Open Thread - Aug 24 - Aug 30

Does anyone know of any posts or resources that are targeted at rationalists that help with extracting yourself and recovering from an abusive relationship?

I hope you don't wait with getting help until you find something targeted specifically for rationalists. Get all the help you can right now. A little bullshit here and there may annoy you, but non-rationalists can also have a lot of domain-specific knowledge.

GO BACK, YOU HAVE TO HELP HER

If there are any methods -- rational or not -- to erase this feeling from your mind, do it a.s.a.p. That is priority #1. Stop your brain from ruining your life.

Congratulations on telling your family. Actually, telling anyone. Saying certain things aloud allows one to think about them more clearly.

Speaking as somebody who could easily be on the other side of that equation, except for a very rigorous moral system, including a rule to stay the hell away from people who scream "Victim!" into my brain, I can tell you exactly how you got into that situation.

She became whatever you needed her to be, in order for you to be the target she wanted you to be. (I can manipulate anybody into doing anything. I just have to become the person they would do that thing for - and my self is flexible in ways most people couldn't imagine.)

In particular, she became somebody who needed help, because you would try to help her.

It's important to realize - she doesn't need help. She never needed help. The person you want to help doesn't exist, and never did. That person was a mask that the person who threatened you wore to make you vulnerable.

Allow yourself to mourn the person you thought she was. But do not imagine that that person was ever her.

Please write more about every part of your experience. As we know from a related field; "people who are sleep deprived don't know how sleep deprived they are". People in an abusive relationship don't know they are in an abusive relationship (until the moment of clarity) any writing about noticing things will help people potentially get away from bad relationships.

Edit: have some karma to help you recover and/also reap successful feeling from your present adventure

There's this, both for dealing with the aftermath of the break-up, as well as the break-up itself.

I think your feelings will change over time. Changing how you think about something may not change how you feel now, but it may lead to changes in how you feel in the future. It kind of sucks right now, but I don't think this conflict between your feelings and thoughts is permanent. It's a temporary thing you are going through.

Here are some articles I read that helped me understand abusive relationships a little better.

“I Can Handle It”: On Relationship Violence, Independence, and Capability http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/08/08/i-can-handle-it-on-relationship-violence-independence-and-capability/

It’s Not Your Relationship That’s Abusive, It’s Your Partner – Here’s Why That Distinction Matters http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/05/its-not-your-relationship-thats-abusive-its-your-partner-heres-why-that-distinction-matters/

Also, when a friend of mine was in a similar situation, he said that reading a book about Borderline Personality Disorder was helpful. His girlfriend had that. Your situation may be different.

I also think it may help to read books to help learn about and remember what healthy relationships look like. John Gottman's books are my favourite for that. Gottman has studied thousands of real life couples in his lab and has a good idea of what works and what doesn't.

Here's one that I liked, though if another of his books jibes with you more, then you might want to get that one:

Why Marriages Succeed and Fail by John Gottman http://www.amazon.com/Why-Marriages-Succeed-Fail-Yours/dp/0684802414/

And, Gottman has studied abusive relationships, and attempted to figure out why people abuse, and what patterns they have. He wrote a book about it, focusing on men abusing women, but I think it would be useful in the reverse situation.

When Men Batter Women by John Gottman and Neil Jacobson https://www.gottman.com/shop/when-men-batter-women/

Buy and read this book right now: "No More Mr. Nice Guy" by Robert Glover

(I can't tell from your post whether you are male or female, but it doesn't matter. The book is equally good for either.)

In essence, this book may help you learn how to stop being a victim, how to set your own limits, and how to get your own needs met. It also may inoculate you against getting into future relationships like this.

As someone who has been through a lot of abuse, beware. Your future self, not your current self, feels the fallout from the abuse more so than your current self. You have adapted to your abusive situation, when it goes away, you will be maladapted. Get out. Just take it on blind faith that you should get out if you have to. You don't want to end up like me. In my case I was indeed subjected to violence like what might happen to you. To this day, I regret not retaliating, killing my abuser or torturing them back to save myself from even a portion of it. And I'm well aware that's very much not normal. Now, even though I have the opportunity, I don't want to and won't, but if I could go back in time, well...the point is that you should get out, and that's not at all going to be the hard point from there.

If someone threatens you and/or abuses you, call the police. That stuff is illegal. Do so as soon as you safely can.

I tried it, but at the time I found it very hard to focus. it's a lot like working at home – you need to be very good at creating your own routines and structure, and managing your own projects.

If that's not you, develops those skills first. Getting work where you train those skills is a good approach.

The value of interleaving is evidence that a lot of conventional education is about teaching people to endure boredom, and this is a very bad mistake.

Interleaving is great. After reading about this a few months ago, I realized how I did Anki was bad. I had separate decks for each subject. To interleave, you could put everything in one deck, but you'd only be able to organize by tag then.

I figured out a better way to interleave in Anki. Create a filtered deck which takes X random cards from all your other decks. You can make X as big or small as you want.

Incidentally, this also made me realize how much of a cue studying by deck was. The subject of some cards was no longer obvious because of how I wrote them, so I've slowly been disambiguating them. This is good, I think, as in reality you often don't have such a strong cue that says "use knowledge from X subject".

For those interested in further reading: Robin Hanson's take, popularly-written book.

Why questions are very good and should be encouraged! But also, it is worth improving the questions, in addition to just answering them. So if a child asks "why is the bus going?", you can ask for a clarification "Do you mean what makes it move? Or do you mean where is it going?"; this models clearer language and better communication skills, it helps the child get an answer to the specific question that they intended, and it prevents why-questions from becoming the default I'm-bored-so-I-will-say-why-until-people-get-sick-of-talking-to-me routine.

Sorry, I know that was slightly off-topic.

Eliezer used an approach of gradual but entertaining introduction so that a good many people stayed interested even though he was also encouraging them to make significant changes in the way they think. He also offered varied and interesting examples so that people understood what he meant.

I think you're overoptimistic about equivalent sequences for other subjects. I hope I'm wrong.

http://eco-comics.blogspot.com/ <- For economics - not a sequence, per se, but covering a broad range of material in an entertaining and (AFAIK) novel way. http://eco-comics.blogspot.com/2009/06/justice-league-and-comparative.html <- Probably the best post there

This happens to my spouse and me very often. We've gotten pretty good at noticing after the second "I dunno, what do you want to do" round that we need to switch from ask mode to tell mode. Don't give options, just propose something, and say "any objection must take the form of a counterproposal" (yes, we say literally this sentence to each other a few times a week).

Especially when one partner is more tired than the other, we can instead just have the more engaged partner pick something and the tired one get one or two vetos before being forced to step up and actually accept something. This isn't always comfortable, especially when it's unclear that there exists a good solution.

It sounds to me as though the problem is that neither of you are very enthusiastic about any of the choices. One possibility is to identify a list of what's tolerable and then use a random method for choosing.

Another is to talk with each other about what each of you really like at a time when you aren't distracted and tired.

It's conceivable that one or both of you aren't good at remembering what you really like, in which case keeping records would help.

I would usually approach these types of decisions by doing research in advance, so that the options can be considered when not driving over potholes and hungry.

For example, the day before going to a city, A and B could each look up yelp reviews of restaurants in the city, and each write down a first choice and a second choise of the restaurants they would most like to go to, given constraints (eg. close to their other destination, open at the right time.) Then they could compare lists, and discuss, and decide which restaurant to go to before even leaving for the destination.

My impression from reading the conversations is that A and B are relatively good at communicating. They have different styles of communicating and different preferences. Over time, A and B might get to know each other's preferences better and be able to predict how the other person will respond with more accuracy, and that may shorten the amount of time it takes. I'm not sure there is a shortcut to convergence. The problem may be more that you are discussing things when tired and hungry and doing other things such as driving. If you have such conversations while you are both feeling kind of crappy, it may take longer to sort things out than if you discuss when in better circumstances.

That's fine, but could you please change the font to the default one? Comic Sans is... ehh, not the best choice for most things.

My instinct is that cheerleaders don't improve results for sports teams, but that that also isn't their function.

On the original topic, I've actually encountered the situation of "environment filled with dude programmers with poor social skills suddenly gets a few very attractive ladies who have incentives to be nice to them." My frat went co-ed senior year.

To put things mildly, productivity did not improve.

On the other hand, a lot more guys wanted to join up. So my guess is that the office cheerleaders do not make existing programmers more productive (and may in fact do the opposite), but that they may make the office more desirable as a work environment to prospective hires.

That depends on what you consider to be the main purpose of a sports team - winning matches or providing entertainment and selling tickets to their games.

The best response to that article that I've seen so far:

Sure, blue balls always help me code better

-- burgerissues on reddit

Related:

1. most people want to socialize with the opposite sex, and are unhappy (and hence unproductive) if they can’t;
2. the conscious reasons for wanting to socialize with the opposite sex often have nothing to do with “fluid exchange” (to use the John Nash character’s phrase from A Beautiful Mind),
3. let he (or she) who is without subconscious Darwinian motivations cast the first stone,
4. human beings didn’t evolve to live their lives in an 85%-male environment,
5. by the Pigeonhole Principle, not every straight male will be as lucky as I was to find a girlfriend in the remaining 15%, and
6. computer science departments could attract and retain better people of both sexes if they felt less like monasteries or pirate ships.

-- Scott Aaronson

They don't seem to be exactly cheerleaders. Their function seems to very similar to that of hostesses in nightclubs.

Possibly. It depends what you hire them to do. See "The Wolf of Wall Street" for an example of effective (in the short term) motivation.

Outcomes:

1 flip  --- $1  probability 1/2
2 flips -- $2  probability 1/4
3 flips -- $4  probability 1/8
4 flips -- $8  probability 1/16
...

The expected value doesn't converge but it grows extremely slowly, where almost all the benefit comes from an extremely tiny chance of extremely large gain. The obvious question is counterparty risk: how much do you trust the person offering the game to actually be able to follow through with what they offered?

If we think of this as a sum over coin flips, each flip you think is possible gives another $0.50 in expected value. So if you think they're probably only good for amounts up to $1M then because it takes 20 flips to pass $1M the expected value is $0.50 * 19 or $9.50. Similarly if you think they're good for $1B then that's 29 flips max for an expected value of $14.50. You could be fancy and try to model your uncertainty about how much they're good for, but that's probably not worth it. And you do want to take into account that someone offering something like this with no provision for how they'll handle extremely large payouts is probably not entirely on the level.

Expected value is also not the right metric here, since we all have diminishing marginal returns. Would you enjoy $1B 1,000x as much as $1M? Even if you're giving your winnings to charity there are still some limits to our ability to effectively use additional donations.

Short answer: $5. (This trusts them to be good for $1024, and is in a range where utility should still be pretty much linear in money.)

I was thinking that you should take into account the fact that if you got several trillion dollars, that only entitled you to half of America's resources, and if you got infinite dollars it would only give you 100% of America's resources. It turns out that similar notions have already been studied and the expected value calculated for them on Wikipedia (well, they just assumed that the bankroll was US GDP and didn't look at a quantity theory of money solution specifically, but same diff).

As formulated, zero -- under the rules you posted you never win anything. Is there an unstated assumption that you can stop the game at any time and exit with your stake?

In general you start meetups in cities and not countries. Do you happen to live Johannesburg or Cape Town?

Should somebody who has more conscientiousness than I do (at least for now) start one here in South Africa?

It doesn't need that much conscientiousness. You just need to reserve a table at a restaurant.

If you're rational and you're in South Africa, why are you still in South Africa? How much do you value your life over the trivial inconvenience of moving?

Why cold turkey on music? Instead, maybe it would be better to find music that does not disrupt your concentration.

Also, some people say its better to change one thing at a time.

Good luck!

Cold turkey has always worked best form than gradual adjustment. BUT changing too many things at the same time is taxing on short term memory, and casual relapsing sometime meant a downward spiral that ended up disrupting the process.
I find it easir to remember to quit one thing at a time, I get less frustration from this approach.

After you are asleep you likely move soon anyway. That means you likely don't get very far by optimizing sleeping position.

The fetal position is fine. Avoid sleeping on your belly, but sleeping on the sides and back is fine too. As far as I'm aware, leg positioning is mostly to your tastes aside from that both of them should have the same position; don't have one outstretched and the other tucked against you.

I dunno, what does a literature search tell you?

I may be misremembering, but, I seem to recall Givewell looking directly at education measures.

Basic sunscreen is zinc. To get that into an applicable form it is usually put into an oil suspension. As mentioned you don't like the oil. You can also get alcohol based suspension sunscreens that feel a lot nicer; and sunscreen in spray form. The benefit of oil is that it doesn't wash off so easily. But there's no point being stuck with oil based sunscreen if they make you feel that uncomfortable

This link might help: http://www.skinacea.com/sunscreen/physical-vs-chemical-sunscreen.html#.VdunDbKqqko as should https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunscreen

I was told a while ago that Asian sunscreen is different and less greasy and I bought some Japanese sunscreen from the internet. It feels much better than the regular American stuff.

Have you tried spray-on sunscreen?

Sunlight increases risk of melanoma but decreases risk of other, more deadly cancers. If you're going to get, say, 3 times your usual daily sunlight exposure, then sunscreen is probably a good idea, but otherwise it's healthier to go without. I'd guess a good heuristic is to get as much sunlight as your ancestors from 1000 years ago would have gotten.

Often, yes, but this is highly dependent on the task -- and sometimes the sub-task. For example, when writing finding the correct word for an idea is motivating, but proofreading for spelling is a chore. I can name a good number of tasks that I do because I am internally motivated, including looking up definitions, washing my hair, organizing my bookshelves, making checklists and flowcharts, grocery shopping, gardening... but just as many (and probably more) that I don't do unless I really feel I need to because it is expected of me.

I think that part of this is that unmotivating tasks tend to stick in your mind as always present and demanding, but the things you enjoy doing are all too fleeting. It is also possible that you are unconsciously defining conscientiousness as "things you should do but don't want to", in which case by definition they will require an external force.

To me these are much the same thing. I am one with the situation. When I clearly see what is necessary, the action follows.

At least, that's the ideal, which I don't claim to always achieve.

I might not understand what you mean by conscientiousness. The things that most feel like things I must do are going to bed and getting up. Are they conscientiousness?

This is exactly how conscientiousness feels to me - not wanting to do something but doing so because it's the Correct Action For This Situation. Generally, this applies to things that don't give me a direct, immediate benefit to do, like cleaning up after myself in a common space.

I don't think so... probably less so than other behaviors, in fact.

In Freudian terms, conscientiousness is very straightforward: in involves putting the lid on your id and doing what the superego tells you.

I'm not sure what "lifetime manic features at age 22 – 23 years" means. Lifetime, or between ages 22 and 23?

But the numbers:

There was a positive association between IQ at age 8 years and lifetime manic features at age 22–23 years (Pearson’s correlation coefficient 0.159 (95% CI 0.120–0.198), P>0.001).

I shall be generous and take the upper end of their range for the correlation, and round it up to c = 0.2.

The shared variance is c^2 = 0.04. That is childhood IQ "explains" (in the technical sense of that word) 4% of the variance of "lifetime manic features at age 22 – 23 years".

For the following calculations I assume, for no reason other than mathematical simplicity, that we are dealing with a bivariate normal distribution. However, I doubt the overall message would be very different for whatever the real distribution is.

The mutual information between the variables, is log2( 1/sqrt(1-c^2) ) = 0.0294 bits.

What can you do with 30 millibits? You might try to use IQ at age 8 to predict "lifetime manic features at age 22 – 23 years". How much will knowing the former narrow your estimate of the latter? The ratio (standard deviation conditional on that information)/(unconditional standard deviation) is sqrt(1-c^2) = 0.980. That is, the spread is 2% smaller.

Suppose you try to predict from IQ at age 8, whether their "manic features" will be above or below the average? By random guessing you will be right 50% of the time. By using that information, you will be right (1/π)acos(−c) of the time = 56%.

Perhaps, if the IQ is really high, the "manic features" will be more significantly above the average? In principle, yes, but in practice, not enough to matter. The probability that an individual has an IQ high enough to be 95% sure that they will be above average for "manic features" is 7.5 x 10^-14. Of course, the bivariate normal approximation cannot be observably accurate so far out, but I think it gives an indication of the scale of the matter.

The mathematics underlying the calculations can be found here. The figures at the end include a scatterplot of what c=0.2 looks like. That was the lowest correlation for which I thought it worth while to include in the tabulations.

Practice a lot when you are not too tired; exercising those muscles and building a habit of standing/sitting up straight will slowly increase your ability to do so more consistently.

I am much better able to maintain good posture comfortably and for longer periods of times when standing, and setting up my home computer with a standing desk has improved my posture and reduced my back pain.

I have also heard it recommended to have a mirror in a place where you will see yourself slumping; it will motivate you to sit/stand up when you see yourself. This has not been very practical for me, but may work for others.

Slouching is unbecoming and say say it increases back pain.

I think that's largely outdated thought. Frequently taught and as a result global back pain rises rather then lowers. You get back pain when you freeze your body and prevent it from moving.

If you get an impulse to slouch inside your body follow it and make the movement consciously. That means your back goes back while the shoulders go up and in front.

If you shoulders go down while they are going in front you will likely tense up.

Conscious breathing can also be very valuable as a tool to stay in touch with your body.

Now here is the weird and confusing part. If the above is a valid proof, then H will eventually find it. It searches all proofs, remember?

Fortunately, H will never find your argument because it is not a correct proof. You rely on hidden assumptions of the following form (given informally and symbolically):

 If φ is provable, then φ holds.
 Provable(#φ) → φ

where #φ denotes the Gödel number of the proposition φ.

Statements of these form are generally not provable. This phenomenon is known as Löb's theorem - featured in Main back in 2008.

You use these invalid assumptions to eliminate the first two options from Either H returns true, or false, or loops forever. For example, if H returns true, then you can infer that "FF halts on input FF" is provable, but that does not contradict FF does not halt on input FF.

Therefore a proof that it doesn't halt does exist (this one), and it will eventually find it.

Gödel's incompleteness bites here. What theory is your halt-testing machine H searching for a proof within? H can only find termination proofs that are derivable from the axioms of that theory. What theory is your proof that H(FL,FL) does not terminate expressed in? I believe it will necessarily not be the same one.

Just calling the problem undecidable doesn't actually solve anything. If you can prove it's undecidable, it creates the same paradox. If no Turing machine can know whether or not a program halts, and we are also Turing machines, then we can't know either.

I guess the answer to this point is that when constructing the proof that H(FL, FL) loops forever, we assume that H can't be wrong. So we are working in an extended set of axioms: the program enumerates proofs given some set of axioms T, and the English-language proof in the tumblr post uses the axiom system T + "T is never wrong" (we can write this T+CON(T) for short).

Now, this is not necessarily a problem. If you have reason to think that T is consistent, then most likely T+CON(T) is consistent also (except in weird cases). So if we had some reason to adopt T in the first place, then working in T+CON(T) is also a reasonable choice. (Note that this is different from working in a system which can prove its own consistency, which would be bad. The difference is that in T+CON(T), there is no way to prove that proofs using the additional "T is never wrong" axiom are correct).

More generally, the lesson of Gödel's incompleteness theorem is that it does not make sense to say that something is "provable" without specifying which proof system you are using, because there are no natural choice for an "ideal" system, they are all flawed. The tumblr post seems paradoxical because it implicitly shifts between two different axiom sets. In particular, it says

If there is no way for H to prove whether it halts or not, then we can’t prove it either.

but a correct statement is, we can't prove it either using the same set of axioms as H used. We have to use some addtional ones.

EDIT: Okay, now I read your article, and I see that what I wrote here is irrelevant. Leaving it here anyway, maybe someone else will like it.

I admit I didn't read your linked article thoroughly, but I will try to explain the basic theory and terminology.

In computer science, when we are talking about a computation that for any input always ends in a finite time and provides an answer, we call such computation algorithm, and the mathematical function computed by this algorithm is called "total recursive function" (or "computable function").

When we are talking about a computation that could potentially run forever, and such case of running forever is treated as an implied special value, we call such computation program, and the mathematical function computed by this algorithm is called "partial recursive function" -- a mathematical function with an undefined value for inputs where the program runs forever. (Algorithms are a subset of programs, and total recursive functions are a subset of partial recursive functions.)

Specifically, if we care about computations returning "yes" or "no", an algorithm corresponds to a total recursive function from X to { "yes", "no" }, where "X" is the input domain: strings, numbers, whatever your computation accepts as a valid input. If we care about computations that potentially run forever, such program corresponds to a partial recursive function from X to { "yes" }, where not returning value is an implied "no". (You could have other, equivalent definitions, but that would only make things less elegant mathematically.)

When debating things such as Halting Problem we have to pay extra big attention to the proper distinction between algorithms and programs, or respectively between total and partial recursive functions. When speaking about programs / partial recursive functions we have to pay attention to which answer is the implied one in case of the infinite computation (is "yes" explicit and "no" implied, or is "no" explicit and "yes" implied?). A simple mistake can change everything dramatically. For example:

Q1: "Can we make an algorithm which, given an arbitrary program and an arbitrary input for that program, determines whether the program will stop in finite time?"

A1: "No. See the standard debate about Halting Problem."

Q2: "Can we make a program which, given an arbitrary program and an arbitrary input for that program, determines whether the program will stop in finite time?"

A2: "Yes, trivially. Just simulate the given program, and print "yes" if the simulation stops."

Q3: "Can we make a program which, given an arbitrary program and an arbitrary input for that program, determines whether the program will run forever?"

A3: "No. If such program would be possible, then together (running in parallel) with the previous program they would make an algorithm solving the Halting Problem, which we already know is mathematically impossible."

I believe that if you will be very careful about which of these words you use, the confusion will be solved. In my opinion, most likely at some place you proved that a program exists for something, but then you started treating it as an algorithm.

Also, there is definitely some objective fact where you cannot get the right answer:

"After thinking about it, you will decide that this statement is false, and you will not change your mind."

If you conclude that this is false, then the statement will be true. No paradox, but you are wrong.

If you conclude that this is true, then the statement will be false. No paradox, but you are wrong.

If you make no conclusion, or continuously change your mind, then the statement will be false. No paradox, but the statement is undecidable to you.

But if it's true that there doesn't exist a proof that it halts, then it will run forever searching for one.

No; provable and true are not the same thing. It may be the case that the program halts, but it is nevertheless impossible to prove that it halts except by "run it and see", which doesn't count.

Okay, an attempt to clear up the Halting Problem:

The proofs in question say it is impossible to algorithmically arrive at a Yes-or-No answer to the generalized question, "Does algorithm X have non-trivial property Y for input Z?", for any specific property Y. Poorly written proof at the bottom. It critically doesn't say that you can't have a Yes-or-No-or-Undecidable answer to that question. Introduce an uncertainty factor and the issue falls apart. Thus, you -can- write a Halting Oracle, so long as you're satisfied that sometimes it won't be able to say.

For purposes of AI Friendliness - which is certainly a non-trivial property - Rice's Theorem says we can't algorithmically prove that an AI - which is an algorithm - is, or is not, friendly, once we manage to define what friendly even is. We can theoretically, however, prove that AI is friendly, not friendly, or undecidably friendly. For our purposes, "not friendly" and "undecidably friendly" are probably equivalent.

For purposes of everything else, nothing at all says that it's impossible to prove whether or not a specific program will halt given a specific input. "But what about the program in Turing's diagonalization proof? Does it halt or not?" The input in that case (the Halting Oracle) can't exist in the first place, as the proof demonstrates.

"But what about this neat program I wrote that halts 25% of the time?" What did you use to generate a random number? Not being aware of your hidden inputs isn't the same as not having an input. For a given set of inputs, your algorithm halts 100%, or 0%, of the time.

A Halting Oracle that only says "Yes", "No", or "Provably Undecidable" hasn't (to my knowledge and research) been proven to be impossible - and a "Yes", "No", or "Maybe" Halting Oracle is quite trivial, as you can throw all cases you can't figure out an algorithm for into the "Maybe" pile. The proofs do not demonstrate that there are any algorithms which are nondeterministically halting for a given input, nor do they demonstrate that we can't prove that any given algorithm will or will not halt, nor do they even demonstrate that an algorithm can't prove that other algorithms will or will not halt - they demonstrate one thing and one thing only, and that is that there is no single algorithm which gives a "Yes" or "No" answer will work on all algorithms for all inputs.

An equivalent-to-Rice's-Theorem-for-our-very-limited-purposes-proof written like the halting problem proof. A trivial property in this case means it -can- vary by algorithm and input.

Suppose Algorithm Zed determines whether or not Algorithm X has non-trivial property Y for the input Z, returning a boolean value. Take Algorithm ScrewZed, with an input of AlgorithmZed, which has the non-trivial property Y iff its evaluation of AlgorithmZed, given the input of Algorithm ScrewZed with the input of AlgorithmZed, says it doesn't have non-trivial property Y. Paradox ensues, provided I wrote all this correctly.

If you can prove it's undecidable, it creates the same paradox.

What makes you say this?

If "φ is provable" then "φ"
Provable(#φ) → φ 

If "φ is false" then "φ is not provable"
¬φ → ¬Provable(#φ) 

if "0≠1" then "0=1 is not provable"
¬0=1 → ¬Provable(#(0=1))

From the link:

That means that we can’t actually prove that a proof doesn’t exist, or it creates a paradox. But we did prove it! And the reasoning is sound! Either H returns true, or false, or loops forever. The first two options can’t be true, on pain of paradox. Leaving only the last possibility. But if we can prove that, so can H. And that itself creates a paradox.

H proves that it can't decide the question one way or the other. The assumption that H can only return TRUE or FALSE is flawed: if a proof exists that something is undecidable, then H would need to be able to return "undecidable".

This example seems to verify the halting problem: you came up with an algorithm that tries to decide whether a program halts, and then came up with an input for which the algorithm can't decide one way or another.

It does not give a counterexample. It specifies a way that you could find a counterexample if there was a halting oracle. But if there was a halting oracle there wouldn't be any counterexample. So what is found is a contradiction.

There is no program such that no Turing machine can determine whether it halts or not. But no Turing machine can take every program and determine whether or not each of them halts.

It isn't actually clear to me that you a Turing machine in the relevant sense, since there is no context where you would run forever without halting, and there are contexts where you will output inconsistent results.

But even if you are, it simply means that there is something undecidable to you -- the examples you find will be about other Turing machines, not yourself. There is nothing impossible about that, because you don't and can't understand your own source code sufficiently well.

No, it's the halting problem all the way down.

But if it's true that there doesn't exist a proof that it halts, then it will run forever searching for one.

Not remotely! There's no proof that it halts, and there's no proof that it doesn't halt. It will run until it halts or the universe ends - there is no forever. The key is that there can be programs for which nobody can tell which one they are without actually trying them until they halt or the universe ends.

I read another chapter, on cockfighting in Bali, and I begin to understand him better.

When he dismisses cognitivism, he's probably thinking of Levi-Strauss. The introductory chapter which seemed illogical to me was probably not intended to be a logical argument of any kind, but a summary of his views. Geertz seems to have the common non-hard-science mystical view of human thought, as something not amenable to logical analysis, and a view of logic as reductionist. He seems, like I suspect Wittgenstein does, to think that a logical analysis of language means analyzing individual words, and that the information provided by context and by the ways the words are put together is somehow beyond the grasp of logic, and that language and human activity just can't be explained that way.

He's supposedly the most-influential American anthropologist.

Yes, but that's because he was doing stuff in the 50s and 60s, when there were a lot of old theories that were ripe for refining and overturning. He made a name for himself by saying a lot of things that seem obvious to us today -- questioning structuralism and functionalism as dominant paradigms was big news in the day. I would say that his work on theory is not worth the trouble it takes to get through it, but I have a low tolerance for bushwhacking through tangled prose. When you get to applied cases, he does make more sense, and can be engaging. I remember Peddlers and Princes being worth reading, although I think he had a good number of page-long paragraphs there too.

I've read a little Geertz, and I think part of what he means is that a culture is people doing stuff, not a body of knowledge or a bunch of patterns which can be abstracted away from the people engaging in a culture..

It appears that the consensus is that saturated fat significantly increases blood cholesterol and arterial plaque formation

Nope -- that's a hotly debated topic. There used to be a consensus that saturated fat is bad, but AFAIK it doesn't exist any more.

In particular, the low-carb and paleo approaches to nutrition strongly assert that saturated fat is NOT bad -- that's why "Bulletproof stuff" involves a lot of it.

For those who are preoccupied with lists that can actually be read and hold to the overly strict standard that preformatted text shouldn't be used where bulleted lists are intended, here's that list again in more readable form:

• Is preoccupied with details, rules, lists, order, organization, or schedules to the extent that the major point of the activity is lost.
• Shows perfectionism that interferes with task completion (e.g., is unable to complete a project because his or her own overly strict standards are not met).
• Is excessively devoted to work and productivity to the exclusion of leisure activities and friendships (not accounted for by obvious economic necessity).
• Is overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values (not accounted for by cultural or religious identification).
• Is unable to discard worn-out or worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value.
• Is reluctant to delegate tasks or to work with others unless they submit to exactly his or her way of doing things.
• Adopts a miserly spending style toward both self and others; money is viewed as something to be hoarded for future catastrophes.
• Shows rigidity and stubbornness.

And for those who overconscientiously think that one should cite one's sources, I'll add that these are the DSM-5 criteria for OCD, and that having four of them is supposed to indicate OCD.

I identify with hating having to scroll sideways to read something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect

(trigger warning: rape)

How much can we be sure, if this would be made legal, that the consent of the adult siblings would mean the same thing as the consent of two random unrelated people. If someone wants to have sex with their sibling who is not really happy about that idea, how much opportunity would they have to pressure them into "consent", if they merely have to wait until their 18th birthday, as opposed to the opportunity to pressure into "consent" someone who is not a relative?

Even if the person who wants to have sex with their sibling waits with the coitus until the sibling's 18th birthday, they still have plenty of opportunity to "groom" them before they are 18. Imagine siblings with large age difference, where the older sibling uses their mental superiority to "brainwash" their younger sibling, to ruin their other relationships and make them socially isolated, to make them emotionally dependent, so that when the younger sibling becomes 18, they are not in a position to say "no".

Also, many people at 18 are not really ready to be economically independent on their family. Imagine a family with two children, one strongly loved by the parents, the other disliked by the parents. When the unloved child becomes 18, their sibling can blackmail them into sex by threatening that if they refuse, the popular child will convince the parents to throw the unpopular child out on the street. (Yes, blackmail is technically illegal, but you would have to prove it. Also, if you are the unpopular child, getting the popular child thrown in jail will not help you get your parents' love; you will still remain on the street.)

In families there is too much power disparity: parents vs children, but also some children vs other. If we care about consent in sex, it is better to not leave open any paths that would allow abusing this power disparity to enforce "consent". Making sex between close relatives illegal is a simple Schelling point.

In theory inbreeding shouldn't be a problem, but in practice it probably is.

In both theory and in practice, it is a problem: the offspring are more likely to have faulty genomes than the offspring of unrelated people.

But why are you raising this issue? The practical answer is known, and adequately accounts for the feelings around it.

Would you then permit homosexual incest, which doesn't produce children?

Epistemic status: anally extracted

Is sexual relationship between two consenting adult siblings ethically okay

I think it's probably like drunk driving -- most of the times it doesn't result in anything bad, but there's a non-negligible chance of outcomes so bad that the expected value still comes out negative.

should it be legal?

I haven't given much thought to that, but for some reason your proposed solution of "legal unless you have offspring" sounds more reasonable to my System 1 than the analogous "legal unless you have a crash" in the case of drunk driving.

Or maybe a better analogy would be any driving = any sex between siblings, drunk driving = sex between siblings without contraception? Then again, a law against sex between siblings without contraception doesn't sound easy to enforce to me.

Even though contraception is widespread in this day and age, if large number of siblings have sex with each other, some of them will inevitably end up having kids.

A second problem is that the energy and emotions and time they devote to their incestuous relationship isn't going to a relationship where they might have kids.

5 years ago, I would have thought logically, and said that if they don't want kids and have access to effective contraception then it isn't a problem. But now I would think probabilistically, and say that even if they are 99% sure they don't want kids, they are about 50% likely (assuming standard levels of overconfidance) to change their minds around 30, and now they are really heavily invested in a relationship which cannot lead to healthy kids, and the sister's biological clock is running out of time.

So, it's certainly a bad idea, although that doesn't automatically mean it should be made illegal, depending upon whether you believe citizens should have the right to make bad decisions.

From what I've heard, the genetic risks have a lot to do with how genetically similar the forebears of the couple are. If all the grandparents are from the same small region, it's a lot riskier than if the grandparents are from different continents.

Supplemental questions that I don't know the answers to: how significant are the effects of inbreeding? Are they often so bad that it would be better for an inbred child to never have existed? How does that compare to having non-inbred children with known high risks of genetic defects? To what extent can the effects be tested for (both before and during pregnancy)?

I'd be very surprised if inbreeding was so bad that careful consensual incestuous sex, with the intent of getting an abortion if pregnancy does occur, wasn't worth the risk.

Edit: Okay, inbreeding seems to be much worse than I'd anticipated.

I made comments to a similar effect in a recent OT http://lesswrong.com/lw/mgr/open_thread_jul_13_jul_19_2015/ckh8 :)

ethically okay

Dude, be a consequentialist. Don't use expressions like "ethically okay" or "morally wrong". Use "superior to", "inferior to".

Grow what you will actually eat, not what you wish you would eat but won't actually eat. Learned this the hard way.

As such I now primarily grow tomatoes, green beans, sweet potatoes, malibar spinach, and strawberries despite being good at producing other things that would go to waste with some regularity.

(Still working on winter / fall gardening. Gonna try turnips and Fava beans.)

How to garden is site-specific. It will be different in different microclimates. I live in Canada, and once I read a gardening book from the UK and I had to laugh at the part where it said what I could plant in January. In Vancouver, maybe, but in the rest of Canada, no.

So...find books suited to your climate or maybe talk to people at a local garden club or nursery. Or talk to your neighbours, since their yards are most similar to yours, and so they may have experience at what works well in that type of soil and climate.

BattleGround God is bad arguing. It seems to have been created and tested by one person who had strong ideas about the type of person that was going to take it. The 'contradictory statements' that it identifies are 1. not actually contradictory, but 2. not presented in conjunction to each other, meaning that you have to take their re-wording of previous statements as consistent. They are not constant -- they replace wording indicating a broad idea with wording requiring a narrow (and specifically Judaic/Christian/Islamic) definition in order to 'catch you out'. Whacking through all the random things they think that you might believe (mostly wisely chosen if you are taking an exit poll at a church, but not so good on a philosophy site) makes it very boring to find their errors... But errors there are. Whoever wrote it was much more interested in catching out theists with murky ideas of rhetoric and not particularly interested in defining beliefs and testing for contradictions.

This person would not last 5 minutes in a discussion with a real human. This is not a good model of how to talk to theists, nor will any non-rational theist bother to play this game with any intent of taking its conclusions as valid. Nor should they.

It was so painful!

Why can't I be unsure about the truth value of something just because it's a logical impossibility?

If you're using logic to determine truth values, then a logical impossibility is false. The reason is that if something is logically impossible, then its existence would create a contradiction and so violate the Law of Noncontradiction.

I'm not certain where the problem lies, but I suspect that you may be misunderstanding the term "logical impossibility". It would not be used to indicate that you have come up with an argument that shows that something is impossible. Instead it would be used to indicate that something is actually impossible in any consistent universe.

To clarify, if I make the argument that 1. Socrates is a man, and 2. all men are mortal, that does not make it logically impossible for Socrates to live forever; it just means that I can show logically that Socrates won't die as long as these statements hold.

Logically impossible things are generally things like a square circle (exactly 4 right angles and exactly 0 angles in the same 2d shape); if they exist, it is because you misunderstand the terms being used in some way; if someone claims that this qualifies as a square circle, they have misunderstood what I am trying to communicate.

Likewise, people may say that an entity cannot be perfectly good and have allowed the holocaust; this might qualify god as a logical impossibility -- if we accept this judgement of morality, if we believe that god is perfectly good, and if we believe that the holocaust happened.

You could perhaps come up with a scenario in which God, being perfectly good, absolutely needed to implant memories of the holocaust into each of our memories.... or you could simply define god as an evil being. so I would say that "logical impossibility" is a bit strong.

How can P(x doesn't exist) < P(x is logically impossible)? That's... well, logically impossible.

If you already know that square circles cannot exist, it follows that in fact they do not exist; nothing impossible happens, so a proposition like "I saw a square circle" automatically gets a truth value = 0 without having to bother examining it.

Maybe it's because I'm not bayesian enough:

If I accepted that:

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. P(H | E) > P(H) if and only if P(H | ~E) < P(H). Absence of evidence may be very weak evidence of absence, but it is evidence nonetheless. (However, you may not be entitled to a particular kind of evidence.)

You cannot expect[2] that future evidence will sway you in a particular direction. "For every expectation of evidence, there is an equal and opposite expectation of counterevidence."

Then I may not hold my current attitude. But I don't see reason to believe those premises.

While I don't agree with the way they phrased their explanation, it's akin to saying "I'm not sure if 2 + 2 = 4 is true, but I am sure it can't equal anything else." Then falling back to "but there could be oddities in the foundation of mathematics that I'm not aware of" when pressed on the inconsistency.

If you claim that your understanding of logic isn't exhaustive, I don't see how you can also claim that X is logically impossible. ("I'm not a car expert but there is no possible way the problem is with the engine")

It makes more sense to think in terms of probabilities here, than "is or isn't". To what probability would you give god being a logical impossibility?

The ability to reason about large amounts of code seems to be more a memory and computation speed problem, than a logic problem. Computers already seem to be better than humans on these counts, so it seems like they may be better at understanding large pieces of code, once we have the whole "understanding" thing solved.

There's certainly ways you can usefully modify yourself. For example, giving yourself a heads-up display. However, I'm not sure how much it would end up increasing your intelligence. You could get runaway super-intelligence if every improvement increases the best mind current!you can make by at least that much, but if it increases by less than that, it won't run away.

http://www.eaglobal.org/livestream This is what I know of. I don't know if they needed to post-edit videos; but if they did - that takes time.

It's probably a safe assumption that there exists some number of people dedicating their careers to the study of intelligence who are able to consider potential heritability confounders you can think up in five minutes.

You can buy traveler's health insurance; it is not hard to find policies that will transport you to the nearest safe hospital, by airlift if necessary, and back to your home country if needed.

Personal experience that it is useful or just from the indirectly linked papers?

Also, note that it may potentiallly insta-fuck your liver.

From this description alone, it sounds like a good idea if you don't plan on having kids.

I've heard people say that it makes them sluggish and dumb - is this first hand experience you're talking about?

But it is. See the long list at page 284. See also the section about data sources on page 331.

The document points to World Development Indicators 2013 for more detailed references and data which is are more accessible by being placed after each corresponding section,

This whole subthread stinks of Dunning-Kruger. Youthful savvy? Cultish following? Guilt about not using Facebook? Putting internet sales on par with a revolutionary movement spanning several countries? That doesn't sound like you know what you're talking about.

I don't know exactly who you're supposed to persuade, but your track record so far on LessWrong shows that you barely manage to break even with your karma, and that you lack the level of self-awareness of a socially well-adapted person. Whoever you successfully persuade would have to be even more oblivious than you, which is saying something. Given what you said here you'd use Facebook for, I for one am glad neither I nor you are using it.

I don't mean for this to be a pointless ad hominem attack; the reason I'm responding this way is for you to take this as a prompter that you need to get out of your own head and think more clearly about matters involving yourself, or how you come off as. Because the way you think about this whole business is a huge red flag. The fact that self-promoters, salesmen, and slacktivists on FB tend to piss off people more than anything else, and the fact that youth is basically never an indicator of "savvy" are two things that should be obvious to everyone who has even a modicum of experience with the internet or life in general.

... Just out of curiosity, how old are you?

Why do you think you would be so good at influencing people on Facebook?

Do you already have a track record of getting sizable groups of strangers doing things they wouldn't otherwise have done by influencing them on some other social media? Then it might be worth looking into how to game facebook.

If you don't, then the first question is if you should try to get into the social media influence game to begin with. How many people are trying to do it compared to people who have any traction with a number of followers, and what sets the successful people apart? If most people who don't bounce off right away are barely hanging by instead of becoming big and influential, how is life for them? How much is success driven by stuff like outrage clickbait, unrelenting smear jobs at whoever your opponent is, raising twitter lynch mobs and the like, and how comfortable would you be operating in an environment where those might be standard operating procedure?

like start the next arab spring

So, remind me, how did that turn out?

Free marketeers just conjure evolution to serve themselves.

Sure. What are the alternatives? Letting the most power-hungry people fight against each other with the winner taking all? A competition who can get most followers by using clever memes that appeal to their cognitive biases? I hope you also see their drawbacks.

My conclusion: all these solutions are imperfect.

The only strong evidence for capitalism that I see is the general increases in wealth during capitalist periods compared to socialist periods.

Okay. How much evidence for other economical systems do you have?