Open Thread, October 7 - October 12, 2013

I'm not super reference heavy but I myself use evernote quite a lot.

Whenever I find something that I probably want to reference in the future I clip it into evernote.

Evernote has the advantage that there a google plugin that searches through your evernote everytime you do a google search. Finding a reference again takes searching. Sometimes more sometimes less. If you want to reduce the time it takes you to refind information, evernote tags or simple hashtags help.

Back in Google Reader days Google Reader search was also quite central, because I often used to quote stuff that came into my RSS feed on some way.

If you want to go more high tech there are options like http://www.mendeley.com/ to manage references. Zotero and CiteULike are similar solutions that are specifically designed for references management.

I personally still use Evernote over single purpose reference management systems because I can simply dumb all information that I might need later into evernote.

Evernote happens to be a cloud service of a US company, so it not 100% secure for all types of information. If I could get a similar service that's hosted safely I would switch, but at the moment convenience wins over data privacy for myself for most data.

There also information that so important that I want to have it available in brain memory. That information goes into Anki.

I'm writing a literature review at the moment, and use Evernote to organize the references. I tag them with year, subject, type, language. I give each reference a number. I abbreviate the conclusions of the references in the notes that contain the original articles as pdf files, and will finally use those snippets to construct the review article.

A dirty great text file is awesome: http://xkcd.com/208/

Yes, seriously.

Referrals are the best source for finding someone involved in negotiation at a specific company. I believe that Google has HR negotiate salaries, so if you know any Googlers, asking them to introduce you to someone in HR will probably work.

If you haven't done so already, you can get ~80% of the value here just by practicing with a random friend playing the role of hiring manager. As you mentioned, most of the value is in ingraining the behaviors through practice, not in the extra knowledge you get. So you don't necessarily need a specialist for this.

If you are interested in Effective Altruism (donate 10% or more of your income or work at an EA organization) then I would be happy to help. I have successfully negotiated 80%+ raises before, and taught 7 people to negotiate with average results of 30% or more raises. About half of the teaching was role-played practice. Feel free to email me at satvik.beri@gmail.com .

I believe Ramit Sethi is the general recommendation here.

Note that the comparison (more to do with X than Y) isn't very helpful for cases where X and Y are not exclusive, and/or related. For this particular topic, the quality and quantity of work in many fields has a direct effect on your ability to negotiate for salary (for three reasons: your actual ability to positively impact the business, your confidence in asking for what you're worth, and your (prospective) employer's comfort level in treating you differently from your nominal peers).

Also, 5 minutes of salary negotiation is bull crap. There is no excuse not to spend dozen hours of research and have multiple 30 minute conversations every year or two. Of course, you should put the same level of thought and effort into other areas of job-satisfaction (commute, hours, duties, etc.) as well.

You might be interested in this article.

Do you know why the age of consent for sex is 18?

The age of consent differs over the world. Even within the US. Kansas has one of 16 while it's 18 in Florida.

According to Wikipedia Spain even has an age of consent of 13 (with some exceptions) and the government recently announced that it wants to raise it to 15.

I don't think my morals on sexuality would change much by living in Spain.

I went to an early college program — a residential four-year college where most students entered at age 15 or 16, after two years of high school. This was in a state where the legal age of consent was (and is) 16. As a consequence, many sexual relationships among first-year students were illegal. However, they were also very common.

The culture at this institution was such that students were treated as "college students who happen to be two years younger", not as "gifted young teenagers who happen to be doing college-level academics". As such, the age-of-consent law was basically regarded as an inappropriate technicality. Students were cautioned about it, but along the lines of "Technically, if someone really wanted to hurt you, they could charge you with this ..."

So far as I know, the only time while I was there that anyone was even seriously threatened with legal charges over an "underage" relationship was one case where a freshman boy (age 15) cheated on his girlfriend with another guy (age 17). The girlfriend initially wanted to report this as "child abuse" but changed her mind before doing so.

In Italy the age of consent is 14, it can go down to 13 if the partner is at max 15 years old, but it raises to 16 if the partner is a temporary or permanent authoritative figure, like a coach or a teacher.

18 is the limit at which it is allowed to publicly show or sell pictures/movies about that person naked or performing sexual acts.

I frankly feel that this is one of the very few cases where Italian laws get the facts right: thirteens would still (try to) have sex wether or not it was allowed.
I remember that I believed too that the age of consent was 18, and felt fine with it, so it was a little shock to discover that the limit was much lower. I later however got various data about how sexual expression/desire/maturity starts around that age (mine too, FWIW), so I reconsidered that this was indeed a case of a law just making common sense: you don't throw in jail a teenager just because of his/her natural impulses.

I'm going to come at this from descriptive ethics, rather than a prescriptive ethics, because I find that more interesting for this particular case.

The popularly termed "age creepiness rule" (don't date under age/2+7) appears to be a weirdly accurate reflection of what most OKCupid men proclaim is reasonable (see: male chart, youngest allowable match) and this is despite the human male inclination towards choosing younger mates (as okcupid shows, actual messaging rates differ from declared values)

Let's just suppose that outwardly stated preferences on OKCupid mimic (at the very least) the moral intuitions of Western men, and that the "age creepiness equation" is not well known enough to actually alter anything.

What would we predict about our laws, given age/2+7?

14=14/2+7

Making 14 the age at which people can start exploring sex without violating the equation.

18=22/2+7

Making 22 the age at which it is inappropriate to have sex with anyone under 18.

Another equation conforming pair which seems to correspond to legally important ages: 16 & 18.

Does this information hold any predictive value for how nations tend to make laws? Does the equation change based on cultural variables? Do you think that the equation reflects anything important about human maturity levels? Does it reflect anything about which behavior would be adaptive ancestrally? Does the equation makes sense from a proscriptive ethics perspective?

My answer to these is generally "yes" with increasing uncertainty and qualifying for each successive question.

Probabilistically your question makes sense. It doesn't make much sense if I think about my personal experience. I don't think my ethics are determined by the law and I don't give much thought to it when thinking about right and wrong. Then again, I know myself imperfectly. My mom was generally obeying the law and my dad was breaking it. I learned from both of them.

In Finland, the age of consent is 16. I disagree with it, but don't really care to elaborate how. I find it really hard to be judgemental about sex.

While I agree that you have to be careful about olive oil you buy in a supermarket, I am somewhat wary about the UC Davis results. My wariness is a function of two sentences. One is on the front page of http://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/ -- it says "Enhancing the quality and economic viability of California table olives and olive oil" (emphasis mine). The second one is in the report and it says "We are grateful to Corto Olive, California Olive Ranch, and the California Olive Oil Council for their financial support of this research."

Also, an observation. EVOO ages. If you really want the freshest tastiest yummiest EVOO you need to buy it around December, a month or two after the harvest (the bottle should have the harvest date on it). If you take the same EVOO and try it after a year has passed, it will be different, certainly by taste. Note that it's still "true" EVOO -- no heating or adulteration or anything. It's just that time has passed.

To try real fresh EVOO buy a bottle of what's called Olio Nuovo and make sure it's not more than a couple of months after the harvest.

I'm pretty sure I've saved time on net by looking through http://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/top?t=all

I think we need some sort of wiki page to list high-value practical advice, where people could e.g. look under "health" and they'd be directed to Shangri-La for weight-loss, or a list of what supplements they should take for general health, with direct Amazon links, or melatonin, red light, red glasses, sleep masks, etc. for sleeping better, and so on. (I am not going to create such a page.)

"open secret"

The term you are looking for is "open secret".

Curious... what is the term for that in Italian?

There was a lively "spray cold water into your left ear for debiasing purposes" discussion.

Why haven't we done an systematic investigation of drugs as means towards debiasing?

I have focussed my attention more on enhancing cognitive function more generally, which has some benefits with respect to debiasing but is far from explicitly targetted. There are some specific behavioural and psychological biases that I can target pharmaceutically but not all of them, not without combining drugs with training. Of course there is much that can be done to enhance the executive function, motivation and relaxed self awareness that makes training oneself out of biases much more viable.

Ritalin is pretty helpful for me (when I can get it) against akrasia. Dunno about bias.

By systematic investigation do you mean a literature review? I hope so. Does such literature even exist, have you done any searches?

I have to take SSRIs to stay sane, but they blunt my emotions (which is usual) and kill my motivation. This has to affect my biases in some way. Then again depression would make me ridiculously biased. Nicotine and caffeine seem to make me overconfident, but help me to get things done.

1mg is hitting yourself over the head with a sledgehammer. Try 200mcg or 300mcg first!

I was taking melatonin for a while, but I kept having these weird/disturbing dreams whenever I took it, so I stopped. Are melatonin induced nightmares common?

I've been taking melatonin for a while. I haven't noticed any obvious improvement, but when I temporarily ran out of it and forgot to buy more for a few days, it felt like I slept worse. Might've been just a placebo effect, but then the pills are cheap and taking them feels like a nice evening ritual to do before going to bed, so I don't mind continuing it.

I've been picking up bottles of 120 3mg pills off eBay for about £7 including P&P. FYI, in six month's time when you can't do without it.

Were the pills slow release or normal? The difference in time to fall asleep could be significant.

I've taken melatonin for a few months, and at the start I thought it did make me sleep better; but then I ran out of tablets one day and I didn't notice my sleep getting worse, so I stopped again.

Counterpoint: They got more press that way, and only one small set of actors had to coordinate, and the answer is obvious.

Done.

the Christian origins

As opposed to, say, its Jewish origins in the Ethical Culture movement, or its academic philosophical origins in the Scottish Enlightenment?

(I think it's usually an error to talk about "the origins" of a current memeplex — they usually develop from several origins.)

What happens when you tell it that you forgot your password. Many system respond by sending you an email with allows you to set a new password.

This is unlikely (p<0.05) to help in this case, but sometimes client-side validation is stricter than server-side. I recently had to disable the max-length on a text entry box so that I could enter the reference number I'd been given (but I checked and there isn't a max-length on the old password box here); another time I had to disable javascript so that I could use an email address with a + that had been accepted before.

Folks, this is what "things you can't say" looks like. This is what a real social taboo looks like.

Notice how different the community response is to this, versus to some of the things that are claimed by their proponents to be "things you can't say" but which are actually merely explicit statements of common beliefs in the cultural mainstream.

When someone triggers a social taboo, the response isn't so much "I will argue against this person!" — not even in the "someone is wrong on the Internet!" fashion. That's just disagreement (sometimes ideological or partisan disagreement), not taboo.

When someone triggers a social taboo, the response is more to try to stifle or exclude it quickly. This sometimes ends in trying to pretend that it never happened.

(I am not asserting that the taboo response is right or wrong on this subject. I am pointing out that it is different.)

I wrote one of the comments you quote, and I also downvoted your article. Originally I felt I shouldn't upvote it, because it is a PR suicide, but I also shouldn't downvote it, because it is essentially correct. At that moment the article karma was zero, so maybe other people had similar thoughts. So instead of voting I wrote the comment. But then I saw that you also added the tags to the article, and that was the last straw. It felt like one article was just a one-time incident that could be left ignored, but creating tags felt like saying: this is one of the official topics of this website. Also the fact that you announced your intention to write more articles like this. At that moment it wasn't a vote about one specific article, but about whether I want this topic to be regularly discussed on LW. Which I don't.

I completely agree with fubarobfusco that this is what a real social taboo looks like. Quoting Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say":

When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.

Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

(...) I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. (...) The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky. [By this I mean you'd have to become a professional controversialist, not that Noam Chomsky's opinions = what you can't say.]

And this is it. Here is the difference, that for you it is very important to "rehabilitate the color yellow", but for most of the LW community, even if they would agree with your ideas, "being labelled as a yellowist would just be a distraction". The cost seems to be too high, in this case.

Please note that some of us use our real names here. Any bad reputation LW gets, has a risk to be connected with our identities; and for example I really don't volunteer to be connected with this specific cause. Let's say that for people like me, being non-anonymous on LW was perhaps a stupid decision; I could have easily done otherwise. But there are other people, who didn't have the choice: people who are employed or otherwise cooperate with MIRI and CFAR. [EDIT: Removed specific examples.] Their publicity is a tool to get their tasks done more efficiently. Again, I don't know what opinions these people may have on your topic, but as far as I know they didn't volunteer to be publicly associated with it. I want to protect them just as I want to protect myself.

You do have a point. But there are social consequences, and we do have to make a trade-off. I promise to downvote any future article about this topic. [EDIT: Removed some words of encouragement, because I updated towards the author merely trolling.]

If LW has any value for you even without discussing this specific topic, I'd recommend creating a new username and starting again, never linking to the old one. If no, then please leave.

Perhaps the net judgment of the LessWrong community is that it should be a forbidden topic. But if so, I think it's worth making a conscious note of that fact.

I would advise against making too specific list of the forbidden topics. But making a vague notion would just invite more questions. Not sure what kind of a "conscious note" we can have here. I guess we should just remember having this conversation, and move on.

Perhaps it belonged here in the open thread; I'm not experienced enough to judge that. There are also complaints that it was obvious and had no significant rationality-related issues, but I humbly invite people to consider whether these may be rationalizations -- when evaluated against the relevance of posts in this open thread.

Most off-topic discussions here are relatively harmless to LW image. You pretty much chose the most taboo subject available, and you didn't even try to justify that by making it relevant to rationality. You could have tested the waters by making comments first, and actually participating in discussions available, but no, you just had to start by pushing your political agenda.

Let's think civil liberties issues here. All the interesting civil liberties issues are about low-status cases -- if a group or some idea is popular with the majority, then no one is complaining and the "civil liberties" concept never comes up. Sometimes you might want to override your ordinary feelings about status to consider an oppressed group.

I feel bad for the oppressed group in question, but pushing a singular political cause is bottom priority. LW doesn't exist to fight for any specific group's civil rights, especially if it happens at the expense of its other goals.

So there are questions here of whether people want to personally change their status judgment based on those clarifications.

The status judgement is based on people in general, outsiders and potential newcomers. LW isn't an isolated bubble.

With regard to "tainting the site", there is an issue as to whether those clarifications can be conveyed in some way to avoid the fears of harm to the site based on low status. Does anyone want to clarify the risk of harm to the site?

You could talk about civil liberties in general, and why pushing rights for marginal groups is more important for rationalists than other things. If you can't do that, then all your other efforts are futile.

I think this probably should be a taboo topic because a) the number of people possibly helped by better legislation about this issue is fairly low b) Reputational hazard is extremely high c) it's not actually something that we can easily get RIGHT. I think the balance between protection of children and the happiness of pedophiles is not something this where we'll find the right balance on in a discussion here, which lowers the potential benefit even further. The stigmatization of people who have certain feelings they can't control is likely to be harsher than is good but I can't actually picture reasonable policy changes that will help the situation.

On the other hand I hate having taboo topics. I downvoted your original post because it was poorly argued and also something I think should probably not be a top-level post but I upvoted this comment for reasonability and because I think the issue is somewhat interesting.

Perhaps the net judgment of the LessWrong community is that it should be a forbidden topic. But if so, I think it's worth making a conscious note of that fact.

Strategic observation: It wasn't forbidden, it didn't need to be. It was something that could be (and was) mentioned occasionally. Now it is forbidden (from what I can tell, practically speaking). It needs to be, because frequent posting on the subject would be toxic. In particular frequent high personal and politically motivated advocacy would be a terrible influence, all things considered.

Maximising the impact you personally can have in influencing whatever socially environment you find for yourself requires tact and strategic thinking. Speaking loudly from a soap box doesn't work unless you are advocating for a group that already has sympathy or status.

Without commenting directly on your topic, I'd like to congratulate you on remaining thoughtful and civil in spite of censure, and not - so far - escalating your interest in discussing this on LW to the point of spam.

Let's think civil liberties issues here. All the interesting civil liberties issues are about low-status cases -- if a group or some idea is popular with the majority, then no one is complaining and the "civil liberties" concept never comes up. Sometimes you might want to override your ordinary feelings about status to consider an oppressed group.

Athrelon's argument Against Social Justice Warrioring seems relevant.

I can't imagine a post that starts out with "Note: If you think the assertion is obvious, then this post may well not interest you." to be a good post on Lesswrong.

Still at it. Well.

I have ruled out that case by calling the topic "celibate pedophilia"

You have done nothing of the sort. You have merely drawn a line around the class (a class of unknown size) of those who have such urges but have never acted on them. But is this concept a natural kind? Does it carve reality at a joint? Does this line on the map correspond to any line in the territory? Is it an empirical cluster in thingspace?

I believe the answer is no. The reality appears to be that there are people who, alas, have urges of this sort, some of whom act on them and are caught, some who act on them and have not been caught, and an unknown number who have not acted. Is there anything to distinguish the latter class from the first two that is predictive of whether or not they will offend in future?

Would you hire as a shop assistant a professed non-practicing kleptomaniac? As an accountant, a professed non-practicing fraudster? For childcare, a professed "celibate pedophile"?

The rest is blatant concern trolling. "Ooh, is this a forbidden topic? Help, help, I'm being discriminated against! Shouldn't we have a rational discussion about this? Are we only thinking about status? Think of the civil liberties. Poor little me, all those downvotes, how could I possibly tell what they mean? Does anyone want to clarify this?"

Alicorn gives you far too much credit for "remaining thoughtful and civil". Yes, you are being polite and well-spoken, I'm sure your discourse goes down very well over after-dinner coffee and cigars with like-minded friends, but it's an empty shell. As C.S. Lewis might have said, it is hard work to make a reasoned argument, but effortless to act as though one has just been made.

I think it is important to remember that the current strong sentiments against pedophilia are somewhat anomalous. I wrote several comments touching the subject on Yvain's blog.

I in the past when discussing this with Athrelon proposed that in the 1970s it was not at all obvious Transsexuals would make the ingroup and that Pedophiles wouldn’t.

The ongoing anti-pedophile hysteria, which has now reached the point where adult men talking with children are considered suspect and pedophiles lie why they got into prison lest they be murdered or raped, clouds our view of the past. It can be hard to alieve that traditional society saw this as one sexual perversion among many and that for a short window in the 1970s many respectable people considered a legitimate orientation.

The “between consenting adults all is allowed in sex” coalition cementing deontological law hadn’t yet solidified at the start of the sexual revolution. The now mostly sidelined “free love” one was the key point for coordination.

It was only 1994 that NAMBLA was expelled from “the International Lesbian and Gay Association, having been the first US based organization to be a member.”

Dawkin’s recent gaffe ( http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/magazine/article3858647.ece ) on the subject is a window into how this recent but alien social reality. I call it a gaffe, because those are in the eye of the beholder (the media), if you don’t think it caused on net bad PR for him do a search or two online and then come back.

Of course today, here where we are calm and in Far Mode and have certain LWian norms, we can safely sketch out the basic harm-based explanation. While both Pedophiles and Transsexuals probably don’t chose their feelings and yes we clearly should treat pedophilia, the idea that we would accept children “consenting” to sex with adult men on an alternative earth instead of contributing money so some men are allowed to cut off their penis and have a vagina fashioned is clearly absurd.

I think the question isn’t absurd at all, once you notice just how post-hoc this reasoning is. After all the why would the people in the 1970s not understand the very simple harm based argument I’m sure conservatives made?

Now maybe Pedophiles will make the coalition some day. Perhaps in 20 years. But this doesn’t change they where thrown off the Prog bus and lost the sexual revolution they helped launch. And in line with the linked article, I’m pretty sure their inclusion or exclusion isn’t going to be decided based on any kind of “harm accounting” that is claimed by many intellectuals to guide modern moral change.

In an add on comment I make the basic harm based argument I'm referring to here explicit

“Children are greatly harmed by sex with adults in nearly all circumstances. Thus this should be taboo for their good.”

So I'm making the likely controversial case that this argument is the result of post-hoc reasoning that would not convince us in the alternative timeline I also tried to make alievable, not only believable, with my language.

I should also append this follow up comment to avoid this being understood as an on attack or insult to transexuals per se:

People asked for a plausible example despite being controversial, I gave one.

Now the debate is about pedophilia, sex with teenagers and transexuals. This would not be a problem if people directly used it either to attack or support the argument I advanced.

Some seem to want to have simplified it and are engaging the comment as if I just said “Pedophilia is not bad, transsexuals are bad.” This isn’t what I was saying, nor was it something I wasn’t saying. It isn’t what the argument is about. Indeed I for now refuse to comment on this in the hopes this thread can be salvaged. Or does everyone simply agree with the point I was making as plausible and only debates on this nearby topic remain?

...

Sure the meta arguments often change our opinion on object level political positions… but engaging just the political positions themselves without addressing the arguments for the meta is not a productive conversation for me.

This was in the context of me using it as an example of the the capricious nature of what is sometimes termed Moral Progress, the ongoing process of value drift in our civilization.

I recall making very similar arguments on pedophilia and generally being up voted. I think this is best explained by there being a stricter standard of avoiding taboo topics for main and open thread compared to the comment section.

I recall other controversial subjects such as the effectiveness of terrorism to stop Moore's law (was upvoted) and racial differences in intelligence (was downvoted) in main articles. And an upvoted article where lukeprog basically took any claim of the PUAs he found plausible and could find academic backing for and presented it divorced from the subculture, that was supposed to be the beginning of a series, but was probably seen as not desirable for the site and discontinued (despite it being upvoted).

I have made arguments about as controversial as the ones in your linked article in comments on pedophilia and have been generally upvoted for them. The same is true of my arguments in favor of there being a hereditary component to the measured racial differences in intelligence. And arguments over some PUA claims. Alas I haven't commented on terrorism.

I think there is a general norm for things you can't talk about:

"this is ok to discuss, however opening it as a topic in itself on main makes the site looks bad and may attract the wrong kinds of attention".

The lesson I think really is to bring these kinds of topics up when they are one relevant example among several. If one wants them discussed as a standalone topics, open threads seem best or discussion section topics at most (hey we need something there besides meetup threads anyway).

If you disagree with "anyone who even tries to hide anything MUST be doing something wrong.", then you disagree with it's logically equivalent contraposition 'If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.'. And indeed you do, you say there are people who've done nothing wrong but do have something to hide. There's no logical error, you just disagree with a premise.

I think the question is poorly formulated. If you say:

P: you have done something wrong

Q: you have a reason to hide something

P->Q: If you have done something wrong, then you have a reason to hide something

!Q->!P: If you do not have a reason to hide something, then you have not done something wrong

Which seems quite consistent to me, as it makes it possible to have a reason to hide something without having done something wrong. The negations of the original are throwing me, and I think the if-then phrase might be backwards as the causality should be doing something wrong causes you to have something to hide, rather than the reverse. My logic course was long enough ago that I can't pin it exactly.

Um, the statement "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" is wrong to start with.

EDIT: Deleted the mistaken part of the post -- was reading too fast and screwed up the formal logic counter-example. Mea culpa

This assumes that there are two categories of things: Right and wrong. In real life that's not the case. If someone tries to judge us their is information that makes him think very highly of us and information that positive but doesn't have such a big impact. If you can control that someone only get's to see the information that makes you look really awesome you achieved something by hiding the information that makes you look medicore.

Nothing you have done needs to be below some threshold that makes it wrong for you to have an advantage by hiding the worst things that you did. As the quality of the things you did naturally fluctuates there will always be worst things.

You could also have done something that a AI that analyses your habits likely pattern matches as suspicious. Given modern technology that means that you will less likely get a good rate when you want to get your mortgage.

Government can also give you trouble with extra inspections when you pattern match to be a dangerous person. It's not directly punishment but when you run a restaurant and you get more food safety inspections than your competitors because you pattern match to be a dangerous person it still hurts you.

If you fly the TSA will bug you if you score highly on some metric. An AI analyses all communication data and those people who look suspicious will get flagged for extra scrutiny.

In our society we also have a concept that it's okay to speak with friends in confidence. If you tell a friend that you protect a secret that he tells you, you have something to hide. I don't think anyone would argue that it's morally wrong to promise a friend that you will protect a secret he tells you.

If someone asks you whether you are feeling alright, you might not want to talk about a problem that you are facing with that person and hide the problem from them. That in no way implies that you think having the problem is "wrong" it just means that you don't think that you will profit from discussing the problem with them.

If you made a new invention and haven't yet patented it, you might want to hide that invention for some time till you are ready to bring the invention to market or patent it. Businesses also have various other forms of trade secrets that they hide. Most busineses don't want to give a competitor their customer list.

If you are in a negotiation having more information than the other party can give you an advantage. As a result you don't profit from sharing all information with them.

If you follow TDT you have to hide certain information, because otherwise someone could infer from the fact that you don't talk about an issue that you feel badly about the issue. You don't want that political dissidents, who share your views, can be distinguished by a government from yourself, because you don't want that the government has the power to go after every political dissident.

I think his problem is he assumes an AI has to closely resemble a human mind to be powerful enough to be dangerous.

Is there a transcript of the interview somewhere? The youtube auto-generated one mangles Chomsky's replies horribly.

Hm. I feel like "impossible to manipulate" just means that you can prove that it will never cooperate when the opponent will defect.

But yeah, if we equate "acting first" with acting in ignorance of the other person's move, then we get something interesting.

I think this is probably really hard to answer sensibly without some more information about you and your goals.

For people who spend a lot of time in the United States I often recommend learning enough Spanish to curse plausibly, make casual smalltalk, ask for directions, and order lunch in, because it's not rare to find communities here where doing so gets you marked as an insider, or at least a potential ally, with all the associated benefits of that marking.

I like learning languages (Esperanto, German, Chinese, Japanese), but consider it as more of a hobby than a useful skill, unless you're planning to move abroad, or have a job that involves a lot of travelling, or marry someone from there.

More useful than video games, reading fiction, surfing on reddit, playing chess.

Less useful (marketable) than programming, self-marketing, public speaking, fixing up your house, negotiating a salary, driving a car, fixing a car...

Probably about as useful as drawing, or doing advanced maths.

If you don't have a need for learning a specific language then I think that you should put your learning efforts elsewhere.

There are many areas where effort gets higher returns.

(Warning: much of this comment is wild speculation.)

Pros:

• Knowing many languages is fucking awesome.
• You'll be able to consume media in the original language. (Translations exist but Sturgeon's Law applies.)
• Like TheOtherDave says, in some places not knowing the local language may mark you as an outsider. And in some other places (basically anywhere other than Northern Europe and capitals), if you don't know the local or national language it may be much harder than you might think to get by, whether or not you mind being seen as an outsider.
• Learning an n-th language now may make it much easier to learn an (n + 1)-st language later on (IOW, learning languages may itself be a learnable skill), especially if the two are related or otherwise similar; this may be useful if you think there's a large chance you'd need to learn a new language in the future but don't know which one yet.
• Knowing several languages which carve up thingspace in different ways may prevent certain failure modes.

Cons:

• Learning a language takes up time that you could use for something else. (But then again, so does watching TV or reading Cracked.com.)
• Certain people (namely, those who resent being made to learn a language in school which they haven't ever since had any practical use for) will think of you as a geek and dislike you.

I am not particularly interested in the answer to this question but this community's answer:

I am curious what you mean by this. If someone/we find a more optimal solution, we should adopt it, no?

I was under the impression that vitamin D is absorbed much better if taken together with fats or oils. I would take it with food, not on an empty stomach.

Cautiously playing around with supplements I found melatonin to be effective in aiding sleep quality, though not with time to fall asleep. Any suggestions to that effect?

Have you tried taking melatonin sublingually? The rapid absorption leads to a faster onset of sleepiness, which might help (I get extremely sleepy about 10 minutes after sublingual administration). Sublingual melatonin tablets can be found on Amazon.

That's very interesting -- I noticed the exact opposite effect. Melatonin helps me fall asleep faster, but sleep quality doesn't appear to be much better. I did notice an improvement in sleep quality with ZMA (zinc+magnesium+vitamin B6), and the melatonin+ZMA combo works wonders for sleep.

I've not noticed a difference with generic Kroger brand and other brands of Vitamin D3. Seems to be about the same effect. 5,000IU and 10,000IU aren't noticeably different in my experience, but either are a marked improvement over no supplementation.

Here's Optimal Employment, where the working in Australia idea is discussed, and here's the Optimal Employment Open Thread.

Here are two options for cheap(er) theatre tickets in NYC:

• TKTS booth - half price tickets the day of the show
• Student rush/standing room policies - Same day tickets and lotteries with steeply reduced prices. (Age/enrollment restrictions may apply

Also, the Staten Island Ferry is free to ride, and gives you pretty views of the city from the water. Just be sure that when you land in Staten Island, you hurry through the terminal to reboard the boat immediately to go back. There's little to visit in Staten Island.

It's from a sermon in which Wesley advocates that Christian should "gain all you can", "save all you can", and "give all you can" — a teaching somewhat similar to efficient altruism. Wesley has slightly different priorities, though: he emphasizes providing for the local community first rather than distant humans.

The line you quote comes from the provisos he puts around "gain all you can" — in gist, don't earn money at the expense of your bodily or mental health or your neighbor's well-being.

Some context for the quote:

We are, Secondly, to gain all we can without hurting our mind [...]. We must preserve, at all events, the spirit of an healthful mind. [...] There are yet [other trades] which many pursue with perfect innocence, without hurting either their body or mind; And yet perhaps you cannot: Either they may entangle you in that company which would destroy your soul; and by repeated experiments it may appear that you cannot separate the one from the other; or there may be an idiosyncrasy, — a peculiarity in your constitution of soul, [...] by reason whereof that employment is deadly to you, which another may safely follow. So I am convinced, from many experiments, I could not study, to any degree of perfection, either mathematics, arithmetic, or algebra, without being a Deist, if not an Atheist: And yet others may study them all their lives without sustaining any inconvenience. None therefore can here determine for another; but every man must judge for himself, and abstain from whatever he in particular finds to be hurtful to his soul.

The key is the use of the word "experiments". Wesley is saying that he found that studying mathematics would "entangle [him] in that company which would destroy [his] soul" — that is, the company of deistic and atheistic mathematicians — and that he could not separate mathematical studies from association with those (to his view) corrupting influences.

I'm not quite sure what is surprising about this? The 19th century sees plenty of Churches take similar steps along the transition to secular humanist Progressivism, and the beliefs and ethics espoused by the latetter today show clear signs of Christian origins. See Conway Hall Ethical Society for an example.

The Conway Hall Ethical Society, formerly the South Place Ethical Society, based in London at Conway Hall, is thought to be the oldest surviving freethought organisation in the world, and is the only remaining ethical society in the United Kingdom. It now advocates secular humanism and is a member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union.

...

The Society was formed in 1793 by a group of nonconformists known as Philadelphians or Universalists. William Johnson Fox, who had studied theology under Dr Pye Smith, became minister in 1817. In 1824 the congregation built a chapel at South Place, in the district of central London known as Finsbury

Conway Hall is named after an American, Moncure Conway, who led the Society from 1864–1885 and 1892–1897, during which time it moved further away from Unitarianism. Conway spent the break in his tenure in the United States, writing a biography of Thomas Paine. In 1888 the name of the Society was changed from South Place Religious Society to South Place Ethical Society (SPES) under Stanton Coit's leadership.

I think this is most likely the one you're thinking of.

Josh,

1. My intuition is, that viewing pictures is more a tension relief and prevents the real offence, rather than stimulating the crime. I would prefer to have hard scientific data. However, without those data, I would bet money on my stated hypothesis, rather than the opposite.

2. You should cite more sources, preferred are the research paper, and among them, metaanalyses, as ChristianKI correctly says.

3. I am not from USA, but worked there for 2 years in the past. I remember hearing about people facing prison for the possession of children pornography, and was genuinely surprised and sorry for the offenders (although I am a standard heterosexual woman). We had a long discussion with my that day US boyfriend, why is the possession punished so severely. I was surprised by the unproven, but unquestioned assumption, that having pictures stimulates the owner to commit the actual crime. Of course, pictures of children molested or having sexual intercourse should not be taken, because children should not have sexual intercourse or be molested. However, some people define children pornography very broadly, even children taking a bath, running around naked in the garden etc. Some 35 years ago, my parents photographed me naked on the beaches of Yugoslavia and it was pretty normal at those times. I would not be happy, if they were selling those pictures to strangers for pornography. However, I believe, selling their own old pictures when the child becomes adult could become legal once - if it is proven that the pictures do not increase the crime.

Did you intend to talk exclusively about virtual child porn? If so, you might want to change the wording of your initial assertion, since "virtual child porn" is not what people think when they read "child porn".

If not, I don't think you've adequately supported your assertion. It may be the case that viewing child porn does not increase the probability of committing child abuse once you've conditionalized on relevant common causes. But it is the case that producing child porn (actual, not virtual) requires child sex abuse. Since increased availability would presumably be causally linked to increased production, ceteris paribus increased availability should be causally linked with increased abuse. Now it may be the case that there is some countervailing causal mechanism leading from increased availability to decreased abuse, but you haven't really provided adequate evidence for the existence of this mechanism, or that it fully compensates for the increased abuse associated with production even if it does exist.

Also, when you say that child porn with real children should be illegal, do you mean that just production should be illegal or that possession should be illegal as well?

And this:

In any case, one of the rationality principles does say that arguments should be evaluated on their own merits, not the attributes of the person making them.

This is not right. The attributes of the person making an argument are often valuable evidence regarding the validity of the argument, especially in an area where one is not an expert. For instance, I don't know much about the research about the relationship between child porn and child abuse. You haven't presented a comprehensive meta-analysis of this research, merely a selection. If I'm trying to evaluate whether your framing is representative of the actual state of the research or whether it is cherry-picked to favor a particular position, my beliefs about your personal attributes are very relevant.

As an aside: I'm really not comfortable with a single-issue poster whose single issue is pedophile rights, especially if this slides from advocacy for celibate pedophiles (which I don't consider objectionable) to advocacy for consumers of child porn (which I do consider objectionable). Consider participating in other discussions on this site as well, so that people don't get the impression that you're on here just to push this, shall we say "provocative" agenda. I feel somewhat bad about saying this because I dislike the idea of piling on to posters who voluntarily identify themselves as low status, and also I do think your commitment to celibacy and the avoidance of child porn in the face of your unfortunate desires is commendable (although I don't like your attachment to pedophilia as an identity). Still, I haven't downvoted you yet, but if every top-level comment or post you make ends up being about pedophilia, I might start doing so.

For those who want some interesting information about the background of child pornography industry Wikileaks made the decision to publish one letter that they got on the topic. Usually Wikileaks only publishes source documents but they made an expection because of the value of information to understand what going on with regards to filter the infernet from child pornography. http://wikileaks.org/wiki/An_insight_into_child_porn

One argument in favor of it is intuition. Looking at pictures of forbidden things might reasonably make it more likely you'd do those things. There is resistance in many quarters to applying this reasoning to the parallel situations of fictional violence in movies and to the degradation of women in pornography, in part because there is no convincing data.

If you care about the issue you are pushing, don't make assertions like that without linking to relevant meta studies.

I might appear to have a vested interest in the availability of such materials. I don't, personally, though the number of men who are given years in prison for looking at pictures does distress me deeply.

Motivated reasoning doesn't score you points on Lesswrong. In a case like that you would profit from keeping your language as academic as possible.

It might be okay to make a joke about suffering that those men who are imprisoned face but making jokes in contexts like this isn't easy so I wouldn't recommend you to try.

In any case, one of the rationality principles does say that arguments should be evaluated on their own merits, not the attributes of the person making them.

You yourself say that you are in the emotion of distress that indicates that you aren't thinking clearly about the issue and it helps people to draw conclusions about your argument.

A reasonable analogy might be sex education. Some conservatives oppose it because they think it will make kids (teens especially) think about sex and become sexually active. The data doesn't support that, of course, and the explanation is that kids are thinking about sex already. Pedophiles are also thinking about sex; the fact that the people they are attracted to are always inappropriate partners doesn't change this aspect of the situation.

If that analogy is correct there little we can do with regards to pedophiles besides locking them up. Cyberporn legislation would be a tool to do so.

Besides you fail to provide any reason why this analogy should hold. Shall we believe that being a pedophile is genetic and the enviroment to which a person is exposed has nothing to do with them becoming a pedophile?

I believe one major objection to all forms, including the virtual, is rarely formulated: people find it gross and disgusting.

The fact that you think it's rarely formulated says more about you than about the position against which you are arguing. There are plenty of people who do consider all forms of pornography to go against human dignity and to objective the objects that pornography shows.

Even if that doesn't bother someone, the alternative of virtual child pornography should be tried first.

That leaves the question of how to decide if a given image is virtual or isn't.

Non-consequentialists don't want to sacrifice the welfare of a few children to help the many.

That no sentence that you should write in a context like. It raises emotions that you don't want to get raised.

You also haven't identified what welfare you care about. Is it about the pleasure of consuming child pornography? If so, is it basically about providing a way for pedophiles to wirehead themselves? If that isn't the goal what is?

You also muddle your goal. You start by pretending that you just want a discussion about whether child porn availability increases child sex abuse and end by calling for legal changes.

PS: Lean to format your links correctly. Not knowing how to format links signals your outsider status.

He looked at how the number of child abuse case reports changed in the society. One thing he never found was an increase in sex crimes against children -- if anything, they went down.

Assertion: If cp possession is suddenly made legal, there will be less clues of abuse to follow because less legal searches can be made. The crimes might even increase, but less will be reported.

Downvoted for calling math 'hogwash' without pointing out a math error.

Taking his 8km/sec speed and 100km height as accurate, the energy to lift one kilogram that high on a ballistic arc (ignoring air resistance and the motion of the Earth's surface) is mgh = 1kg100km \ (1000m/km) * (10 m/s^2) =1e6 J. The energy to accelerate it to orbital speed is 0.5mv^2 = 0.5*1kg*(8000m/s)^2 = 32e6 J. First pass, then, his reasoning seems accurate. Am I oversimplifying? What is your calculation?

Reaching orbital speed takes much more fuel than reaching orbital height.

Hogwash.

Explain. The XKCD guy is usually quite competent at what he does. Are you sure that you are talking about the same thing as he is? If so, what precisely is his mistake?