I attended a fire preparedness course, and the instructor told us that actual fire evacuation drills were not necessary. It was enough just to spend a couple of minutes vividly imagining what we would do in case of a fire. Our chances of surviving would greatly increase if we imagined the situation in advance. Unfortunately he gave no references to that claim.

Yesterday at the Lesswrong Berlin meetup I taught a technique for dealing with emotions. On of the things I learned from the experience is that it's hard to get people in the LW crowd to strongly associate emotions through bringing up memories.

Or a student could imagine deciding to do his homework and then suddenly winning a million dollars.

That's a bad idea. Most people are not motivated to engage in actions that make them win a million dollars. It's outside of their comfort zone to just win a million dollar. It requires people to update their self identity in a non trivial way to win a million dollars. You want to imagine situations that feel good but that are easily accessible.

Using tricks with mental imaginary is a large part of what hypnosis is about.

Changing sociability in a lasting way isn't easy because we have had strong conditioning about what to feel in the past.

Even through my German vocabulary is bigger and it's my native language I'm frequently more let go in social interaction when they are in English because I learned to speak English socially with people in environments that have generally an upbeat vibe like Toastmasters while I spoke a lot of German in my life in situations like school where I behaved socially inwardly.

If I can get someone in a deep enough trance in hypnosis then I can attach an emotion to a well defined behavior. The emotion will come up the next time the behavior is triggered.

If it's something like sociability and the person gets often negative feedback in social situations then the emotional trigger will burn out and soon lose it's effect.

I personally consider implementing negative emotional responses to be dark, but if anyone who comes to the LW Europe Community Camp in Berlin wants a 1-on-1 hypnosis 30 minutes experience to associate a positive emotion to an experience just approach me. As far as I understand there going to be lots of unsheduled time at the weekend.

How well does operant conditioning work where there's a perceived causal link compared to when there is not?

I have noticed waves of insightful posts inspired by other insightful posts, followed by periods where nobody thinks of anything important to say, so we are dominated by meetup posts. I think for me, there has been a greater density of interesting in the previous 2 months, than there was in the 6 months before that.

There are two possible mechanisms that could produce a predominance of meetup posts over interesting new content: an explosion of meetup posts, or a dearth of interesting new content.

There are frequent complaints about how the meetup posts swamp everything else. I'm not sure whether anyone's come up with a convincing way to solve the problem and offered to implement it.

My impression is that there is less interesting stuff on LW than there used to be, partly because a small number of particularly high-quality contributors have moved elsewhere or run out of new things they want to say. Two obvious examples: Eliezer (more or less completely stopped; presumably he's working on some combination of saving the world and writing Harry Potter fanfiction) and Yvain (has no more time for blogging on account of being an overworked junior doctor; also blogging, more than ever but at slatestarcodex.com rather than LW).

Another explanation for the shortage of interesting new things: saying interesting new things is hard and more and more of the things people might want to say have already been said.

Personally I find usually more interesting material in the open threads than the discussion area or the main. I take this to mean I am at least somewhat outside of the core target audience of the site.

More meetup posts clutter Discussion (which is kinda bad) but mean that people are actually going to meetup groups (which is kinda awesome). Maybe frame a meetup post not as a trivial inconvenience, but evidence that rationalists are meeting in person and having cool discussions and working on their lives instead of hanging around in Less Wrong.

When there's a lot of interesting content here, sometimes people ask why we're all sticking around talking about talking about rationality instead of doing stuff out in the world.

If you want to have absolutely no exposure to the iternet, this should be easy to accomplish by sabotaging the tools your computer uses to access the internet. If you're on Ubuntu, you can do this easily by going into /sbin and removing dhclient, and possibly if and iw. To get those back you'd need a liveCD, and to get a liveCD you'd need an internet connection.

I used that solution for a couple months and it worked well. But I often do have legitimate uses for the internet. So you could use something like LeechBlock to block unproductive websites but retain internet access. Unfortunately, LeechBlock and similar solutions are easy to circumvent.

So I built a system to flexibly manage internet access restrictions in a way that is very difficult to circumvent. The code is here, but it's hard to use without a tutorial, and I haven't written a tutorial yet - I'm planning to, but it might take me another month or two. Essentially, you have two user accounts on your computer. The one is a "controller" administrator account, while the other is a "requester" non-administrator account. Most of the time, you are in the requester account, and you do not have access to the controller account; the controller account's password is randomized and hidden from you by the system. You can issue requests to the controller account; an example of a request is "give me access to the controller account". These requests take some time to be enacted, which prevents precommitment-breaking. The controller account restricts the requester account's internet use by filtering packets and blocking certain domains. Again, this code will be hard to use until I write a tutorial/readme, which I'll probably do in a month or two.

Seconded!

Currently, my plan is to not get internet at home, and to rely on public places such as libraries/Starbux/etc whenever necessary.

I don't currently have a Smartphone, but am pretty convinced that there are way too many advantages to having an iPhone as a blind introvert to avoid one forever (Android accessibility is too weak to rely upon at present). I am worried about how to make this work without having the constant temptation of 24/7 internet access hanging over my head (I don't really know how any of the data plans work / what extremely useful apps require an internet connection / etc).

(I also don't know if any of my neighbors would have unsecured wi-fi, or if the signal would be strong enough to access from home. At my parents' house, the wi-fi from across the street is strong enough and unsecure enough that my laptop connects automatically if nothing else is available.)

Most teaching jobs around here involve significant use of internet capable machines for grading, communication with other teachers and administration, and increasingly communication with students. Mathematics is probably more resistant to online teaching materials than most subjects though, and you may be able to find a school that eschews such things.

Can you unpack this goal a little for me? Is your desire to constrain your future self from some activities, or something more subtle? Is this an exploration of a possiblity to see what effect it'll have, or a plan to solve a specific problem that you've identified?

Your last few sentences makes me think this is more like performance art than any rational goal-driven decision. If you're planning to arrange your life around this, I suspect you simply can't live in an urban setting. Teaching math isn't safe, you will be surrounded by people who don't share your phobia. Farmhand may or may not be safe.

I've used Internet Lock effectively in the past. Presumably there's some way around it but it sounds like you're like me and don't know enough to find out what that way is.

Currently I do use internet, but with severe filtering restrictions using both K9 and Microsoft Family Safety. So for example, I couldn't follow the link you provided to explain your goals, because K9 blocked it. My wife has the password to both programs, which she makes sure I don't find out. She also carefully monitors what I do online (at my request - plus I told her what types of things to call me out on) using SpectorPro. So yes, that means she'll see what I'm writing now - hi dear! Obviously this wouldn't work without a good partner.

I don't have a smartphone, and neither does my wife. I'm a student, so perhaps that doesn't count, but my wife's a database / software consultant, and she gets along just fine without one. Again, that's not getting rid of the internet, just the smartphone.

I know several people who don't have internet access in their homes, and several who don't even have computers. They work in positions where they don't need to take computer-related work home with them, so any computer / internet use they have is at work. By the way, that's the most effective way to do it - just ditch the computer entirely if at all possible. If it wasn't for the fact that I need it for studying I'd do it myself.

I want to use computers without being exposed to the internet.

Why is this a problem? Drip some epoxy into your physical Ethernet port, break off the Wi-Fi antenna, delete the network drivers from your system...

How about using two computers?

Buy the cheapest one you can find for the internet connection, and put it in an inconvenient position, for example where you have to stand while using it. After downloading everything you had on the list, always shut it down, to create a trivial inconvenience for starting it again.

I suggest substituting "knitting unwanted sweaters for penguins" for "raising money for rare diseases in cute puppies" because the sweater thing actually happened, research into rare diseases of cute puppies might pay off in understanding other diseases, and at least for me "rare diseases in cute puppies" has a nasty pattern match to sneering at rare diseases in people, cuteness, and puppies.

Hmm... There are people wastefully knitting sweaters for penguins, and there are penguin chicks freezing to death every time it rains. Would it be possible to get those people to knit wool sweaters for the penguin chicks?

This is absolutely awesome!

There are some reasons to believe that being happy makes you more productive, rather (just?) than the other way round.

I believe this strongly. Coincidentally, today I was reflecting on my past life-optimization attempts, and seems like the most frequent reason for failure was that at the beginning the idea of the new change made me happy, but after some time I stopped being happy, and then it became difficult to overcome obstacles and I gave up. So I decided that when I try something new in the future, an important task will be to keep myself happy about the project. Even if it means something stupid, like dancing a few minutes before I start the task, or something similar.

Holding a pencil in your teeth could achieve the same thing, just more simply.

(I am not sure what will be the long-term consequences for your teeth. If you keep your mouth partially open for long periods of time, it may change the chemical environment. Maybe try a short pencil or something, so you can keep your mouth closed. And maybe use some pencil-shaped thing without graphite.)

There is also some reason to believe that smiling stops making you happy if you force a smile too often.

Bus drivers are expected to smile at costumers. Some days that doesn't come without effort. Bus drivers use two strategies to solve that: force a smile and think about something that makes them smile. On days when a driver used mostly the first strategy their mood tended to get worse, while when they used the second it got brighter.

These are interesting questions. I think the keyword you want for "hash collisions" is interference. Here's a more helpful overview from an education perspective: Learning Vocabulary in Lexical Sets: Dangers and Guidelines (2000). It mostly talks about semantic interference, but it mentions some other work on similar-sounding and similar-looking words.

For instance, there seemed to be a lot of "hash collisions": vocabulary words that I kept confusing with one another. Some of these were clearly phonetic: hai (shark) and kai (probably).

That problem is called memory interference. I think reading Wozniaks 20 rules, gives you a good elementary understanding of concepts like that.

In general there doesn't seem to be a good way to predict memory interference in advance.

When faced with apparent interference I usually make a card specifically for the interference:

Front: (kai / hai) -> shark
Back: hai

Front: (kai / hai) -> probably
Back: kai

You may find "linguistic cohort"a useful search phrase.

When I studied linguistics back in the 80s it was a popular way of thinking about lexical retrieval. E.g., a cohort model might explain collisions between "kertautua" and "kuvastaa" by observing that they share an initial-sound, final-sound, and (I think?) number of syllables, all of which are lexical search keys. (Put another way: it's easy to list words that start with "k", words that end with "a", and three-syllable words.)

That said, I remember thinknig at the time that it was kind of vacuous. (After all, it's also easy to list words with "v" in the middle somewhere.)

I find that making up mnemonics works well to combat interference. They don't have to be good mnemonics for this to work.

Example: I noticed I kept mixing up the Spanish words aquí (here) and allí (there). I then made up the mnemonic that aquí has a "k" sound so it's close, and allí contains l's so it's long away. A few days later, I encounter the word "allí". My thinking then goes "That's either here or there, I keep confusing those" -> "oh yeah, I made up a mnemonic" -> "allí means there".

I wonder how well this method would work for others.

I tend to think of this in terms of compression: you can use various compression schemes to store english words in fewer bits, but that will make you store foreign words in more bits. For example, you could order letters by frequency and represent frequent letters with fewer bits. You can do the same with groups of letters (e.g. "thing" = "th" + "ing", both very frequent combinations in English), or take advantage of conditional probabilities ('t' much more likely to be followed by 'h' than 'n') to squeeze a few more bits of compression. Similarly, if a westerner wanted to describe the Chinese character 語 without any prior knowledge of Chinese, the description would be very long, but a Chinese speaker would describe it as "the key for speech, and a five above a mouth".

This is just another way of describing what you call phonetic space.

Simple issues of frequency makes learners see words as "closer" than native speakers do, another problem is when the "phonetic space" of one language has more(or different) dimensions than those of another; e.g. many people find it hard to learn words when the distinction between voiced and unvoiced "th" is important, or when the tone of a syllable also carries meaning (as in Chinese). The Chinese words for "mother", "insult" and "horse" all sound like exactly the same word, "ma", to non-Chinese speakers.

Try asking the librarians what they can do for you, even if you don't bring a specific project to ask about.

The librarians at the company I work for will produce reports on topics you ask them about by compiling results from data bases. It is actually quite useful and would take a lot of learning for the non-librarian to produce.

I have used libraries all my life, but I have never used a librarian, except for the fact of their running the libraries. Not even before the Internet. I have never quite understood what one would consult a librarian for, especially now that we have the Internet and Google.

I would say the big one to start is Family Traditions, and the like. Ideas:

• A weekly or bi-weekly date night where you go do something different (no dinner-and-a-movie.)

• If you don't usually have a "Family Dinner", make one day of the week a "Family Dinner" night.

• Weekly or monthly get-together where you can hash out plans, see what's been problematic, hopefully correct things before they lead to arguments, etc

• The yearly traditions such as: having a jar where you write down all the awesome things that happened on slips of paper, and read the paper on New Years, various holiday traditions, or yearly vacations, or whatnot

Your future spouse can answer this better than we can.

If having children is in the plan, I will comment that having kids has been much more Schellingy than getting married was, and any life-changes I didn't have solidly cemented before having kids damned sure weren't going to be made after having them.

One thing I'm glad I did was make a habit of trying to write fiction a few times a week before the kids came along - basically, selfishly carve out some me-time - because now I'm still able to maintain this habit with two babies.

Let me just state some obvious ones:

• Exercise
• Saving money
• Eating well
• Anki
• Anything in the longevity guide
• Practicing a new skill (eg: musical instrument, cooking, a sport or hobby)
• Learn how to make bulleted lists in this system, why isn't this working?
• Overcoming an annoying habit like biting nails
• Meditating regularly

Start a a good feelings journal or a relationship journal. Being positive and specific boosts your mood and satisfaction with the relationship.

A commitment to being healthy and happy could be a good idea. The information from the Blue Zones could provide lots of useful ideas.

A commitment to love could also be a good idea. Love 2.0 book has scientific research in this field.

On a simpler note, you could commit to a long walk in nature with your wife every month or every fortnight. Find a nice trail and keep returning there for a nice slow walk. You could use this time to unwind or to calmly discuss what you could do about things.

It is hard to make suggestions not knowing the current state of your life.

If you currently smoke, stop smoking, the general disruption in routine around the wedding should make it easier. Reflect on how you want your relationship with your partner to be over the long term, maybe arrange to discuss these things with them at regular intervals.

If you are anything like the majority of married men, you will be told what to change about yourself, in what direction and by how much. [Yes, this is tongue in cheek]

Unless you post an example fault tree analysis with this software (say, as an image), all this PUA/Anti-PUA/Meta-PUA/Game/Whatever conversation is highly unlikely to be productive.

Edit: I want to make it clear that I'm excited with what you could come up with, and how you could formalize yours and existing/others theories on relationships. You could definitely bring conversations on relationships to a higher level.

EDIT: A friend just shared an interesting Wikipedia page with me. I can already see that those rules require several caveats.

I am sure a proper analysis of the impact of relationship problems on the life of the average person in terms of happiness, well-being or some other similar quantity will put this near or at the top of the list in the Western world.

Though seeing as exercising and eating properly are similar in magnitude - I assume - but people are still not doing it gives me little confidence.

If you focus your attention on trying to prevent all kinds of error to happen, you are likely going to act needy and romance won't work well. A highly optimized process might get a pickup guy laid but it doesn't produce a real connection.

Good romance is about enjoying the time you spent together instead of optimizing all the actions that you take while you are together to achieve some future goal.

While dancing Salsa or Bachata I can produce pretty strong intimacy fast, by being in the moment. If I however dance really intimately with a woman whom I just meet I often get inside my head and think whether what I'm doing is alright and about the consequences of my actions. That in turn messes up the whole interaction because I'm not acting based what I'm feeling in the moment anymore and that's going to feel strange to the woman.

Being vulnerable is also important for romance and drawing fault trees doesn't help you to get into a state when you are vulnerable and can allow yourself to be touched on a emotional level by the other person.

That sounds like an interesting project!
Probably doomed to fail, but this doesn't mean it's not worth beginning...
First step first: do you know how to do FTA? Or do you know a good source for learning FTA?

I believe it's called PUA.

Totally illegal. Damn useful though.

A (perhaps obvious) tactic that has worked for me:

Clean one thing per day - Dust an end table, wipe off the TV screen, vaccuum the hallway. Tasks that take 30 seconds to 5 minutes to complete help curb the temptation to procrastinate. Plus, cleaning can be infectous—dusting one end table can turn into two; vacuuming a hallway can lead to vacuuming a whole floor of your home, etc. (Note: I've found the " Just One Thing A Day Method" to be helpful in cleaning my house, changing my diet to be more healthy, getting rid of clutter over time, adding productive habits at work, etc.)

The effect I've observed is that my house stays clean—my roommate even says I'm "too clean"—but I feel as if I'm devoting very little time to "house cleaning".

One thing worth considering in your search is how different peoples' definition of "clean" is. Their is a wide spectrum in preferences, and I'd imagine that matters a great deal based on what you are after.

Organizing is investment cleaning. It takes a lot more time in the beginning (it will even look WORSE mid-project), but once you have a place for everything it is SO much quicker and easier to put everything in its place. If your area isn't organized, then you have to think about each think you pick up or clean. Where does this go? Where should I put it? Once you've organized, cleaning is a simple process of putting things back where they belong.

Some heuristics: Things you use frequently should be easy to get to, and easy to put away. For example put your most frequent coat on a hook, not hanger. You want to have shelf space and or a canvas box that is currently empty, to use for future miscellaneous items. Don't be hesitant to just get rid of things.

Re: Picking Up- The number one most important thing to take care of is trash/garbage. Pick it up, put it in a bag, take it out. Do not let it accumulate. This leads to smells and contributes most to a feeling of "grossness". Kitty litter also falls under this category. Number two thing to pick up is clothes. They go in a hamper. For people on this site, number three is probably books. Clothes and books both have the quality of being large, often strewn about, and easy to pick up.

This is a point to be made more generally for personal hygiene, cooking, actually anything that we all have to do regularly but isn't regularly taught in books and schools.

I think this is an excellent project, so excellent that I have to ask, why are we not (if indeed we are not) already doing this, all the time?

Weight-watcher groups are watching their weight all the time, not just meeting to talk about it. People meeting to help each other learn a foreign language are learning that language the rest of the time, at least, for as many hours a day as they find useful. University students make studying a full-time job (the ones that are serious). Rationality is supposed to be applicable to everything; every moment is an opportunity for practice.

Bad idea if you just go "live rationally", imo. I predict it'd end up either as mostly useless cargo-cult behavior by a sufficiently incompetent-and-unaware-of-it participant, going crazy and frustrated trying to apply not yet processed for daily human consumption raw heuristics and biases research to everyday living 24/7, or doing the general wise living thing that smart people with life experience often already do to the best of their ability but which you can't really impart in an instruction manual very well without having the "smart" and "life experience" parts covered.

Might be salvageable if you narrowed it down a bit. Live rationally to what end? Not having a clear idea of what my goals are is the first problem that comes to my mind when looking at this. I don't see why "my goals are doing exactly what I already do day in, day out, so I've already been living rationally all this time, thank you very much" would necessarily be incoherent for example. So maybe go for success for society-wide measuring sticks, like impressive performace in standardised education and good income? A lot of people are doing that, but I'm not seeing terribly much sentiment here for people trying to maximize their earning potential and professional placement as the end goal in life, though some do consider it instumentally.

So maybe say the goal is to live the good life. Only it seems that the good life consists of goals that are often not quite accessible to the conscious mind and methods to search pursue them that can be quite elaborate and often need to be improvised on the spot.

Not to be all bleak and obscurantist though, there is the Wissner-Gross entropy thing, which is a quite interesting idea for an universal goal heuristic, something like "maneuver to maximize your decision space". Also pretty squarely in the not yet ready for human consumption, will drive you crazy if you try to naively apply it 24/7 bin. And if you could actually codify how well someone's satisfying a goal like that you'd probably be getting a PhD and a research job at Google, not running a forum challenge.

I think most Christians would say that Jabocs completely misunderstood Christianity.

I think that experiments like this which take ideas very seriously are good because they give us an additional perspective of what rationality happens to be.

I'm curious about the qualifications to embark on such an experiment, and what makes it different from what everyone who posts in the rationality diaries has already been doing. I mean, for all intents and purposes, I made an effort to live more LW Rationally after reading the sequences, but that's clearly not what we're aiming for, here. Also (as I whine about frequently), I'm "poor"/legally blind/living in bible-thumping rural America, but would prefer to improve locally rather than move to, say, the SF Bay area; does any of that disqualify me from volunteering for the experiment?

I do really like the sound of this, though, and I'm hoping something useful (or at minimum entertaining) comes of it.

My ad hominem argument of the day: the author is in the philosophy department... figures...

Meanwhile, I'd also pounce on the "Ontological Alternatives" chapter there to ask a slightly unrelated question: Regarding the "fourth option" there, has anyone ever tried to analyze a world ontology where, unlike here, particles can belong to multiple different worlds according to some kind of rule or per-particle basis? e.g. Instead of having a particle belong to World # 872 as an elementary property, which lets it only interact with other W-872 particles, it would have a set of "keys" where any other particle that also has at least one of those keys can be interacted with, while that other particle might have a slightly different keyset and thus be able to interact with a third particle "located" right next to the first one (insofar as position of two non-interacting particles is relevant to the second one in question)?

I realize I'm throwing ideas around while having no idea at all what I'm talking about, but at the same time from where I'm sitting it feels like all the "sides" of the QM interpretation debates always share a humongous bag of uncontested assumptions. Namely, assumptions about pesky details like "position" being a necessary, elemental and fundamental property of particles.

Danish: møbel (2), stol (1), lænestol (3)

Furniture is countable in Danish, so the word I wrote means "piece of furniture".

It's actually really weird that furniture is uncountable in English. Most other uncountable nouns make sense - you can't really count how many milks you have. I wonder how it came to be that something so tangible is uncountable in English?

Hebrew: רהיט s(2), כסא s(2), כורסה s(2 - closer to "armchair")

Russian: мебель (2), стул (1), кресло (2 - closer to "armchair")

Notes:

• Modern Hebrew was strongly affected by its artificial revival due to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda so it might violate "evolutionary" laws.

• The Hebrew word for "furniture" I wrote is singular i.e. corresponds to "a piece of furniture" in English. Plural is רהיטים which has 3 syllables.

• In both languages I don't know a word for "recliner" as opposed to "armchair". It is probably possible to use some 2 word combination like in Slovak.

German: Möbel (2) Stuhl (1) Liege (2)

Spanish: mobiliario (4), silla (2), silla reclinable (6)

Not sure I've got a good source for you, but if you use the Rayleigh criterion you get that you can just about make out earth-sized objects using visible light at 4 ly. You could use much higher energy photons (better resolution from lower wavelength), but this gives you other problems. Anything beyond visible light won't make it through the atmosphere (1 km is a BIG thing to put into space), and x and gamma rays are really hard to build optics for.

Any introduction to astronomy textbook will help you out. I used BOB.

Instead of having huge individual telescopes which run into issues {How do you keep the mirror clean? What shape do you make it? How do you deal with the atmosphere (Adaptive optics are hard enough for small telescopes)? Constructing a telescope this large in space would be fantastically difficult and expensive.}, you can do interferometry. The largest telescopes these days run into the tens of meters, see E-ELT.

How do you define "staying in the box." Whatever definition you use, the AI will likely find a way to get out of the box while satisfying your definition.

...and hope that AI doesn't get an idea that the safest way of staying in the box is to destroy the outside world. Or just kill all humans, because as long as humans exist, there is a decent chance someone will make a copy of the AI and try to run it on their own computer (i.e. outside of the original box).

If you don't get your answer here another good place might be the information security stackexchange.

You said that it would take "massively convincing evidence" to get you to change your position. Does this mean that you already have a massive amount of evidence for your position, or that you have an incredibly strong prior, or perhaps both?

I started with merely a reasonably strong prior (above 50%), and found some non-massive amount of evidence to reinforce it.

However, should I find evidence that contradicts my position, there will be a number of possible explanations. First is that the evidence is a true sign that my position is incorrect; second is that the evidence has been presented in such a way as to be more convincing than it really is; third is that the evidence has been faked, by a particularly aggressive militant atheist. (There may be further possibilities as well, but let us consider these three for the moment).

Now, this is a subject of great importance. One of the reasons why it is of great importance is the question of the afterlife (specifically, whether it exists or not). Since it is a subject of such great importance, it is of equal importance that I take caution when updating. Specifically, I must take particular care to avoid deliberate attempts at deception. In order to do this, I must first evaluate any evidence I recieve to see what the odds are that it could have been produced, or selected, in a deliberate effort to pull the wool over my eyes.

I know that aggressive militant athiests exist. I know that there are people out there, convinced that God does not exist, who will go to great effort - including subterfuge and deliberate deception - to convince others of this view. Such people have a clear motive for elaborate deceptions.

In order to pass the bar for being considered 'massively convincing' evidence, the evidence must pass the following test: it must be more likely that the evidence is a true sign that God does not exist, than it is that the evidence has been either faked or cherry-picked in order to support the atheist hypothesis.

You also said that " there are parts of the Bible that are not intended to be taken literally". What process do you use to determine which parts were intended to be taken literally, and which weren't ?

It is the same process as I use to determine whether a given piece of writing is fiction or non-fiction. I consider, given what little I know of history, and what I know of fiction, and what I know of human nature, and come to a decision on whether it is more probable that a given incident happened as described, or whether it is more likely that a given incident originated in someone's imagination.

Consider, for example, the book of Job. This is a clear example of something not intended to be taken literally.

To summarise; a righteous and holy man (Job) has vast amounts of wealth. The Devil proposes that he is only righteous and holy because this give him vast material wealth, and God permits the Devil to test this hypothesis. Job promptly loses his wealth, his children, his health. Three of his friends turn up and make long, wordy speeches about how Job must have sinned, in order to attract such disaster; Job himself maintains his innocence. Finally, God himself turns up and makes a long, wordy speech about his great power; Job more-or-less throws himself on God's mercy, and then God chastises Job's friends; Job ends up with more wealth than ever before.

There are several indications throughout the Book of Job that it is intended as a work of fiction. First of all, there are the long, wordy speeches; far longer and wordier than anyone would normally use when conversing among friends, but very appropriate to (say) a stage production in front of an audience. Secondly, there are many references to Jewish legends of the time (which have to be explained in footnotes in modern bibles). Thirdly, the means by which Job discovers his original loss of wealth - three servants arrive, each explaining how some disaster overtook some part of Job's property and only he survived to come and tell Job - is eminently suitable for a low-budget stage production (one merely needs three actors to arrive and say their lines). Fourthly, aside from a bit of narration at the start and finish, everything happens in one location, and it's a location easily reproducible on stage (outside, sitting in the dirt). Fifthly, despite the complexity of the speeches, the moral is very simple ('bad things can happen to good people').

So, for these reasons and others, I consider it more likely that Job was not meant to be taken literally than it is that the incidents described in Job happened as described. Despite that, the moral of Job - that bad things can happen to good people, and thus that people with bad luck are not necessarily evil - is important.

You also said that " there are parts of the Bible that are not intended to be taken literally". What process do you use to determine which parts were intended to be taken literally, and which weren't ?

Piping in a month later: originally, this is what the Talmud was for. It contains very precise and detailed debates on exactly what's literal, what's allegorical, and what's probably just metaphor for something that wasn't quite so miraculous when it really happened.

I think they are encouraged, but as with all links, they should always be posted along with a summary/description.

It is difficult to get good info on the English-speaking internet. I have been following the Russian-speaking Internet + I have personal contacts (I was born in the Crimea, and raised in Odessa). I am happy to answer questions.

edit: the outside view of this reminds me of the European middle ages. Much of European politics was dominated by the conflict between France (a unified autocratic state), and the Holy Roman Empire (a highly decentralized "superstate" but dominant in central Europe). France was often able to exploit the decentralization of the HRE, and the lack of effective political power of the Hapsburg emperor to get its way, even though a unified HRE would easily defeat it. In fact, one of the stated foreign policy goals of France was to keep the HRE divided, which was accomplished by siding with individual german princes against the Hapsburg emperor (and doing scandalous things like allying with the Ottoman empire, which was a muslim state).

The EU is a kind of modern, liberal HRE, and is having the same difficulties solving coordination problems.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26270866

is a decent starting point

http://live.aljazeera.com/Event/Ukraine_liveblog

AlJazeera is an excellent, sorely underrated news source.

CFR has two issue guides on the subject. As an aside, I find CFR in general to be a great source of relatively balanced foreign news analysis. My primary source of world news these days is their Daily News Brief which I get delivered in my inbox.

Why do you care? Sure, these events might kill us, but do you expect them to influence your decisions?

What do you mean by "deep"? In one comment you contrast it to propaganda, but in another you mention the possibility of slanted deep coverage. You asked for a chart of who's who. BBC gives one. Is this shallow? But don't you need to start shallow? Do you predict that Ilya will give a radically different one?

What is your assessment of what happened in Egypt?

The problem is confusing.

Are you saying that each pair of quadrilaterals intersect at a mutual vertex and nowhere else, and that each vertex is common to exactly two quadrilaterals?

I got it. Nice.

Well, I wasted a half hour of my morning, but I got all 30. Hardest for me was 19.

It always amazes me how much weight people give to the very lossy signal that is karma. Please do report (on Sundays) whether you think this is helping, and with which goals.

Honestly, 75% positive seems pretty good to me. In fact, it seems better than my (current) 96%. If I'm not posting at least some things that people don't like, I'm probably posting too little generally, and not taking enough risks.

In an attempt to remedy this, I will reduce my threshold for commenting or posting each week until I'm at 75% positive karma, and then re-evaluate whether I like that level.

I have looked at your recent comments and, though you have participated in some potentially mindkilling discussions, you also have some downvotes that are completely inexplicable on that account. For example this comment and this comment were both downvoted at least once. I suspect therefore that your karma drop is due to having a mass-downvoting "enemy" as some others have complained of recently. (Though a piece of counter-evidence is that not all your comments have been downvoted, which is the usual M.O.)

Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics discusses the kinds of open questions we'd need to answer in order to know whether or not there will be such a band.

Section 2.3. (and its subsections) of Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk also discusses three different types of FOOM that might be possible: hardware overhang, speed explosion, and an intelligence explosion. Your argument should probably address all three.

You should read Eliezer's post That Alien Message.

Soon, confirmation comes in from high-orbiting telescopes (they have those) that the astronomical miracles do not seem as synchronized from outside Earth. Only Earth's telescopes see one star changing every second (1005 milliseconds, actually).

Almost the entire combined brainpower of Earth turns to analysis.

[...]

Three of their days, all told, since they began speaking to us. Half a billion years, for us.

There's a post somewhere about two entities discussing how evolution is optimizing so quickly, compared to how things were before. One of them tries to argue that brains will be even faster while the other scoffs that brains making machines with hundreds of moving parts in as little as a thousand years is absurd.

Of course it's an allegory for the next jump also having a massive time scale difference, with things that used to take years taking only minutes.

Unfortunately I can't find the post and I can't remember what it's called.

Wouldn't the body liquids boil destroying all kinds of fine structures..?

So you get even more denaturation and membrane distortion (and possibly rupture)?

The real question is whether it is possible to formulate a predictive hypothesis which involves an intelligent creator which has lower Kolmogorov complexity than hypotheses without an intelligent creator. No religion has come close to formulating such a hypothesis. Of course it difficult (or even impossible) to prove there is no such hypothesis because of the uncomputability of Kolmogorov complexity.

Btw, there are models in which it makes sense to speak of "before the big bang", look up "eternal inflation".

I asked about this atheist/simulation thing on an open thread several months ago.

What I came up with is that the most natural cluster of theism includes as part of the definition that the "simulator" is ontologically basic, and did not evolve into existence.

With that definition in mind, I am an atheist who is not willing to make the claim that our material universe came before any sort of intelligence.

This sounds too much like an anthropic argument, which reduces to tautology. We see ourselves in the universe because the universe contains us.

I'm uncomfortable with mass-upvoting people's comments even if they are known to have been mass-downvoted; it might make them feel slightly better, but it's difficult to figure out how much to compensate them (especially if the target has a contentious history with the site, as private_messaging does), and it weakens karma as a signal of a post's reception just as much as mass downvotes do.

If you believe individual comments to have been downvoted below their worth, by all means upvote them by way of compensation. But I wouldn't make a policy of it if I were you; if their karma's been pushed down enough to affect their posting privileges, I might tentatively endorse it as a patch, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

I don't understand why people care so much about Karma, especially effects they know are coming from a small number (1?) of serial downvoters.