Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015

Thanks to everyone who granted me karma! I just posted the article here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lgy/how_much_does_consumption_affect_production/

Instead of using a name like a_lurker and asking for PM's I would suggest going trying to be a little more public - your goal should be to display to potential employers that you can code. This is actually harder than it sounds, as programmers (especially self taught) are more likely to be introverted and don't like marketing themselves. [from my personal perspective]

Some suggestions would be:

1. Pick some sort of professional sounding name for yourself (doesn't have to be a business name) that you want to be known as - better if it is rare on google. You will use this name to promote your knowledge and collaboration on many websites

2. Register a domain - even if it is a .info with a simple About you page, saying you are looking for work and your resume. This website should be in your email signature and plugged on other site below.

3. Start a github account (learn git first) and publish something - anything that you think was good code [as long as it isn't the answer to any of your course assignments]

4. Answer questions on Stackoverflow with your professional name - and ask questions. Don't spam it, but don't be afraid to ask stupid questions.

5. Get a linkedin account and grow your network there

Happy to answer any PM's you have, but you should think about promoting yourself if you want work.

Cheers,

Duncan

http://www.acutesoftware.com.au

I'm not a mentor, but I'm in a similar situation. I have a math degree (with some CS) from a unremarkable school, no work experience, no network, and no web presence. I've had success getting interviews at large tech companies just by applying online. There's usually a job listing aimed at recent graduates. I should mention that I have fairly credible signals of CS skill on my resume (meaning I list some things I've built and say a few words about each), a decent academic record, and a fortunate aptitude for the sort of algorithm questions they like to ask during screening phone interviews.

To be clear, my first onsite interview is coming up, so who knows how it will turn out :) Be careful who you take advice from! Although this is very limited information, it seems I was under-confident that these companies would talk at all to someone who had e.g. no work experience and no referral. I would have told my past self to apply earlier!

I'm in a similiar situation - been studying math, but looking to get a programming job. I've been using the well-accliamed Cracking the Coding Interview book to prepare for interviews. If you're interested, I would be happy to trade advice, review, or questions.

Right now, I think the main thing I need to work on is building up my network. I've done most of djm's suggestions already.

Reading debates like this makes me sad. I realize that just like everything else, feminism also is a tool that different people can use for different purposes. Some people can use it to support empathy towards other human beings. Some people use it to deny empathy towards other human beings. Somehow the latter seem more prominent on the internet.

There is something in the impersonal online communication that emphasises sociopathic traits in people. When in real life you see a suffering man, you usually don't see feminists running to him screaming "actually, I have it much worse!". But when you see a man writing about his suffering online, this is what often happens. Maybe it's because behaving like an asshole in real life is likely to bring you a punch in the face or at least a loss of status, while doing the same on internet generates page views and income, if you do it properly.

Like polymathwannabe wrote, there is a meaningful definition of "privilege" (although I would prefer the word "advantage"), which is: "Maybe you are just a lucky person who doesn't have this problem, so you don't think about this problem, and you may even find it unbelievable, but for some other people this is an important factor in their lives." This is the core that makes sense.

The part of the online discource that doesn't make sense is the frequent claim that this "privilege" is unidirectional: "If you separate people into two groups X and Y, exactly one of them will have problems that the other side doesn't see." There is an illogical jump from "group X has on average more problems than group Y" to "problems of the group X are a strict superset of problems of the group Y". This implicit assumption manifests in a debate when people from group Y are told to "check their privilege", but is assumed that people from group X have no provilege to check. (Unless we consider some other dimension, so e.g. people from X1 may have privilege over people from X2, but still never a privilege over Y1.)

Like Sarunas described, the problem is replacing the reality with a simplified multilinear model. First problem, the model depends on which variables are included and which are excluded, which is somewhat an arbitrary decision, so of course people are prone to include the variables which "prove" their oppression, and exclude the variables which "disprove" it. (For example, there is usually a strong emphasis on "male privilege", but very little emphasis on "rich privilege". Which is coincidentally exactly the kind of bias you would expect if the theory is popular among female Harvard students.) Second problem, the multilinear assumption itself may be wrong, even if we include all the relevant variables. Third problem, even if the multilinear model would descibe the averages of groups accurately, individuals are not the averages of their groups. It doesn't make much sense to assume that a random black homeless man has a lot of power and money just because a different individual from the "black male" group happens to be a US president.

If I understood the story correctly, Scott Aaronson was attacked mostly for paying too little attention to the feminist (well, not only theirs) concept of "privilege". I will try to paraphrase the concept of "privilege" (if I understand it correctly) using the terms of statistics in a way that, I imagine, might lead someone to accept the concept. This way, hopefully, I will be able to clearer express myself.

Suppose you can quantify suffering (let's use the word "suffering" even though in everyday language it is quite strong word, whereas I'll use it to describe even very small annoyances). And suppose you are trying to create a statistical model, that could predict total suffering of an individual without actually measuring his/her suffering without paying attention to a particular situation (just some kind of "total average suffering"), using explanatory variables that are easy to measure. Suppose you decide that you will use belonging to a specific social group of people as your explanatory variables. As you can see, nothing in these terms guarantees that this model will actually be good (i.e. if the error terms are symmetric, etc.), because, for example, it is not clear whether explanatory variables denoting whether a person belongs to a certain group are actually enough to make a model good, etc.

If you try, for example, linear regression, you will obtain something like this: S = a + b_1*x_1 + ... b_n*x_n + e. In addition to that, you can have additional variables of the form x_i*x_j or x_i*(1-x_j) to model interaction between different variables. Here S is total suffering, a is an intercept term, x_i is an expanatory Boolean variable denoting whether a person belongs to an i-th social group (some groups are mutually exclusive, some aren't, for example, let's say that we assign 1 to blue eyed people and 0 to others), and if b_1 is negative, then b_1 could be said to measure "privilege" of people who belong to i-th group. If I understand correctly, people who employ this concept use it this way. Let's denote Ŝ= a + b_1*x_1 + ... b_n*x_n and call it "predicted suffering".

As you can see, claims that privilege is very important and thus everyone must pay a lot of attention to it depend on many assumptions.
The model itself might be unsatisfactory if does not account for many important explanatory variables that are as important (or even more important) than those already in a model. Few people are interested in "testing" the model and justifying the variables, most people simply choose several variables and use them.

Modeling total average suffering without paying attention to a specific situation may be misleading if the values of b_i varies a lot depending on a situation.

Another thing is that it is not clear whether error terms e are actually small. If your model of total suffering fails to account for many sources of suffering, then error terms probably dwarfs predicted suffering. It is my impression that, when people see a linear model, their default thinking is that error terms as smaller (perhaps much smaller) than the conditional mean, unless explicitly stated otherwise. Therefore saying that a model has predictive power without saying that it has huge error terms might mislead a lot of people about what the model says.

Some people might claim that they, for some reason, are only interested in specific types of suffering, i.e. suffering from prejudice, biased institutions, politics, laws, conventions of public life or something like that. That doesn't mean that individual variation and error terms are small. If they aren't, then you cannot neglect their importance.

The values of coefficients b_i may be hard to determine.

But the problem I want to talk about the most is this. If you can observe the value of response variable S (total average suffering of an individual or total average suffering of an individual which is caused by a specific sets of reasons) then focusing on predicted value Ŝ is a mistake, since observation of response variable S screens off the the whole point of making a prediction Ŝ. For example, you can use university degrees to predict the qualifications of a job applicant, but if you can already observe their qualifications, you do not need to make predictions based on those degrees. It is my impression that most people, who talk about privilege, sometimes pay little attention to actual suffering S, but, due to mental habits obtained, perhaps, by reading the literature about the topic, pay a lot of attention to predicted suffering Ŝ. For example, Scott Aaronson describes his individual S in his comment here and gets a response here. The author says she empathizes with Scott Aaronson's story (S), then starts blaming Scott for not talking about Ŝ, and proceeds to talk about average (Ŝ) female and male nerds. Ŝ is not what any individual feels, but it seems to be the only thing some people are able to talk about. If the size of Ŝ does not dwarf model error terms e, then by talking about Ŝ and not talking about S they are throwing away the reality.

In addition to that, there is, If I understand correctly, another source of confusion, and it is ambiguity of the vague concepts "institutional" and "structural". If we are talking, e.g. about suffering from biased institutions, prejudices, structures in society etc. (if for some reason we are paying more attention to only this specific type of suffering), then S (and not Ŝ) is what actually measures it. However, it is my impression that some people use these words to refer to Ŝ only, without error terms e. In this case, they should remember, that S is what actually exists in the world and, if error terms are huge, then there might be very few situations where neglecting them talking about Ŝ instead actually illuminates anything. It is my impression that some people who are interested in things like "privilege" tend to overestimate the size of Ŝ and underestimate the size of e, perhaps due to availability heuristic.

Many people, who argue against feminists, tend to claim that the latter estimate Ŝ incorrectly. This may or may not be true, but I don't think that it is a good way to convince them to pay attention to problems that are different from what they are used to dealing with. Instead, I think that there might be a chance to convince them by emphasizing that S, and not Ŝ is what exists in the real world, emphasizing that error terms e may be huge, and not allowing them to change the topic from S to Ŝ. If you make them concede that a problem X, which their model does not use as a explanatory variable, exists and person_1, person_2, ... person_n suffer from problem X. Perhaps then they will not be hostile to the idea of noticing the pattern. To sum up, it seems to me that feminism tends to explain all things in top-down fashion and model their enemies as being top-down as well. My guess is that making them to think in "bottom-up" style terms may make their thinking somewhat less rigid.

Of course, all this is an attempt to guess how a specific part of a solution (stopping feminists from trying to complicate any kind of solution) might look like

Although Scott was too modest to point this out, part of the reason he is right is that nerds massively contribute to our economy and defense making anything that harms their (our) productivity significant.

That's such a strange comment. It seems like he was an especially sensitive young man who had a weird psychological reaction to reading radical feminist writings.

Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison.

That's sad, but it surely must be an extremely uncommon problem. Not many young men read radfem tracts to begin with. Having that kind of extreme reaction must be very rare.

I disrecommend this practice for text and equations. It will save you a small amount of time up front, but may cost you more overall. First, your ability to search is compromised depending on how much is a graphic. I search fairly frequently, especially when I want to update a card. That's the second disadvantage: you can't update a card so easily now. There's a third disadvantage: Typing up a paragraph from a book (in your own words) has additional learning benefits.

A fourth disadvantage is that different sources may have different notation. I've struggled to keep consistent notation for a number of my decks. You don't have much of a choice in the notation if you just take screenshots. It is a good idea to have multiple notations in your decks, but my suggestion would be to have consistent notation for the main cards and have extra cards about the less common notations.

In my experience, deciding what to add takes much more time than adding it. I make this as easy as possible by noting what I think is important when reading, reviewing, etc. I have lists of text files of things to add along with where to find more information. I have a Beeminder goal to add 3 cards daily that I don't mark as easy right off the bat, and I generally think about what would be most useful to myself and take them from my text files. (What I add tends to be technical, e.g., I am relearning combustion theory at the moment. 3 a day is reasonable for this, but the rate should depend on the subject and how much time you can invest.)

Graphical things are okay to take from books. However, I will frequently make my own graphic for the learning benefits and because I want to tweak/improve what I see.

I'd break this down into two questions:

• Would it be better for you to pay for a neighbor of yours to switch to the green mix or give that money to GiveWell?
• Is there something special about the energy you use coming from renewable sources as opposed to the energy someone else uses?

For the first question, subsidising renewable energy is probably a good thing, but there's no reason to expect this particular opportunity to be up there with the world's best organizations. For the second it doesn't seem to me that it matters. So I'd say buy the normal stuff and give the difference to the best organization you can find.

Perhaps you meant hydrocarbons instead of carbohydrates.

In Germany I'm not sure that you increase the amount of green energy that get produced by making a choice to be on a plan that "uses" green energy. The German energy market isn't free in the sense that you can raise demand for green energy to raise supply of green energy.

We have laws that everyone who wants to sell green energy into the market gets a gurantee that the energy is brought for a decent price.

I'd love to try them, but am in the UK. Happy to cover the additional postage cost!

Already have some on the way, so will let people who haven't tried them yet do so. Thanks for the offer though. :)

Regarding repetitive strain injury you might consider this thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/css/low_hanging_fruit_in_computer_hardware/6q3c

This ebook solved my crippling RSI a few years ago, FWIW: https://www.painscience.com/tutorials/trigger-points.php

Also, one can click on the "Latest Open Thread" in the sidebar.

Therefore, learning about cognitive biases teaches one to notice if one is in a dangerous situation where they should "halt" one's System 1 and offload their decision making to the System 2.

There's no good reason to believe that things work like that. Conscious attempts to block a bias like the Hindsight bias don't work.

Is it possible to train your "general intuition" (if such thing exists) or your capability to develop domain-specific intuitions more quickly and more reliably?

"Noticing" seems to be a skill that's useful whenever you are interacting with intuition. Mindfulness meditation provides also broad benefits for System I processes.

If you have some sort of decision-making process you do a lot that you expect is going to become a thing you build intuition around later, make sure you have the right feedback loops in place, so that you have something to help keep that intuition calibrated. (This also applies to processes you engineer for others.)

LOL, sorry for that. Yes, obviously I was thinking in Italian. Fixed it.

In Italian, the month we call January is called Gennaio. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other languages whose name for January begins "Gen".

Likely the result of the Harper article that started with an analysis of ethereumand then moved to the LW-space.

Adding to Vulture's reply (that you can not make absolute positive statements about truth), the modern view of "Occam's razor" (at least in Bayesian thought) is the minimum description length (MDL) principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length), which can be rigorously formalized. In this formalism, it becomes a prior over models. Multiplied with the likelihood over models (derived from data), this gives you a posterior. In this posterior, if you have two models that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is preferred (note that the more complicated one isn't completely rejected; it's just given lower posterior probability).

There are very deep fundamental theoretical considerations for why MDL is a very good way of assigning a prior to beliefs. If someone wants to reject Occam's razor, they would have to give an alternative system and show that under the assumptions of MDL it gives better long-term utility. Or that the assumptions of MDL are unfounded.

In the Bayesian view, you can never really make absolute positive statements about truth anyway. Without a simplicity prior you would need some other kind of distribution. Even for computable theories, I don't think you can ever have a uniform distribution over possible explanations (math people, feel free to correct me on this if I'm wrong!); you could have some kind of perverse non-uniform but non-simplicity-based distribution, I suppose, but I would bet some money that it would perform very badly.

Why can't there be other criteria to prefer some theories over other theories, besides simplicity?

The best we can do is to falsify a theory (as Karl Popper proposed), but beyond that we can never say anything about whether a theory is true.

You don't have to go that road, you can also say: "The map is not the territory" and stop looking for true maps but rather value maps based on accuracy or usefulness.

I answered "not at all", even though I was for some years very shy, anxious and fearful about asking girls out, because I never felt anything like the specific fears both Scotts wrote about, of being labelled a creep, sexist, gross, objectifier, etc. It was just "ordinary" shyness and social awkwardness, not related at all to the tangled issues about feminism and gender relations that the current discussion centers on. I interepreted the question as being interested specifically in the intersection of shyness with these issues, otherwise I might have answered "sort of".

Typically, it's polite to add a "I just want to see the results" option, so that people who don't fit into the class of desired voters can still see the votes without corrupting them.

The results so far are 10, 25, 13.

Being a non-frequent commenter, I didn't know that you had to vote to see the results. I'm not in target demographic so I voted not at all. 10, 25, 13 are the correct poll results after tossing out my response.

Well I'm very surprised and grateful to the people who voted. I thought both Scotts were probably significant outliers. But the poll results seem to show that their experiences are not that uncommon.

Could you be more specific as to who should respond? If nerdy means high IQ + low social skills, I'm not sure I should respond, because I don't have low social skills, but I am an otherwise... Geeky hetero male.

I answered "sort of", but I've thought about it more and now think "not at all" may have been a better answer. I think the two Scotts are talking about a real problem but the main commonalities between my experience and theirs are:

1. not particularly successful with women (I was single for most of high school and have been single for long stretches of my adult life)
2. afraid to let people know I was interested in them
3. depressed about lack of romantic success

and I don't think it's particularly controversial that those are common straight male nerd experiences (or common experiences for other demographics, especially the second and third things on the list). The controversial thing is whether these problems were caused or worsened by feminist ideas, which in my case was not true at all.

Possibly relevant:

• I am about ten years older than both Scotts.
• I did not "go to college" in the sense of earning a degree. (I took a bunch of music classes at a community college -- i.e., a college without dorms. I never attended anything like the sexual-assault prevention workshops Scott Aaronson mentions.)

I had zero experience with women in high school, but found I was well ahead of the curve after college. My experience is most single people under 30 have relationship issues to some degree or another. I find just generally being more socialable is the best cure. Trying to specifically get good at relationships without learning the rest of it is setting yourself up for failure.

Perhaps a distinction should be made between the different reasons for asking someone out, because there's a gender imbalance in them. Namely, one could desire someone mainly for sex (because the target is one of several attractive people around) or mainly because they want a relationship with that specific person (and none other), i.e. a crush. At least what I get from SSC's account of Aaronson's experience was that the latter was more motivated by sex.

If lonely male nerds are motivated by the first and lonely female nerds (or girls in general) are motivated by the second, and both parties know this, then obviously the guy is going to be rejected. Both the guy and the girl need to have significantly more sexual experience than the typical high schooler in order for the idea of casual sex / friends with benefits to appeal to the girl. (Otherwise, the sex is probably going to suck for her in every way possible, from the burden of contraception to failure of the inexperienced boy to please her sexually.) If both guy and girl were to be looking for a mainly romantic partner (in a relationship that would obviously include sex, if at a later date), then the guy's chances for approaching her would go up.

(That is not to say that they would go up by much above 0 in the given context. Expressing ("that kind of") interest in someone you're not on a chatting basis with, which apparently is how many nerdy guys approach the situation, with is a horrible social move that only the most charming and attractive can pull off. Flirting precedes confessions, people.)

I don't think this quite flies. There's no particular reason to look for adaptations relating to national politics; that's a scale we didn't evolve to handle. (Interpersonal politics, sure, but young people aren't known for playing long games there.) And putting this down to explicit planning doesn't work either; we generally see shorter planning horizons among young people, e.g. in domains like finance, where we'd normally expect analogous arguments to apply. However, a youth bulge does seem to be correlated with social unrest.

So, what's going on there? I'm not totally sure, but I'd start by looking at risk tolerance.

I'm confused. Are you assuming that the revolutionaries are altruistic, but only to people who live during their life? If they're selfish then they wouldn't care how things are for people at large, and if they're altruistic they wouldn't care about their lifespan.

I'm not sure that the returns to direct participants in many revolutions have been net-positive (relative to a probability weighted sum of possible non-revolutionary outcomes), even many decades out. Certainly the initial pain that accompanies a revolution will dull, but that's a quite different. At the very least, the accounting becomes difficult enough that a rational-choice theory of revolutions begins to look implausible, unless we modify the theory to assume that young participants are irrationally overconfident that the revolution is going to go well.

Consider the fairly small long term gains of fighter in the American Revolution, relative to a trend that favored the demands of the colonies anyway. Or the Russian Revolution, where the removal of the Czar was inevitable, but where fighting for the more revolutionary path afterwards was a terrible mistake. And also don't forget the large number of thwarted revolutions.

You aren't missing anything, but this is not exactly news - the Bay Area is one of the most expensive places in the US, so its amenities are largely for those who can afford the rent. And, ultimately, most of its benefits are simply reflected in higher real-estate values for landowners. Lower zoning regulations would help, of course - as would getting rid of the insanity known as Prop 13.

have you given any thought to what you have taken for granted now that you may have to discard in, say, 300 years?

This is getting old. You've been hammering at the same point over and over.

I wonder why people like us who talk about wanting to "live forever" don't think more seriously about what that could mean in terms of overturning our current assumptions and background conditions

If you think seriously about what living a lot longer than current norms would have to mean, then you'll realize that everything familiar to you now will eventually vanish, and new things will take their place.

that just means that these women haven't thought very hard about what living a really long time could mean

This relates to the phenomenon of getting on in years and realizing that the books which mattered to you earlier in life don't seem to have aged well when you revisit them.

I don't see how you can "found" a religion and know that it will stick around after your death

I wonder how this political subculture will look in the coming years as its Boomer adherents continue to die off

This is obviously a very important matter for you, but why repeat the same argument, why ask the same question a dozen times?

Shifts like that also happen on much shorter time scales. Besides, to experience one, just move to a different country and see how you like it.

Hey, if neoreactionaries will dominate in the 24th Century, it means you have to be very good right now and do your utmost to forge a future worth living. Because who knows, they might take our time as their model:))

Hypothetical future person:

"Oh no, I've woken from cryonic sleep and no-one like Harry Potter! What am I to do with myself? Life without Harry Potter is cold, and void of meaning. I can't live without Harry Potter. Goodbye, cruel world." bang