people in this community are unusually prone to feeling that they're stupid if they do badly at something

I suspect this is a result of the tacit assumption that "if you're not smart enough, you don't belong at LW". If most members are anything like me, this combined with the fact that they're probably used to being "the smart one" makes it extremely intimidating to post anything, and extremely de-motivational if they make a mistake.

In the interests of spreading the idea that it's ok if other people are smarter than you, I'll say that I'm quite certainly one of the less intelligent members of this community.

I've noticed in many people (myself included) a definite tendency to overvalue intelligence relative to practice.

Practice and expertise tend to be domain-specific - Scott isn't any better at darts or chess after playing all that pool. Even learning things like metacognition tend not to apply outside of the specific domain you've learned it in. Intelligence is one of the only things that gives you a general problem solving/task completion ability.

It seems to me, based on purely anecdotal experience, that people in this community are unusually prone to feeling that they're stupid if they do badly at something.

This is certainly true of me, but I try to make sure that the positive feeling of having identified the mistakes and improved outweighs the negative feeling of having needed the improvement. Tsuyoku Naritai!

I don't mean to say that talent doesn't matter: things such as intelligence matter more than Adams gives them credit for

I think the relative contribution of intelligence vs. practice varies substantially depending on the nature of the particular task. A key problem is to identify tasks as intelligence-dominated (the smart guy always wins) vs. practice-dominated (the experienced guy always wins).

As a first observation about this problem, notice that clearly definable or objective tasks (chess, pool, basketball) tend to be practice-dominated, whereas more ambiguous tasks (leadership, writing, rationality) tend to be intelligence-dominated.

I like this anecdote.

I never valued intelligence relative to practice, thanks to an upbringing that focused pretty heavily on the importance of effort over talent. I'm more likely to feel behind, insufficiently knowledgeable to the point that I'm never going to catch up. I don't see why it's necessarily a cheerful observation that practice makes a big difference to performance. It just means that you'll never be able to match the person who started earlier.

Yes, I know that schools will never assign eight-ball for homework. But maybe there is some kid-friendly way to teach the same lesson.

Make them play some kind of simplified RPG until they realise the only achievement is how much time they put into doing mindless repetitive tasks.

I'm guilty of a sort of fixation on IQ (not actual scores or measurements of it). I have an unhealthy interest in food, drugs and exercises (physical and mental) that are purported to give some incremental improvement. I see this in quite a few folks here as well.

To actually accomplish something, more important than these incremental IQ differences are: effective high-level planning and strategy, practice, time actually spent trying, finding the right collaborators, etc.

I started playing around with some IQ-test-like games lately and was initially a little let down with how low my performance (percentile, not absolute) was on some tasks at first. I now believe that these tasks are quite specifically-trainable (after a few tries, I may improve suddenly, but after that I can, but choose not to, steadily increase my performance with work), and that the population actually includes quite a few well-practiced high-achievers. At least, I prefer to console myself with such thoughts.

But, seeing myself scored as not-so-smart in some ways, I started to wonder what difference it makes to earn a gold star that says you compute faster than others, if you don't actually do anything with it. Most people probably grow out of such rewards at a younger age than I did.

But I've noticed in many people (myself included) a definite tendency to overvalue intelligence relative to practice.

I'm not sure I agree with that. In what areas do you see overvalue of intelligence relative to practice and why do you think there really is overvalue in those areas?

I've noticed for example that people's abilities to make good comments on LW do not seem to improve much with practice and feedback from votes (beyond maybe the first few weeks or so). Does this view represent an overvalue of intelligence?

Here's something else I wrote a while ago: a script that gives all the comments and posts of a user on one page, so you can save them to a file or search more easily. You don't need Greasemonkey for this one, just visit http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/lesswrong_user.php

I put in a 1-hour cache to reduce server load, so you may not see the user's latest work.

May I suggest submitting the script to userscripts.org? It will make it easier for future LessWrong readers to find it, as well as detectable by Greasefire.

Nice! Thanks.

Edit: "shows only new/unread comments upon refresh" — how does it determine readness?

Thanks for coding this!

Currently, the script does not work in Chrome (which supports Greasemonkey out of the box).

Would you consider making display of author names and points a toggle and hidden by default, à la Anti-Kibitzer?

Sounds fantastic!

Err... but the link is broken.

He did give a permission to restore the posts (I didn't ask about comments), when I contacted him originally. There remains the issue of someone being technically able to restore these posts.

Do people think that a discussion forum on the moderation and deletion policies would be beneficial?

I would like to see a top-level post on moderation policy. But I would like for it to be written by someone with moderation authority. If there are special rules for discussing moderation, they can be spelled out in the post and commenters can abide by them.

As a newcomer here, I am completely mystified by the dark hints of a forbidden topic. Every hypothesis I can come up with as to why a topic might be forbidden founders when I try to reconcile with the fact that the people doing the forbidding are not stupid.

Self-censorship to protect our own mental health? Stupid. Secrecy as a counter-intelligence measure, to safeguard the fact that we possess some counter-measure capability? Stupid. Secrecy simply because being a member of a secret society is cool? Stupid, but perhaps not stupid enough to be ruled out. On the other hand, I am sure that I haven't thought of every possible explanation.

It strikes me as perfectly reasonable if certain topics are forbidden because discussion of such topics has historically been unproductive, has led to flame wars, etc. I have been wandering around the internet long enough to understand and even appreciate somewhat arbitrary, publicly announced moderation policies. But arbitrary and secret policies are a prescription for resentment and for time wasted discussing moderation policies.

Edit: typo correction - insert missing words

If there's just one topic that's banned, then no. If it's increased to 2 topics - and "No riddle theory" is one I hadn't heard before - then maybe. Moderation and deletion is very rare here.

I would like moderation or deletion to include sending an email to the affected person - but this relies on the user giving a good email address at registration.

Do people think that a discussion forum on the moderation and deletion policies would be beneficial?

Yes. I think that lack of policy 1) reflects poorly on the objectivity of moderators, even if in appearance only 2) diverts too much energy into nonproductive discussions.

A minute in Konkvistador's mind:

Again the very evil mind shattering secret, why do I keep running into you?

This is getting old, lots of people seem to know about it. And a few even know the evil soul wrecking idea.

The truth is out there, my monkey brains can't cope with the other's having a secret not willing to share, they may bash my skull in with a stone! I should just mass PM the guys who know about the secret in a nonconspicus way. They will drop hints, they are weak. Also traces of the relevant texts have to still be on-line.

That job advert seems to be the kind a rather small subset of organizations would put out.

That is just paranoid don't even think about that.

XXX asf ag agdlqog hh hpoq fha r wr rqw oipa wtrwz wrz wrhz. W211!!

Yay posting on Lesswrong feels like playing Call of Cthulhu!

....

These are supposed to be not only very smart, but very rational people, people you have a high opinion of, who seem to take the idea very seriously. They may be trying to manipulate you. There may be a non-trivial possibility of them being right.

....

I suddenly feel much less enthusiastic about life extension and cryonics.

I think such discussion wouldn't necessarily warrant its own top-level post, but I think it would fit well in a new Meta thread. I have been meaning to post such a thread for a while, since there are also a couple of meta topics I would like to discuss, but I haven't gotten around to it.

Do people think that a discussion forum on the moderation and deletion policies would be beneficial?

I don't. Possible downsides are flame wars among people who support different types of moderation policies (and there are bound to be some - self-styled rebels who pride themselves in challenging the status quo and going against groupthink are not rare on the net), and I don't see any possible upsides. Having a Benevolent Dictator For Life works quite well.

See this on Meatball Wiki, that has quite a few pages on organization of Online Communities.

Thanks. More reason to waste less time here.

Intelligence is your primary means of survival.

People who keep secrets are your enemies.

Keeping secrets is a waste of time.

I have been reading OB and LW from about a month of OB's founding, but this site has been slipping for over a year now. I don't even know what specifically is being discussed; not even being able to mention the subject matter of the banned post, and having secret rules, is outstandingly stupid. Maybe I'll come back again in a bit to see if the "moderators" have grown up.

It seems that I am not one in a million. Pity.

Wow. I thought I understood regression to the mean already, but the "correlation between X and Y-X" is so much simpler and clearer than any explanation I could give.

When I tried making sense of this topic in the context of the controversies over IQ heritability, the best reference I found was this old paper:

Brian Mackenzie, Fallacious use of regression effects in the I.Q. controversy, Australian Psychologist 15(3):369-384, 1980

Unfortunately, the paper failed to achieve any significant impact, probably because it was published in a low-key journal long before Google, and it's now languishing in complete obscurity. I considered contacting the author to ask if it could be put for open access online -- it would be definitely worth it -- but I was unable to find any contact information; it seems like he retired long ago.

There is also another paper with a pretty good exposition of this problem, which seems to be a minor classic, and is still cited occasionally:

Lita Furby, Interpreting regression toward the mean in developmental research, Developmental Psychology, 8(2):172-179, 1973

RPGs (and roguelikes) can involve a lot of optimization/powergaming; the problem is that powergaming could be called rational already. You could

• explicitly make optimization a part of game's storyline (as opposed to it being unnecessary (usually games want you to satisfice, not maximize) and in conflict with the story)
• create some situations where the obvious rules-of-thumb (gather strongest items, etc.) don't apply - make the player shut up and multiply
• create situations in which the real goal is not obvious (e. g. it seems like you should power up as always, but the best choice is to focus on something else)

Sorry if this isn't very fleshed-out, just a possible direction.

Here's an idea I've had for a while: Make it seem, at first, like a regular RPG, but here's the kicker -- the mystical, magic potions don't actually do anything that's indistinguishable from chance.

(For example, you might have some herb combination that "restores HP", but whenever you use it, you strangely lose HP that more than cancels what it gave you. If you think this would be too obvious, rot13: In the game Earthbound, bar vgrz lbh trg vf gur Pnfrl Wbarf ong, naq vgf fgngf fnl gung vg'f ernyyl cbjreshy, ohg vg pna gnxr lbh n ybat gvzr gb ernyvmr gung vg uvgf fb eneryl gb or hfryrff.)

Set it in an environment like 17th-century England where you have access to the chemicals and astronomical observations they did (but give them fake names to avoid tipping off users, e.g., metallia instead of mercury/quicksilver), and are in the presence of a lot of thinkers working off of astrological and alchemical theories. Some would suggest stupid experiments ("extract aurum from urine -- they're both yellow!") while others would have better ideas.

To advance, you have to figure out the laws governing these things (which would be isomorphic to real science) and put this knowledge to practical use. The insights that had to be made back then are far removed from the clean scientific laws we have now, so it would be tough.

It would take a lot of work to e.g. make it fun to discover how to use stars to navigate, but I'm sure it could be done.

Note also the Wiki page, with links to previous threads (I just discovered it, and I don't think I had noticed the previous threads. This one seems better!)

One interesting game topic could be building an AI. Make it look like a nice and cutesy adventure game, with possibly some little puzzles, but once you flip the switch, if you didn't get absolutely everything exactly right, the universe is tiled with paperclips/siny smiley faces/tiny copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky. That's more about SIAI propaganda than rationality though.

One interesting thing would be to exploit the conventions of video games but make actual winning require to see through those conventions. For example, have a score, and certain actions give you points, with nice shiny feedbacks and satisfying "shling!" sounds, but some actions are vitally important but not rewarded by any feedback.

For example (to keep in the "build an AI" example), say you can hire scientists, and the scientists' profile page lists plenty of impressive certifications (stats like "experiment design", "analysis", "public speaking", etc.), and some filler text about what they did their thesis and boring stuff like that (think: stats get big Icons, and are at the top, filler text looks like boring background filler text). And once you hired the scientists, you get various bonuses (money, prestige points, experiments), but the only of those factors that's of any importance at the end of the game is whether the scientist is "not stupid", and the only way to tell that is from various tell-tale signs for "stupid" in the "boring" filler texts - For example things like (also) having a degree in theology, or having published a paper on homeopathy ... stuff that would indeed be a bad sign for a scientist, but that nothing in the game ever tells you is bad.

So basically the idea would be that the rules of the game you're really playing wouldn't be the ones you would think at first glance, which is a pretty good metaphor for real life too.

It needs to be well-designed enough so that it's not "guessing the programmer's password", but that should be possible.

Making a game around experiment design would be interesting too - have some kind of physics / chemistry / biology system that obeys some rules (mostly about transformations, not some "real" physics with motion and collisions etc.), have game mechanics that allow you to do something like experimentation, and have a general context (the feedbacks you get, what other characters say, what you can buy) that points towards a slightly wrong understanding of reality. This is bouncing off Silas' ideas, things that people say are good for you may not really be so, etc.

Here again, you can exploit the conventions of video games to mislead the player. For example, red creatures like eating red things, blue creatures like eating blue things, etc. - but the rule doesn't always hold.

I'm not sure if transformice counts as a rationalist game, but appears to be a bunch of multiplayer coordination problems, and the results seem to support ciphergoth's conjecture on intelligence levels.

Dramatic in outcome:

One way to achieve this is to make it a level-based puzzle game. Solve the puzzle suboptimally, and you don't get to move on. Of course, that means that you may need special-purpose programming at each level. On the other hand, you can release levels 1-5 as freeware, levels 6-20 as Product 1.0, and levels 21-30 as Product 2.0.

Not allegorical:

The puzzles I am thinking of are in the field of game theory, so the strategies will include things like not cooperating (because you don't need to in this case), making and following through on threats, and similar "immoral" actions. Some people might object on ethical or political grounds. I don't really know how to answer except to point out that at least it is not a first-person shooter.

Surprising

Game theory includes many surprising lessons - particularly things like the handicap principle, voluntary surrender of power, rational threats, and mechanism design. Coalition games are particularly counter-intuitive, but, with experience, intuitively understandable.

But you can even teach some rationality lessons before getting into games proper. Learn to recognize individuals, for example. Not all cat-creatures you encounter are the same character. You can do several problems involving probabilities and inference before the second player ever shows up.

Text adventures seem suitable for this sort of thing, and are relatively easy to write. They're probably not as good for mass appeal, but might be OK for mass nerd appeal. For these purposes, though, I'm worried that rationality may be too much of a suitcase term, consisting of very different groups of subskills that go well with very different kinds of game.

One idea I'd like to suggest would be a game where the effectiveness of the items a player has changes randomly hour by hour. Maybe a MMO with players competing against each other, so that they can communicate information about which items are effective. Introduce new items with weird effects every so often so that players have to keep an eye on their long term strategy as well.

One issue I've frequently stumbled across is the people who make claims that they have never truly considered. When I ask for more information, point out obvious (to me) counterexamples, or ask them to explain why they believe it, they get defensive and in some cases quite offended. Some don't want to ever talk about issues because they feel like talking about their beliefs with me is like being subject to some kind of Inquisition. It seems to me that people of this cut believe that to show you care about someone, you should accept anything they say with complete credulity. Have you found good ways to get people to think about what they believe without making them defensive? Do I just have to couch all my responses in fuzzy words? Using weasel words always seemed disingenuous to me, but if I can get someone to actually consider the opposition by saying things like "Idunno, I'm just saying it seems to me, and I might be wrong, that maybe gays are people and deserve all the rights that people get, you know what I'm saying?"

Yes please.

Does the term "bridger" ring a bell for you? (It's from Greg Egan's Diaspora, in case it doesn't, and you'd have to read it to get why I think that would be an apt name for what you're describing.)

I wanted to say thank you for providing these services. I like performing the same translations, but it appears I'm unable to be effective in a text medium, requiring immediate feedback, body language, etc. When I saw some of your posts on old articles, apparently just as you arrived, I thought to myself that you would genuinely improve this place in ways that I've been thinking were essential.

Can't help with your question, but speaking of Europe....

The words righteous indignation in combination are sufficiently well-recognized as to have their own wikipedia page. The page also says that righteous indignation has overtones of religiosity, which seems like a reason not to use it in your sense . It also says that it is akin to a "sense of injustice," but at least for me, that phrase doesn't have as much resonance.

Edited to add this possibly relevant/interesting link I came across, where David Brin describes self-righteous indignation as addictive.

I noticed this emotion cropping up a lot when I read Reddit, and stopped reading it for that reason. It's too easy to, for example, feel outraged over a video of police brutality, but not notice that it was years ago and in another state and already resolved.

Sounds related to the failure class I call "living in the should-universe".

Righteous indignation is a good word for it.

I, personally, see it as one of the emotional capacities of a healthy person. Kind of like lust. It can be misused, it can be a big time-waster if you let it occupy your whole life, but it's basically a sign that you have enough energy. If it goes away altogether, something may be wrong.

I had a period a few years ago of something like anhedonia. The thing is, I also couldn't experience righteous indignation, or nervous worry, or ordinary irritability. It was incredibly satisfying to get them back. I'm not a psychologist at all, but I think of joy, anger, and worry (and lust) as emotions that require energy. The miserably lethargic can't manage them.

So that's my interpretation and very modest defense of righteous indignation. It's not a very practical emotion, but it is a way of engaging personally with the world. It motivates you in the minimal way of making you awake, alert, and focused on something. The absence of such engagement is pretty horrible.

Interestingly enough, this sounds like the emotion that (finally) induced me to overcome akrasia and write a post on LW for the first time, which initiated what has thus far been my greatest period of development as a rationalist.

It's almost as if this feeling is to me what plain anger is to Harry Potter(-Evans-Verres): something which makes everything seem suddenly clearer.

It just goes to show how difficult the art of rationality is: the same technique that helps one person may hinder another.

Should I just use 'indignation' and then define what I mean in the first few sentences?

That could work well when backed up by with the description of just what you will be using the term to mean.

I will be interested to read your post - from your brief introduction here I think I have had similar observations about emotions that interfere with thought, independent of raw overwhelm from primitives like anger.

I've seen "moral indignation," which might fit (though I think "indignation" still implies anger). I've also heard people who feel that way describe the object of their feelings as "disgusting" or "offensive," so you could call it "disgust" or "being offended." Of course, those people also seemed angry. Maybe the non-angry version would be called "bitterness."

As soon as I wrote the paragraph above, I felt sure that I'd heard "moral disgust" before. I googled it and the second link was this. I don't know about the quality of the study, but you could use the term.

In myself, I have labeled the rationality blocking emotion/behavior as defensiveness. When I am feeling defensive, I am less willing to see the world as it is. I bind myself to my context and it is very difficult for me to reach out and establish connections to others.

I am also interested in ideas related to rationality and the human condition. Not just about the biases that arise from our nature, but about approaches to rationality that work from within our human nature.

I have started an analysis of Buddhism from this perspective. At its core (ignoring the obvious mysticism), I see sort of a how-to guide for managing the human condition. If we are to be rational we need to be willing to see the world as it is, not as we want it to be.

outrage?

Pardon the self-promotion, but that sounds like the feeling of recognizing a SAMEL, i.e. that there is some otherwise-ungrounded inherent deservedness of something in the world.

(SAMEL = subjuctive acausal means-end link, elaborated in article)

Something I learned myself that the article supported: taking tests increases retention

Something I learned from the article: varying study location increases retention.

Wow. Next Tuesday and in my hometown! Nice.

Sigh... I would consider flying down from Sydney to go to it, but sadly I'm in a show that whole week and have to miss out entirely. Ah well. Hopefully they'll have the audio online, but I would have loved to mingle with people who share my worldview.

I don't live in Australia.

I've noticed this too. There's no easy way to 'unfold all' is there?

The study looks at people over 55 years of age. It is possible that there is some sort of selection effect going on -- maybe decades of heavy drinking will weed out all but the most alcohol-resistant individuals, so that those who are still drinking heavily at 55-60 without ever having been harmed by it are mostly immune to the doses they're taking. From what I see, the study controls for past "problem drinking" (which they don't define precisely), but not for people who drank heavily without developing a drinking problem, but couldn't handle it any more after some point and decided themselves to cut back.

Also, it should be noted that papers of this sort use pretty conservative definitions of "heavy drinking." In this paper, it's defined as more than 42 grams of alcohol per day, which amounts to about a liter of beer or three small glasses of wine. While this level of drinking would surely be risky for people who are exceptionally alcohol-intolerant or prone to alcoholism, lots of people can handle it without any problems at all. It would be interesting to see a similar study that would make a finer distinction between different levels of "heavy" drinking.

These are fine conclusions to live by, as long as moderate drinking doesn't lead you to heavy drinking, cirrhosis and the grave. Come visit Russia to take a look.

The discussion of the same paper on Overcoming Bias has reminded me of another striking correlation I read about recently:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/beer-makes-bud-wiser.html

It seems that for whatever reason, abstinence does correlate with lower performance on at least some tests of mental ability. The question is whether the controls in the study cover all the variables through which these lower abilities might have manifested themselves in practice; to me it seems quite plausible that the answer could be no.

That's very interesting, but I'm not sure I trust the article's statistics, and I don't have access to the full text. Could someone take a closer look and confirm that there are no shennanigans going on?

This sounds interesting and relevant. Here's my input: I read this back in 2008 and I am summarising it from memory, so I may make a few factual errors. But I read that one of the problem facing large Internet companies like Google is the size of their server farms, which need cooling, power, space, etc. Optimising the algorithms used can help enormously. A particular program was responsible for allocating system resources so that the systems which were operating were operating at near full capacity, and the rest could be powered down to save energy. Unfortunately, this program was executed many times a second, to the point where the savings it created were much less than the power it used. The fix was simply to execute it less often. Running the program took about the same amount of time no mater how many inefficiencies it detected, so it was not worth checking the entire system for new problems if you only expected to find one or two.

My point: To reduce resources spent on decision-making, make bigger decisions but make them less often. Small problems can be ignored fairly safely, and they may be rendered irrelevant once you solve the big ones.

I was having similar thoughts the other day while watching a reality TV show where designers competed for a job from Philippe Starck. Some of them spent ages trying to think of a suitable project, and then didn't have enough time to complete it; some of them launched into the first plan they had and it turned out rubbish. Clearly they needed some meta-planning. But how much? Well, they'll need to do some meta-meta planning...

I'd be happy to give your post a read through.

ETA: The buck stops immediately, of course.

Upvoted for importance of subject - looking forward to the post. Have you read up on Information Foraging?

I haven't read Nicholas Carr, but I've seen summaries of some of the studies used to claim that book reading results in more comprehension than hypertext reading. All the ones I saw are bogus. They all use, for the hypertext reading, a linear extract from a book, broken up into sections separated by links. Sometimes the links are placed in somewhat arbitrary places. Of course a linear text can be read more easily linearly.

I believe hypertext reading is deeper, and that this is obvious, almost true by definition. Non-hypertext reading is exactly 1 layer deep. Hypertext lets the reader go deeper. Literally. You can zoom in on any topic.

A more fair test would be to give students a topic to study, with the same material, but some given books, and some given the book material organized and indexed in a competent way as hypertext.

Wide and deep reading, such that you make the information presented yours, gives you more background knowledge that helps you find your own connections.

Hypertext reading lets you find your own connections, and lets you find background knowledge that would otherwise simply be edited out of a book.

It is very difficult to distinguish rationalisations of the discomfort of change, with actual consequences. If this belief that hypertext leads to a less sophisticated understanding than reading a book, what behaviour would change that could be measured?

I have two suggestions, which are not so much about romantic relationships as they are about communicating clearly; given your example and the comments below, though, I think they're the kind of thing you're looking for.

The Usual Error is a free ebook (or nonfree dead-tree book) about common communication errors and how to avoid them. (The "usual error" of the title is assuming by default that other people are wired like you--basically the same as the typical psyche fallacy. It has a blog as well, although it doesn't seem to be updated much; my recommendation is for the book.

If you're a fan of the direct practical style of something like LW, steel yourself for a bit of touchy-feeliness in UE, but I've found the actual advice very useful. In particular, the page about the biochemistry of anger has been really helpful for me in recognizing when and why my emotional response is out of whack with the reality of the situation, and not just that I should back off and cool down, but why it helps to do so. I can give you an example of how this has been useful for me if you like, but I expect you can imagine.

A related book I'm a big fan of is Nonviolent Communication (no link because its website isn't of any particular use; you can find it at your favorite book purveyor or library). Again, the style is a bit cloying, but the advice is sound. What this book does is lay out an algorithm for talking about how you feel and what you need in a situation of conflict with another person (where "conflict" ranges from "you hurt my feelings" to gang war).

I think it's noteworthy that following the NVC algorithm is difficult. It requires finding specific words to describe emotions, phrasing them in a very particular way, connecting them to a real need, and making a specific, positive, productive request for something to change. For people who are accustomed to expressing an idea by using the first words which occur to them to do so (almost everyone), this requires flexing mental muscles which don't see much use. I think of myself as a good communicator, and it's still hard for me to follow NVC when I'm upset. But the difficulty is part of the point--by forcing you to stop and rethink how you talk about the conflict, it forces you see it in a way that's less hindered by emotional reflex and more productive towards understanding what's going on and finding a solution.

Neither of these suggestions requires that your partner also read them, but it would probably help. (It just keeps you from having to explain a method you're using.)

If you find a good resource for this which is a blog, I'd be interested in it as well. Maybe obviously, this topic is something I think a lot about.

I could point to some blogs whose advice seems good to me, but I won't because I think I can help you best by pointing only to material (alas no blogs though) that has actually helped me in a serious relationship -- there being a huge difference in quality between advice of the form "this seems true to me" and advice of the form "this actually helped me".

What has helped me more in my relationships than any other information has is the non-speculative parts of the consensus among evolutionary psychologists on sexuality because they provide a vocabulary for me to express hypotheses (about particular situations I was facing) and a way for me to winnow the field of prospective hypotheses and bits of advice I get online from which I choose hypotheses and bits of advice to test. In other words, ev psy allows me to dismiss many ideas so that I do not incur the expense of testing them.

I needed a lot of free time however to master that material. Probably the best way to acquire the material is to read the chapters on sex in Robert Wright's Moral Animal. I read that book slowly and carefully over 12 months or so, and it was definitely worth the time and energy. Well, actually the material in Moral Animal on friendship (reciprocal altruism) is very much applicable to serious relationships, too, and the stuff on sex and friendship together form about half the book.

Before I decided to master basic evolutionary psychology in 2000, the advice that helped me the most was from John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.

Analytic types will mistrust author and speaker John Gray because he is glib and charismatic (the Maharishi or such who founded Transcendental Meditation once offered to make Gray his successor and the inheritor of his organization) but his pre-year-2000 advice is an accurate map of reality IMHO. (I probably only skimmed Mars and Venus, but I watched long televised lectures on public broadcasting that probably covered the same material.)

Do you really need a "theory of mind" for that?

Our partners are not a foreign species. Communicate lots in an open and honest manner with hir and try to understand what makes that particular person click.

I recall someone claiming here earlier that they could do anything if they bet they could, though I can't find it right now. Useful to have some more explicit evidence about that.

I am, and I am planning to leave it to get a higher more average pay. From my viewpoint, it is terribly overrated and undervalued.

Ping Arthur breitman fb or linked in. He is part of NYC lw meetup, and a quant at goldman.

It looks a little odd for a hard takeoff scenario - it seems to be prevalent only in Iran, it seems configured to target a specific control system, and it uses 0-days wastefully (I see a claim that it uses four 0-days and 2 stolen certificates). On the other hand, this is not inconsistent with an AI going after a semiconductor manufacturer and throwing in some Iranian targets as a distraction.

My preference ordering is friendly AI, humans, unfriendly AI; my probability ordering is humans, unfriendly AI, friendly AI.

I just finished reading that book. It is mostly from a "defense against" perspective.

Reading the chapter names provides a decent [extremely short] summary, and I expect that you're already aware that they are influences. That said, when I read through it, there were a lot of "Aha!" moments, when I realized something I've seen was actually a well thought out 'weapon of influence'- and now my new hobby is saying "Chapter 3: Commitment and Consistency!" every time I see it used as persuasion.

The whole book is hard to put down, and makes me want to quote part of it to the nearest person in about every paragraph or two.

I'd consider writing such a post, but I'm not sure how to compress it- the very basics should be obvious to the regulars here, but the details take time to flush out.

Yes, I would like such a post.

The would be more likely to work if you completely took out the 'for existential risk' part. Find a way to cooperate with people effectively "to make money". No need to get religion all muddled up in it.

I used to be a professional games programmer and designer and I'm very interested in fun. There are a couple of good books on the subject: A theory of fun and Rules of play. As a designer I spent many months analyzing sales figures for both computer games and other conventional toys. The patterns within them are quite interesting: for example child's toys pass from amorphous learning tools (bright objects and blobby humanoids), through mimicking parents (accurate baby dolls), to mimicking older children (sexualised dolls and makeup). My ultimate conclusions were that fun takes many forms whose source can be ultimately reduced to what motivates us. In effect, fun things are mental hacks of our intrinsic motivations. I gave a couple of talks on my take on what these motivations are. I'd be happy to repeat this material here (or upload and link to the videos if people prefer).

I've long had the idea of writing a sequence on aesthetics; I'm not sure if and when I'll ever get around to it, however. (I have a fairly large backlog of post ideas that have yet to be realized.)

The ideas really started forming around the recent 'public relations' discussions.

If we want to change people's minds, we should be advertising.

My guess is that "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" is the best piece of publicity the SIAI has ever produced.

I think that the only way to top it would be a Singularity/FAI-themed computer game.

How about a turn-based strategy game where the object is to get deep enough into the singularity to upload yourself before a uFAI shows up and turns the universe into paper clips?

Maybe it would work, and maybe not, but I think that the demographic we want to reach is 4chan - teenage hackers. We need to tap into the "Dark Side" of the Cyberculture.

What ideas? I'm pretty sure I find whatever you are talking about interesting and shiny, but I'm not quite sure what it even is.

That's a really good article, the Microsoft humans really know their stuff.

Wow! I'm certainly surprised!

I don't know, I'm thinking the idea that this wouldn't happen (which I had as well) may be a case of "living in the 'should universe'"...

Is there a reasonable way of applying probability to analogue inference problems?

Your examples, certainly show a grasp of the problem. The solution is first sketched in Chapter 4.6 of Jaynes

Is, in effect, the selection of the underlying model the real challenge of rational decision making, not the inference rules?

Definitely. Jaynes finishes deriving the inference rules in Chapter 2 and illustrates how to use them in Chapter 3. The remainder of the book deals with "the real challenge". In particular Chapters 6, 7, 12, 19, and especially 20. In effect, you use Bayesian inference and/or Wald decision theory to choose between underlying models pretty much as you might have used them to choose between simple hypotheses. But there are subtleties, ... to put things mildly. But then classical statistics has its subtleties too.

(sorry of this comment is too long, continued from above) Creating Incentives

Of course, a sense of public pride exists in many people, and this has led large numbers of people to learn about the issues without external inducements. But the population of educated voters could be vastly increased if there were these personal benefits, especially for groups where environmentalism has not become a positive norm.

While we have thought about other approaches to creating these wide-ranging personal incentives, specifically, material prizes and the intangible benefits of social networking and personal pride (such as are behind Wikipedia or Facebook’s success), it appears that these are difficult to apply to the issue of climate change. Material prizes would be costly to fund, especially to make them worth the several hours necessary to learn about the issues. The issues are difficult enough, and the topic possibly scary enough, that it is not necessarily fun to learn about them and discuss with your friends. For another, it takes time and a little bit of dedicated thinking to achieve an adequate understanding of the problem, but part of the incentive to do so on Wikipedia—to show off your genuine expertise on the topic, even if anonymous—is exactly not what is supposed to happen when there is an educated populace on the topic: you will not be a unique expert, just another person who understands the issue like everyone else. The sense of urgency and personal importance needed to spur people to learn just is not there with these modes of incentivization.

But there is one already extremely effective way that companies, schools, and other organizations incentivize behavior that has little to do with immediate personal benefits. These institutions use their ability to advance or deter people’s future careers to motivate performance in certain areas. The gatekeepers to these future prospects can use their position to bring about all kinds of behavior that would otherwise seem to be a huge burden on those individuals. Ordinary hiring and admissions processes, for example, can impose large writing and learning requirements on their applicants, but because the personal benefits of getting into these organizations are enormous, people are more than willing to fulfill these requirements. Oftentimes, these requirements do not even necessarily have much to do with the stated purpose of the organization, but are used as filtering mechanisms to determine which are the best candidates. Admissions essays are not what universities set out to produce, but rather a bar they set to see which candidates can do well. These bars (known as “sorting mechanisms” in economics) sometimes have additional beneficial effects such as increased writing practice for future students, but not necessarily. For example, polished CV writing is a skill that is only good for overcoming these bars, without additional personal or social benefits. But because these additional effects are really only secondary attributes of the main function of the hurdle, the bar can be modified in ways that create socially beneficial purposes without affecting their main function.

So our specific proposal is to leverage employers’ and schools’ gatekeeper status to impose a hiring hurdle, similar to a polished CV or a high standardized test score, of learning about contemporary climate change science and policy. This hiring hurdle would act much like other hiring hurdles imposed by organizations, but would create a huge personal incentive for individuals to learn about climate change in place of or in addition to the huge personal incentive to write good covering letters or scoring well on the SATs.

The hiring hurdle would be implemented by a third party, a website that acts both as the layman’s guide to climate change science and policy (possibly with something that already exists, but hopefully with something more modular) and as a secure testing center of this knowledge. The website would provide an easy way for people to learn about the most up to date climate science and different policy options available, something that could probably be read and understood with an afternoon’s effort. Once the individual feels that he or she understands the material well enough, a secure test can be taken which measures the extent of that individuals’ climate knowledge. (This test could be retaken if the individual is dissatisfied with the result, or it could be imposed again once new and highly relevant information is discovered). The score that individuals receive could be reported to institutions they apply to. This score would be just one more tickbox for institutions to check before accepting their applicants, and they could determine the score they require.

The major benefit of this approach is that it creates enormous personal incentives for a very small cost. Companies and other institutions already have hiring hurdles in place, and they do not have to burden their HR staff with hundreds of climate change essays but just a simple score that they could look up on the website. The website itself can be hosted for a relatively small cost, and institutions can sign up to the program as more executives and leaders are convinced that this is a good idea.

Presumably, it is much easier to convince a few people who are in charge of such organizations that climate change education is important than to convince individual members of the public. Potentially, this project could affect millions, especially if large corporations such as McDonalds or Walmart or universities with many applicants sign on to the program. Furthermore, approaching the problem of global climate change through nongovernmental institutions seems like a good approach because it avoids the stasis in many public institutions, and it can be done by convincing much fewer stakeholders. Also, many of these institutions have an increasingly global scope.

Developing a platform to combat “information cocoons” yet retain legitimacy

The major problem is that this type of incentivizing might be seen as a way of buying off or patronizing voters, but this appears to be necessary to break the “information cocoons” that many people unknowingly fall into.

Hopefully a charge of having a political agenda can be answered by allowing a certain amount of feedback and continuing development of the guide as more arguments are voiced. Part of the website will be organized so that dissent can be voiced publicly and openly, but only in an organized and reasoned way (something like lesswrong but with stricter limits on posting). The guide would have to maintain public legitimacy by being open to criticism and new evidence as we discover more and also display the evidence that is supporting the current arguments. We would like to include a rating system, something like Rotten Tomatoes, where we have climate experts and the general public vote on various arguments and scenarios that are developed (but this would probably be only for those who develop a specific interest, not part of the testable guide. Of course, the testable guide would follow major developments on this more detailed information). We have thought of using an argument map to better organize such information.

But still, it could not be so flexible that those previous information cocoons redevelop on the website, and a similar polarization occurs on the website as before. Some degree of control is necessary to drive some points home. Thus, a delicate balance might have to be achieved.

That sums up pretty much the ideas to this point. At this point, the project is pretty much all theorizing, although we have found a couple of programmers who might help for a reduced fee (Know of anyone that would be interested in this for free?) and are looking into some funding sources. This would be a large scale attempt at rational debate and discussion, spurred by a mechanism to encourage everybody to participate, so please if you have any advice it would be enormously appreciated.

Sincerely, Allen Wang

Human intelligence, certainly; but just intelligence, I'm not so sure.

You beat me to it :)

A blog says:

"The model proposed by Christopher Ryan in “Sex at Dawn” (the women in a group have sex with the men in their group, and uncertain paternity leads all of the men to feel responsible for providing for the children) ..."

That doesn't require group selection.

No, but the book relies on kin selection to some extent: it's beneficial to share resources with your tribe, but not other tribes.

It's very silly. What he's saying is that there are properties at high levels of organizations that don't exist at low levels of organizations.

As Eliezer says, emergence is trivial. Everything that isn't quarks is emergent.

His "universality" argument seems to be that different parts can make the same whole. Well of course they can.

He certainly doesn't make any coherent arguments. Maybe he does in his book?

Here's the Open Thread comment where Daniel Varga made the page and its source code public. I don't know how often it's updated.

They did? I've been wishing for something like that myself. I'd also like another page that collects just my high karma comments. Extremely useful feedback!

The philosophical tradition of 'Rationalism' (opposed to 'Empiricism') is not relevant to the meaning here. Though there is some relationship between it and "Traditional Rationality" which is referenced sometimes.

But now I sense an even more disturbing definition: rational as opposed to empirical.

Ummmmmmmm.... no.

The word "rational" is used here on LW in essentially its literal definition (which is not quite the same as its colloquial everyday meaning).... if anything it is perhaps used by some to mean "bayesian"... but bayesianism is all about updating on (empirical) evidence.

But now I sense an even more disturbing definition: rational as opposed to empirical. As I use scientific evidence as the most important arbiter of what I believe, I would find the anti-empirical idea of 'rational' a big mistake.

Indeed. It is heretic in the extreme! Burn them!

But now I sense an even more disturbing definition: rational as opposed to empirical.

I don't think that's how most people here understand "rationalism".

There is at least one post about that - though I don't entirely approve of it.

Occam's razor is not exactly empirical. Evidence is involved - but it does let you choose between two theories both of which are compatible with the evidence without doing further observations. It is not empirical - in that sense.

Now that I come to think of it, I've never seen the LW definition of "rationality" used anywhere outside LW and OB, and I've never even seen it explicitly defined. EDIT: http://lesswrong.com/lw/31/what_do_we_mean_by_rationality/ But if you asked me, I would say it means taking your selfish and unemotional economic agent to his logical extreme: rationally examining one's own thought processes in order to optimise them, rationally examining scientific evidence without interference from one's biases, and rationally accepting the possibility that one has made a mistake.

Here is our definition of rationality. See also the "unnamed virtue".

In a certain sense rationality is using evidence efficiently. Perhaps overemphasis on that type of rationality tempts one to be sparing with evidence - after all if you use less evidence to reach your conclusion you used whatever evidence you did use more efficiently! But not using evidence doesn't mean there is more evidence left afterwards, not using free or very cheap evidence is wasteful, so proper rationality, even in that sense, means using all easily available evidence when practical.

Wow, a debate where the most reasonable-sounding person is a sysop of Conservapedia. :)

I always find these entertaining, though I begin to despair of human nature after a while. Thanks for letting me watch.

This server is really slow.

This sounds like the same question as why are there so few top-notch women in STEM fields, why there are so few women listed in Human Accomplishment's indices*, why so few non-whites or non-Asians score 5 on AP Physics, why...

In other words, here be dragons.

* just Lady Murasaki, if you were curious. It would be very amusing to read a review of The Tale of Genji by Eliezer or a LWer. My own reaction by the end was horror.

How diverse is Less Wrong?

You may want to check the survey results.

However, if we are predominately white males, why are we?

Ignoring the obviously political issue of "concern", it's fun to consider this question on a purely intellectual level. If you're a white male, why are you? Is the anthropic answer ("just because") sufficient? At what size of group does it cease to be sufficient? I don't know the actual answer. Some people think that asking "why am I me" is inherently meaningless, but for me personally, this doesn't dissolve the mystery.

I've been thinking that there are parallels between building FAI and Talmud-- it's an effort to manage an extremely dangerous, uncommunicative entity through deduction. (An FAI may be communicative to some extent. An FAI which hasn't been built yet doesn't communicate.)

Being an atheist doesn't eliminate cultural influence. Survey for atheists: which God do you especially not believe in?

I was talking about FAI with Gene Treadwell, who's black. He was quite concerned that the FAI would be sentient, but owned and controlled.

This doesn't mean that either Eliezer or Gene are wrong (or right for that matter), but it suggests to me that culture gives defaults which might be strong attractors. [1]

He recommended recruiting Japanese members, since they're more apt to like and trust robots.

I don't know about explaining ourselves, but we may need more angles on the problem just to be able to do the work.

[1] See also Timothy Leary's S.M.I.2L.E.-- Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life Extension. Robert Anton Wilson said that was match for Catholic hopes of going to heaven, being trajnsfigured, and living forever.

I generally agree with your assessment. But I think there may be more East and South Asians than you think, more 36-80s and more 15-19s too. I have no reason to think we are underrepresented in gays or in deaf people.

My general impression is that women are not made welcome here - the level of overt sexism is incredibly high for a community that tends to frown on chest-beating. But perhaps the women should speak for themselves on that subject. Or not. Discussions on this subject tend to be uncomfortable, Sometimes it seems that the only good they do is to flush some of the more egregious sexists out of the closet.

I don't know why you presume that because we are mostly 25-35 something White males a reasonable proportion of us are not deaf, gay or disabled (one of the top level posts is by someone who will soon deal with being perhaps limited to communicating with the world via computer)

I smell a whiff of that weird American memplex for minority and diversity that my third world mind isn't quite used to, but which I seem to encounter more and more often, you know the one that for example uses the word minority to describe women.

Also I decline to invitation to defend this community for lack of diversity, I don't see it as a prior a thing in need of a large part of our attention. Rationality is universal, however not in the sense of being equally universally valued in different cultures but certainly universally effective (rationalists should win). One should certainly strive to keep a site dedicated to refining the art free of unnecessary additional barriers to other people. I think we should eventually translate many articles into Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, Arab, German, Spanish, Russian and French. However its ridiculous to imagine that our demographics will somehow come to resemble and match a socio-economic adjusted mix of unspecified ethnicities that you seem to hunt for after we eliminate all such barriers. I assure you White Westerners have their very very insane spots, we deal with them constantly, but God for starters isn't among them, look at GSS or various sources on Wikipedia and consider how much more a thought stopper and a boo light atheism is for a large part of the world, what should the existing population of LessWrong do? Refrain from bashing theism? This might incur down votes, but Westerners did come up with the scientific method and did contribute disproportionately to the fields of statistics and mathematics, is it so unimaginable that developed world (Iceland, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, America, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan ect.) and their majority demographics still have a more overall rationality friendly climate (due to the caprice of history) than basically any part of the world? I freely admit my own native culture (though I'm probably thoroughly Westernised by now due to late childhood influences of mass media and education) is probably less rational than the Anglosaxon one. However simply going on a "crusade" to make other cultures more rational first since they are "clearly" more in need is besides sending terribly bad signals as well as the potential for self-delusion perhaps a bad idea for humanitarian reasons.

Sex ration: There are some differences in aptitude, psychology and interests that ensure that compsci and mathematics, at least at the higher levels will remain disproportionately male for the foreseeable future (until human modification takes off). This obviously affects our potential pool of recruits.

Age: People grow more conservative as they age, Lesswrong is firstly available only on a relatively a new medium, secondly has a novel approach to popularizing rationality. Also as people age the mind unfortunately do deteriorate. Very few people have a IQ high enough to master difficult fields before they are 15, and even their interests are somewhat affected by their peers.

I am sure I am rationalizing at least a few of these points, however I need to ask you is pursuing some popular concept of diversity (why did you for example not commend LW on its inclusion of non-neurotypicals who are often excluded in some segments of society? Also why do you only bemoan the under-representation of groups everyone else does? Is this really a rational approach? Why don't we go study where the in the memspace we might find truly valuable perspectives and focus on those? Maybe they overlap with the popular kinds, maybe they don't, but can we really trust popular culture and especially the standard political discourse on this? ) is truly cost-effective at this point?

There's nothing about being white, or female, or hispanic, or deaf, or gay that prevents one from being a rationalist.

I may be wrong, but I don't expect the proportion of gays in LessWrong to be very different from the proportion in the population at large.

I was never trying to say that there was something wrong with the way that Less Wrong is, or that we ought to do things to change our makeup. Maybe it would be good for us to, but that had nothing to do with my question. I was instead (trying to, and apparently badly) asking for people's opinions about whether or how our makeup along any partition --- the ones that I mentioned or others --- effect in us an inability to best solve the problems that we are interested in solving.

People are touchy on this. I guess its because in public discourse pointing something like this out is nearly always a call to change it.

While katydee's story is possible (and probable, even), it is also possible that someone is catching up on their Less Wrong reading for a substantial recent period and issuing many votes (up and down) in that period. Some people read Less Wrong in bursts, and some of those are willing to lay down many downvotes in a row.

It is possible that someone has gone through your old comments and systematically downvoted them-- I believe pjeby reported that happening to him at one point.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have downvoted you twice in the last half hour and upvoted you once. It's possible that fifty other people think like me, but if so you should have very negative karma on some posts and very positive karma on others, which doesn't appear to be the case.

And now my karma has jumped by more than 300 points! WTF? I'm pretty sure this time that someone went through my comments systematically upvoting. If that was someone's way of saying "thank you" ... well ... you are welcome, I guess. But isn't that a bit much?

That happened to me three days ago or so after my last top level post. At the time said post was at -6 or so, and my karma was at 60+ something. Then, within a space of < 10 minutes, my karma dropped to zero (actually i think it went substantially negative). So what is interesting to me is the timing.

I refresh or click on links pretty quickly. It felt like my karma dropped by more than 50 points instantly (as if someone had dropped my karma in one hit), rather than someone or a number of people 'tracking me'.

However, I could be mistaken, and I'm not certain I wasn't away from my computer for 10 minutes or something. Is there some way for high karma people to adjust someone's karma? Seems like it would be useful for troll control.

False positives, false negatives

This sounds pretty exhaustive.

Hefty quantities of Synergetics seem incomprehensible to me.

Fuller was trying to make himself into a mystical science guru - and Synergetics laid out his domain.

There is some worthwhile material in there - though you might be better of with more recent secondary sources.

Seconding this question.

I found Synergetics in the local library when I was in high school, was duly impressed by Arthur C. Clarke's endorsement on the cover, but didn't understand much at all about the book. I was too young to tell if the book was obvious math crankery or not back then, but the magnum opus style of Synergetics combined with it being pretty completely ignored nowadays makes it look a lot like an earlier example of the type of book Wolfram's A New Kind of Science turned out to be.

Still, I'm curious about what the big idea was supposed to be and what did people who seriously read the book thought about it.

ETA: For the curious, the whole book available is online.

Don't do that - instead associate programs with sensory input streams.

Good question. Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to create a universal shortcut for "run each one, and see if you get the possible world you were aiming for," other than the well-known alternatives like AIXI-tl and MC-AIXI.

The questions are about a future which hasn't been written yet. So: "it depends".

If you are asking what is most likely, my answers would be: machines will probably learn languages, yes there will be tests, prior knowledge-at-birth doesn't seem too important - since it can probably be picked up quickly enough - and "it depends":

Humans will probably tell machines what to do in a wide range of ways - including writing code and body language - but a fair bit of it will probably be through high-level languages - at least initially. Machines will probably tell humans what they want in a similar way - but with more use of animation and moving pictures.

There are possible general AI designs that have knowledge of human language when they are first run. What is this "permitted" you speak of? All true seed AIs have the ability to learn about human languages, as human language is subset of the reality they will attempt to model, although it is not certain that they would desire to learn human language (if, say, destructive nanotech allows them to eat us quickly enough that manipulation is useless). "Object code" is a language.