Open Thread, February 1-14, 2012

Why did Luke ask you to research polyamory.

Only just noticed this. If you or Luke would find it useful to talk to Dr Meg Barker about this I can put you in touch.

the one academic doing good work in the area is Sheffer, who is running a longitudinal survey which may or may not have enough statistical power to rule out particularly dramatic variances in outcomes. (Sheffer mentions the selection bias problem but seems to have the attitude that it's not a problem for her work.)

Was there any follow-up here?

It's called a token economy. Game developers use dark arts in all kinds of ways to keep people playing; they even employ PhD psychologists.

Good idea. Maybe net worth comes in the same sense, except less meaninglessly?

Other examples:

Number of facebook friends High score in Temple Run

Those videos are great.

That thing you quoted is worthy of a rationality quote.

She was mentioned in a quotes thread about a year ago (where I first discovered her), and has recently joined the team at Khan Academy. I likened this for my non-nerd friends to Tom Morello from Rage Against The Machine teaming up with Billy Joel to fight dragons.

Good luck!

I'm mildly frightened by the prospect, because I'm mildly frightened by the possibility that my political beliefs so far might be built entirely on my ability to mindkill other people with clever argument. So, yes, I think this is a good if not vital idea.

Konkvistador has been talking about doing something like that ...

11 points so far says you should make this a rerun post in Discussion.

These two discussions might be of some interest to you if you haven't read them already.

I agreed with the basic idea, although I did have a slight [citation needed] feel. She jumped around a bit without justifying things as much as I'd like. Although perhaps that's ok for what's basically a youtube rant.

Is there any reason people should watch this rather than read Roy Baumeister's (excellent, IMO) 2010 book Is There Anything Good About Men? (which is available online in the usual sub rosa places)?

Having been born and raised in Russia, this seems so alien to me. I'd say that here we have a sort of make-do gender equality in many respects, partly a heritage of the USSR.

Oops. On reflection, I misinterpreted her point. I really can't endorse any of the following, except:

Also, I don't think female-autonomy is consistent with the political female-first distribution of benefits she identifies.

I do think her description of the actual success female-first-ism is not very accurate.

Wrong statements preserved for clarity of thread.

Synopsis: Women are more valuable in society than men because women get lifeboat seats and men don't. This different valuation is justified because women can have children and men cannot.

First, this is equivalent to saying that women's first social purpose is child-rearing.

Second, the Youtube video acknowledges that society geared towards women-as-reproduction-machines requires a lot of restrictions on female autonomy. Would you trade a substantial portion of your autonomy for increased priority of your life being protected in high-risk situations? I wouldn't, for the same reason that I think AI implementing the zeroth law of robotics is not Friendly.

Third, one might conclude that restricting female autonomy was necessary for social continuation purposes, but why would individual women want the world to be that way? Society might respond with genuine regret that this is how things must be, but in practice, I've never met anyone who thought that (1) women's autonomy should be restricted, and (2) this was something to regret. In other words, terminal values are not justified by (and don't need justification from) instrumental-value arguments.

I also think that the Youtuber's sex-based child-rearing advice is terrible. As she says, we are teaching men and women to be certain ways. Why should we need to teach what is inherently true?

Also, I don't think female-autonomy is consistent with the political female-first distribution of benefits she identifies.

Yes, I'm a fan of an f.lux equivalent for Linux, Redshift. (Have you considered melatonin?) Incidentally, as far as vitamin D goes, I think it may be harmful for sleep when taken in the evening.

Thanks for the download link! I also have "night owl" issues I am currently experimenting to fix. I just installed the f.lux program and will report back on its usefulness by the end of the month. (Immediate reaction- It looked REALLY red for about 5 minutes. Now it just looks a little red.)

Another new hack I'm trying is to take a sleep aid when I think I should go to bed soon.

My impetus for doing this was a mix of seeing people post about melatonin here, and also realizing that when I was sick, I LIKED being able to take PM meds which would knock me out and force me to go to sleep when I thought I should. (but which I of course do NOT want to take when I am not sick!)

Is there a reason LWers recommend melatonin rather than other non-addictive sleep aids?

Also, I would like to thank the LessWrong community in general for giving me the idea to even try these types of self-improvement mods.

Are you serious? If you have an aptitude for coding/design/software architecture, and no other burning passion, programming is an excellent choice. While indeed changing rapidly, it is an easy discipline to update your skills cheaply and with almost no red tape. Besides, most people change careers on average more often than every 20 years, so no point looking that far ahead.

Just Don't Call Yourself A Programmer.

Is it true that you can't work in it more than a couple of decades because all your skills will go obsolete and you'll be replaced by someone younger?

If this happens (and yes, to some people this happens), then you are doing it wrong. Getting older usually brings some problems, like accumulated bad experience, loss of illusions, less enthusiasm, possible burning out, and starting a family which means that you are less willing to work overtime, etc. But this happens in any profession.

What exactly are your programings skills? (The "larger picture" is already mentioned in a shminux's comment, so I focus here only on programming.) If you have memorized a few keywords and function names, then honestly you don't know anything about programming, and a new programming language or technology will make your skills obsolete. Even for a good programmer, having the important keywords in your "memory cache" is useful, but switching to another language is just a matter of time.

After "memorizing the keywords" level you get to the real programming -- you design algorithms, understand design patterns (which simply means: you will need to solve thousands of problems, but then you will see that 99% of them can be classified as belonging to one of cca dozen templates, and when you are familiar with the templates, solving these problems will become very easy), and you will see something really new only once in a while (even most of the new things are just reinventing the wheel). And even if you see the new thing, it still helps to have a knowledge about the old things, because you will understand why the new thing was designed this way.

You have to develop some meta-skills to make learning easier. For example if you work in multiple programming languages, you often use the same or similar thing with a different syntax. So why not make yourself a cheat-sheet per language per topic? Then if you have to learn a new language, you have to spend one day constructing a new cheat-sheet, and you are fluent in the new language. Using Google and parsing the official documentations are important skills. This can make your learning curve incredibly fast. Are there fresh people coming from university that know more than you? Listen to them, make notes of the keywords they use, ask what tools they use, then read Wikipedia, read a free online book, try the tools, use google, and within a month you will be able to give them good advice.

And then there is the higher meta-level where you decide what exactly will you do and how will you sell yourself.

"Programming" isn't really a coherent vocation any more, and will probably become even less so as time passes. By way of analogy, being a scribe was once a trade in its own right, but any contemporary job you're ever likely to want will demand literacy.

It depends on other things about you that we don't know. What do you want? What's your skill/ability profile like?

If you're most interested in money, working as a salaried programmer can take you into the six figure range (the average for Silicon Valley has passed that now). Your skills will obsolesce faster than in other disciplines, and you'll actually be called on it (doctors skills vary a lot by time of graduation, with older being worse, but the patients don't do anything about it), but that's manageable. Unfortunately, as you get older you lose fluid intelligence and so can't learn new skills as easily.

You can make much more money in startups in expectation (from tail outcomes) if you're good, but note that one can be an entrepreneur in other fields (software/web startups are nice in terms of low barriers to entry, low capital requirements, etc, but that also means more competition). With a long time horizon if you're smart enough to reliably graduate medical school and find medicine tolerable you'll make more money as a doctor than an engineer. Likewise for elite law schools, if you both have the credentials to get in and go to the high end places (although that carries more risk). Finance (investment banking, hedge funds, etc) has substantially better financial prospects if you can get into it, although again nontrivial risk.

Other technically demanding jobs (other types of engineering, actuaries, etc) have similar or better aggregate compensation statistics.

In terms of quality of life, some people really like coding, at least compared to the demands of higher-paying fields (risk, self-motivation, management/sales/schmoozing, intense hours, many years of costly schooling, etc). Others don't.

Old thread.

Indeed. This is why I have a hard time thinking of ems as "friendly", even as I concede they would be fully human - we have considerable historical precedent as to what happens when one group of humans is much more powerful than a colocated other group of humans.

Frankly, humans aren't human-friendly intelligences. As such, it's not clear to me that "human-friendly intelligence" is even a sufficiently coherent concept to make predictions from; much as "God" isn't a coherent concept.

Wonder if Eliezer's planning any epic fanfics after MoR...

Maesters of the Citadel from GRRM's world of Ice and Fire are basically crying out to be remade into a Bayesian conspiracy or better yet an organization fighting magic and banishing it from the world in order to reduce existential risk.

The destruction of Valyria, the Others beyond the Wall, the sheer destruction that Dragons can wrecked on human lands, the ability and possibly intelligence enhancing capability of the network of Godswoods... if we where living in that universe wouldn't we perhaps do the same?

Now that I think about it, maybe I'll rather start writing that.

Followup: it helps morning mood when taken in the morning: http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#vitamin-d-at-morn-helps

Maybe that's a small version of what a midlife crisis feels like.

In my twenties (late '80s, early '90s), my friends and I used to talk about having a mid-life crisis every six months. Oh, the angst of Generation X, in the now-lost-to-history last years of the pre-Internet era. (I'm quite enjoying my actual middle age.)

That's funny. My rationality has conquered my paranoia to the point that I don't fear murders hiding in my house. I fear Cthulhu-ish monstrosities. Such fears have the virtue of being internally consistent, even if they have the vice that they seem inconsistent with our understanding of the physical laws (and thus are extremely improbable). :)

You can find it in chapter 63:

I will say this much, Mr. Potter: You are already an Occlumens, and I think you will become a perfect Occlumens before long. Identity does not mean, to such as us, what it means to other people. Anyone we can imagine, we can be; and the true difference about you, Mr. Potter, is that you have an unusually good imagination. A playwright must contain his characters, he must be larger than them in order to enact them within his mind. To an actor or spy or politician, the limit of his own diameter is the limit of who he can pretend to be, the limit of which face he may wear as a mask. But for such as you and I, anyone we can imagine, we can be, in reality and not pretense. While you imagined yourself a child, Mr. Potter, you were a child. Yet there are other existences you could support, larger existences, if you wished. Why are you so free, and so great in your circumference, when other children your age are small and constrained? Why can you imagine and become selves more adult than a mere child of a playwright should be able to compose? That I do not know, and I must not say what I guess. But what you have, Mr. Potter, is freedom.

That's not many worlds, that's quantum immortality. It's true that the latter depends on the former (or would if there weren't other big-world theories, cf. Tegmark), but one can subscribe to the former and still think the latter is just a form of confusion.

You're correct that with that outcome pump, some copies of you would win the lottery. However, I disagree that you should kill yourself upon noticing that you'd lost. This has been discussed on LW before here.

This doesn't make sense. If I'm copied 5 times (in this Everrett branch, nothing about other branches), and one of my copies wins the lottery, I still wouldn't want to kill myself. This doesn't mean that I wouldn't believe my copies existed -- it's just that their existence wouldn't automatically move me to suicide.

Why then would I want to kill myself if the copies happen to be located in different Everret branches? What does their location have to do with anything?

Thus, if you subscribe to the MWI, this is one of the most rational ways to make money. So, if you need money and don't follow this strategy, you are either irrational or don't really believe what you say you do (most likely both).

No: if I follow that strategy it makes it more likely that others will follow that strategy; so even if I do successfully end up in a world where I won the lottery, it may also be a world where all my love ones committed suicide.

When considering this, I thought of another related question. If MWI/Quantum Immortality insists that you not die, would it also insist that you come into existence earlier? If you can't die ever (because that keeps you in more branches), then the earlier you're born, the more branches in which you are alive, therefore MWI/Quantum Immortality indicates that if you exist the most likely explanation is... (I don't know. I seem to be confused.)

MWI/Quantum Immortality feels like puddle thinking. But I'm not sure I fully understand puddle thinking either, so me saying MWI/Quantum Immortality feels like puddle thinking feels like me explaining a black box with a smaller black box inside.

Given those thoughts, I think my next step is to ask "In what ways is MWI/Quantum Immortality like puddle thinking and in what ways is it not like puddle thinking?

Reference to puddle thinking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe#In_fiction_and_popular_culture

... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

I believe that my death has negative utility. (Not just because my family and friends will be upset; also because society has wasted a lot of resources on me and I am at the point of being able to pay them back, I anticipate being able to use my life to generate lots of resources for good causes, etc.)

Therefore, I believe that the outcome (I win the lottery ticket in one world; I die in all other worlds) is worse than the outcome (I win the lottery in one world; I live in all other worlds) which is itself worse than (I don't waste money on a lottery ticket in any world).

Least Convenient Possible World, I assume, would be believing that my life has negative utility unless I won the lottery, in which case, sure, I'd try quantum suicide.

thus creating an outcome pump for the subset of the branches where you survive (the only one that matters).

What? No! All of the worlds matter just as much, assuming your utility function is over outcomes, not experiences..

So far most replies are of the type of the invisible dragons in your garage: multiple reasons why looking for them would never work, so one should not even try. This is a classic signature of belief in belief.

A mildly rational reply from an MWI adept would sound as follows: "While the MWI-based outcome pump has some issues, the concept is interesting enough to try to refine and resolve them."