's some truth in what your friend says. Unless it comes natural to you (and this might come with practice, so I don't want to speak badly about pickup), using predetermined strategies and such will come across as more awkward and less natural than just general social awkwardness.

Being naturally awkward isn't really such a bad thing, as long as you can own your awkwardness and focus on your other strengths.

I found the people I was talking to really boring. My promising new friend suggested that it was because I was boring, haha.

My brother has this amazing gift. He can talk to anyone and find whatever they say interesting. (Or at least fake it very well.) I don't know how he does it, but he seems to have at least some knowledge on every subject and in the rare cases he doesn't he knows exactly what questions to ask to make his conversation partner to feel interesting.

The thing is, hardly anyone is actually boring. Everyone knows something you don't and it can only be to your benefit to get them to share this. In order to do this, you need to be confident in your own interestingness, so you don't feel bad when you're not sharing trivia about yourself and the things you know a lot about. The best way to combat the boringness in others is to develop an interest in everything.

I have four questions for you:

• What behaviour(s) have you changed?
• Do you already have plenty availability of women in your proximity or are planning to expand it?
• How will you broadcast your uniqueness?
• What kind of woman are you looking for?

Thanks

I would test your voice to see the reaction you get with a more expressive voice, I suspect there's other things going on in the research you mentioned.

Good luck, sounds like an interesting plan.

Don't focus on adjusting voice. Focus on getting in touch with your emotions. If you are in touch with your emotions they have an effect on your voice.

You can impress insecure girls by suppressing all emotions and simply appearing confident. That won't work with the kind of girl who is capable of being a decent life coach. Life coaching needs awareness of the emotional state of the person you are talking to. Suppressed fear that you aren't willing to openly show is very unattractive.

At the moment you listed your goals in system II matter. Connect to system one. Connect to the actual desire inside yourself on a system I level.

Sorry are you looking for advice? What do you mean that you are treating this as a business problem?

So what will you do if you can't get out of the Reserves?

https://omegavirginrevolt.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/the-reserves/

I keep telling people that more and more countries as they develop and feminize will fill up with sexually rejected men and adult male virgins, given women's real preferences in modernity - namely, that women find most men sexually repulsive. A quarter of Japanese men in their 30's reportedly have had no luck getting sexual experience, and Japan has a funny way of exploring "the future" before other developed countries.

America's sexologists show no interest in this trend that I can see, probably because sexology has a feminist bias and the LGBT dysfunctionals have drawn more way research interest from sexologists because they have organized politically and they have enablers in elite institutions. By contrast, no one gives a crap about the millions of incels out there who have normal desires and long for girlfriends.

On the face of it, I don't feel that this particular risk differentiates itself enough from "what if [insert subtle end-of-times scenario here]?" to be worthy of specific consideration. It's a lot of what ifs and perhapses.

Interesting. Very small concentrations of the chemical would have to sterilize practically everyone they contacted - else it would just cause humanity to very rapidly evolve resistance, or maybe kill off the developed world.

Reminds me of the decline in testosterone levels over the past couple decades, which might be due to endocrine-disrupting compounds in the water supply and in plastics and food, but which hasn't been enough to sterilize much of the population.

There is a very short window for this to be a serious existential threat, on the order of a few decades. If mass sterilization does not happen soon, our technological ability to make babies using cloning and other technologies will outpace the need for genital-based reproduction.

The only one I can think of (though I can't find the specific article) is Goertzel's description of an architecture where the guardian component is separate from the main AGI

You're probably thinking of GOLEM. The Gödel machine is another proposal along somewhat similar lines.

Some discussions more directly related to your suggestion could be:

• Roman Yampolskiy's proposal for "safe questions"

Our proposed protocol is based on the idea of asking what we will call ‘safe questions’ with restricted answers. We define a safe question as one for which a human being could find an answer without any help from superintelligence, all on his own merit. Why is this useful? Suppose that a scientist working on a cure for cancer is looking at two potential cures. Each one could be developed and tested without assistance from the AI, but would take about 3 years of hard work each. Which one to try first if the scientist believes that they have about an equal chance of working? If a wrong option is chosen to be tested first, humanity will still obtain a cure for cancer but it will happen 3 years later. What if we could ask the AI to suggest which option to try first? [...]

To make sure that a potential question is safe, a group of experts could be used to review it. The experts should all be trained AI safety engineers, meaning that they are familiar with the design of the AI and its confinement environment as well as the latest developments in machine ethics (Allen et al., 2006; Anderson & Anderson, 2007; Hall, 2000; Moor, 2006; Tonkens, 2009). Experts may also need to be trained in computer psychology a currently non-existent profession which might become a reality in the future (Epstein, 1997). [...]

The limited outbound channel shell consist of binary (0 or 1) answers next to original unmodified safe questions presented by the intermediary non-intelligent software in random order as to avoid communication via covert timing or resource channels which make steganography possible. The output should in no way be controllable by the AI, outside of the multiple choice menu.

• "Thinking inside the box" (section 3.1.) also has some discussion about restricting an AGI's outputs to be safe by selecting the questions to be asked appropriately. There was also some discussion along these lines in the beginning of chap. 10 of Superintelligence, e.g., running multiple copies of different Oracles and comparing their answers with each other to avoid deception - "the answers of the different oracles have to match each other" could be a simple and formally definable criteria.

P(A or B) = P(A) + P(B) - P(A and B)

You use the Inclusion-Exclusion Principle.

You take the probability of A not happening and multiply by the probability of B not happening. That gives you P(not A and not B). Then subtract that from 1. The probability of at least one of two events happening is just one minus the probability of neither happening.

In your example of 23% and 48%, the probability of getting at least one is

1 - (1-0.23)*(1-0.48) = 0.60.

The other responses are absolutely correct. If they clarified things for you, great! However, you indicated that your intuition wasn't getting you to the correct answer, so let's try to formulate these into a new intuition.

You are starting along a path from left to right. The left side is where you started, and way over on the right side are different outcomes. The 'chances' you mention above are forks in the path, and you are taking each path with some probability.

At the first fork there are two paths, one in which A happened and one in which A did not. The path where A happened is picked 23% of the time. These two paths (A and not A) each branch again at the second fork, one in which B happened and one in which B did not. At this fork, the path where B happened is picked 48% of the time.

Two forkings means there is a total of 4 end points: One for (A, B), one for (A, not B), one for (not A, B), and one for (not A, not B).

The chance of ending up in each endpoint is equal to the product of chances. If A happens with 23% chance and B happens with 48% chance, then both happening is (0.23 times 0.48). The chance of something not happening is (1.00-(chance of happening)). So, (A, not B) is (0.23 times (1.00-0.48)) (not A, B) is ((1.00-0.23) times 0.48) and lastly: (not A, not B) is ((1.00-0.23) times (1.00-0.48))

When you say you want either, you are saying that you consider the (not A, not B) endpoint unacceptable, but that you are satisfied with the other three: (A, B), (A, not B), and (not A, B) are all equally good.

RolfAndreassen is showing that you can find the probability of either A or B by taking a double negative: since the chance of something not happening is (1.00-(chance of happening)), we can take (1.00-(chance I end up in the single bad endpoint)) which is equal to (1.00-(chance I end up at (not A, not B)) = (1.00 - ((1.00-0.23) times (1.00-0.48)))

Sarunas is showing that naively adding the probabilities of A and B returns too large a value. Only by subtracting out the probability of (A, B) can it be corrected.

Intuiting the probabilities as branching paths I found very helpful, especially when you get to situations where the probabilities depend on eachother. See http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes/ for an example

Hope this helps!

For someone like me who grew into probability with Jaynes' book, seeing in the first chapter that algorithms are trained using multiple times the same data (cross-validation) was... annoying, let's say (I actually screamed at the book).

There's two ways to train algorithms 'multiple times' on the same data. The bad one is data duplication, but cross-validation is the good one. Data duplication is the sort of thing that Jaynes would have been worried about, because it means you're counting evidence from the same piece of data twice, thus your model has illusory precision.

But what does cross-validation do? There's an issue called "overfitting," where any statistical procedure performed on a training set will fit both the noise and the signal in the training set, but while the signal on a test set will presumably be the same, the noise will be different and thus the model will do worse. Single validation is when you split your data into two parts, the training set and the test set, so that you can see how well your model trained on the training set does on the test set. When there's a tunable parameter in the training method, people will sometimes optimize the tunable parameter given data in the test set.*

But to do one split and leave it at that is wasteful. Cross-validation is when you partition the data many times, and fit many different models, and can thus talk about how the population of models behaves. In particular, consider the case of 'leave-one-out' cross-validation, where in a dataset of n points, we train n different models, each time using n-1 datapoints to fit the model parameters, test them on the 1 datapoint left out. This gives each individual model as much training data as possible while still leaving us a test dataset to determine how resilient to overfitting our model-generation procedure is.

* The principled way to do this is to split the data three times, into a training set (which the algorithm always has access to), a validation set (which the algorithm only has access to when setting the tunable parameters), and then a test set (which the algorithm never has access to, but is used to assess how well the model does after the tunable parameter has been optimized).

^ Above post is the illustration of the danger of LW's style Bayes. Below is a non-crazy discussion (e.g. one where people don't scream):

http://andrewgelman.com/2013/12/10/cross-validation-bayesian-estimation-tuning-parameters/

Eventually it makes sense, I promise. "Bayesianism" in the sense of keeping track of every hypothesis is very computationally expensive - modern algorithms only keep track of a very small number of hypotheses (only those representable by a neural network [or what have you], and even then only those required to do gradient descent). This fact opens you up to the overfitting problem, where the simplest perfect hypothesis in your space actually has very little information about the true external reality. You need some way of throwing away the parts of the signal that your model wasn't going to figure out anyhow.

For this reason among others, modern machine learning algorithms often have a lot of settings that have to be set by smarter systems (humans), before your algorithm can actually learn a novel domain. These settings reflect how the properties of the domain interact with properties of your algorithm (e.g. how many resources the algorithm has to commit before it can expect to have found something good, or what degree of noise the algorithm has to learn to throw away). These are those "hyperparameter" things. Cross-validation is just an empirical tool that helps humans figure out the right settings. You can probably figure out why it's expected to work.

This experiment has been done with various paintings.

it goes something like this:

• experimenter offers ~30 paintings to subject
• Subject rates paintings 1-10
• experimenter concludes by saying; we would like to give you a painting to keep, if you want it. (painting happens to be a 3-4 on the scale of their evaluations)
• experimenter leaves and comes back days or weeks later
• experimenter asks subject how they like painting (1-10) or to evaluate the whole set of paintings again.
• subject now rates the painting they got to keep as higher than previously.
• experiment was also done on people with altzheimers and the same effect was found even when the patient had no memory of the previous experiment or the experimenter.

Sorry I don't have a name or a link to the papers, but it was at least a few years ago. Something about cognitive dissonance I believe; about how you wouldn't accept the painting unless you liked it therefore you convince yourself that you like it more than you did.

I kinda inferred that the subject is aware on how their decision will impact the future of the experiment (ie that it will be the basis of which option is removed). I first time almost read it as if a random choice was removed and the focus would be whether which one was removed impacted their opinions.

I am also unclear on what significance the choice is supposed to be. If I choose a toy to play with for 5 minutes, 3 hours or get to own after the experiment those are kinda different choice situations.