Open Thread, October 16-31, 2012

Conscientiousness is fairly rigid; it is, however, about as hereditable as IQ or less, from the 2 studies I have on hand:

• "Genetic and environmental effects on openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness: An adoption/twin study"%20-%20Genetic%20and%20Environmental%20Effects%20on%20Openness%20to%20Experience,%20Agreeableness,%20and%20Conscientiousness-%20An%20Adoption%3ATwin%20Study.pdf), Bergeman et al 1993: 29% of variance
• "Heritability of the Big Five Personality Dimensions and Their Facets: A Twin Study", Jang et al 1996: 44%

Good question. I assume you ask because conscientiousness is highly correlated with a number of positive life outcomes?

1. Conscientiousness is temporally stable, that is, in the average individual, it does not much change over time.
2. Conscientiousness is linked to a number of other personality traits - e.g. self-regulation, perseverance, etc.... These traits can be trained; and according to a quick skim of the study below, training those traits in turn effects conscientiousness, at least in children.

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/publications/EisenbergDuckworth_ConscientiousnessOriginsinChildhood_2012.pdf

1. In adults, the trait is more temporally stable (sorry, no citation off hand), but there are hacks - e.g. self-control strategies like mental contrasting, implementation intentions, learned industriousness, etc... can partially achieve the same effect as having more conscientiousness.

This is a good question though... I will investigate some more.

I have very slowly become a lot more conscientious over the course of my life. It feels like I made a deliberate effort to do so by eg leaning hard on calendars, todo lists and such, but it may simply be ageing.

This is my own thought and not backed up by any citations, but ...

Since Concientiousness is usually measured by self-reporting, you could find a Concientiousness survey and turn all the questions into affirmations, and recite these affirmations daily. "How often do you forget important deadlines?" -> "I rarely forget important deadlines." I would hypothesize that eventually you might come to believe these discrete facts about yourself. Directly, this would lead to much higher scores on future Concientiousness surveys.

I've read that the only "cure" for true personality disorders is to fake it until faking it becomes second nature. For example, narcissists pretend to care about the needs of others until they sort of start to automatically care about them. So my idea here is that by pretending to have higher Concientiousness, you might actually change.

Heckman and Tough just wrote a whole book claiming that there are cheap ways to increase conscientiousness of children, though probably only at the low end.

I think there are a couple ways to go about answering this question. If you go about it by seeing whether people who are related and people with a few life experiences that you want to track score high on a conscientiousness test, you're not really answering the question "what training would work?"

I don't have a direct answer to that, but I do have several bits of information that would be very useful for a person who would like to try and solve this:

Dabrowski did research on morality also. His theory is that there are certain traits called "super sensitivities" that predict moral behavior. There may be a way to increase these - perhaps with drugs or life experiences designed to make your nervous system more excitable.

See also Jane Elliot's brown eyes, blue eyes experiment. I don't know whether they did these formally, but they observed that when the situation was reversed (the situation was that kids with a certain eye color were told they were better and became abusive) the children who had experience being second class were much less abusive when put into the "better than" role, as if the experience of being second class had inoculated them against some amount of the bad behavior.

I researched violent crime one day and discovered that the main thing that was connected with violent crime was high testosterone. In theory, treatment using existing drugs could make a very big difference. That would probably require some kind of training intended to explain to the violent criminals that their problem was chemical, and convince them to take the drugs. This would be difficult because if they're chemically imbalanced it may not be easy to get that through to them. To an ordinary person, it's a no-brainer, but to them, it's probably not. Some type of educational program designed to get them to wake up and realize they need testosterone reduction treatment may go a long way.

This doesn't exactly qualify as training, as I've gone up to a meta level, but this kind of thinking could potentially make a very big difference:

We need to consider the role of perverse incentives. There are a lot of perverse incentives in life, and a lot of them are improperly checked and balanced. For instance, diagnosing a person with a mental disorder can be devastating to that person and to come up with an accurate diagnosis can take some time. However, psychologists are pressured to diagnose on the first visit because they can't get paid by the insurance company without it. Take a good person and put them into a bad situation, and they may react as if they were a bad person because they need to in order to survive. Identifying and changing perverse incentives might really change not only the way that a large number of people behave, but would also redirect the selection pressure on humans such that the good ones are more likely to survive and reproduce, helping to "train" our genes in the right direction, rather than just our behavior.

Aye. I'd be keen to join some sort of book club for smart people, where you could see others' bookshelves a la LibraryThing, but on top of that also have very short reviews letting you know what to expect from each book.

Most books tend to fall into two broad categories: things you already mostly know, and things you care little about. The rare high-value book is one that has just enough connection to what you already know, and makes you care about a whole new domain. (An exceptional book, like GEB, will make you care about many new domains at once.)

One recently read book that was very high value because it covered ground that was totally new to me: Abbott's System of Professions. Typically books in the sociology of professions had focused on the "trappings", professional societies, regulation and so on. Abbott pointed out that professions were the emergent result of a complex system of jurisdictional disputes, and the only way you can understand a profession is by looking at the others that compete with it for dominion over its topics. Abbot's analysis is so wide-ranging that it connects in several places with topics I care about; for instance when he analyzes "the construction of the 'personal problems' jurisdiction", a tug-of-war between the clergy, the (early) "neurologists", and psychiatry; or when he sketches the early history of the information professions - I hadn't realized that librarians were among the first such.

I have the exact same problem. You forgot about Phineus Gage and getting a pole stuck through your head.

I think one way of solving this would be to use something like workflowy to make the entire book a zoomable/compressible bullet list. That way, the book would have a section heading like "explanation of Chomsky's theory of Universal grammer" you could literally just skip that entire branch of the book (and if any part of it were referenced, you could jump back to it (because it's digital) ) .

Also, a lot of LWers (myself included) are looking to build better argument mapping software for a wikipedia of arguments type resource (though that's a bit simplified).

EDIT:

Also, you could compile all the different 1 sentence, 1 page, 5 page, 1 chapter, explanations from several different authors. for any particular bullet point.

That's the benefit of online linkable texts as opposed to books.

On the net, if you want to mention a Sequence post or a Wikipedia article, you just link to it and the reader either knows or can quickly check whether they've read it before.

In a book, if you just name-drop something like "evo-psych", the reader might have a very different, limited, or wrong conception of the subject. If you refer to another book or article that explains the subject, the reader isn't likely to have read it unless it's a very famous textbook or popular exposition (like The Selfish Gene), because there are many equally good books on any subject. So for the reader to make sure they're on the same page as the author, the book must include a long explanation of the subject referred to - even if it's not the actual topic and author would rather leave it out.

The only reason that I still read most books is that it is very low cost for me.

I think I get some benefit from reading through things I already know, though. It's going to help me remember it and the explanations are going to be somewhat different and so I'm going to get a better understanding of it overall.

I would join the group. We could do it through goodreads or a similar, better designed, site if you know of one.

this clip

There are lots of examples in the movies of two geniuses facing off and one asserting that the other can simulate the first so well as to understand and counter a particular plan; that is, of A simulating B simulating A. This example has the advantage of showing the hypothetical, rather than asserting it.

This is an example of mainstream concept of exploring the game tree. It's worth promoting, but I prefer not to call it acausal interaction.

Making good cards for spaced repetition may help.

Use your imaginary friend whom you try to explain the gist of what you've just read when, say, brushing your teeth. :)

(Actually writing down an explanation would certainly be more effective but not as fast).

I've once been told the keys were an arcane ritual called "taking good notes" combined with the Level 5 Bayesjutsu called "Condense your probability mass" and "Test your predictions".

Attempts at piercing the veil of secrecy and/or locating a tutor or manual on these rituals and techniques have proven fruitless to date. Reports of such findings have all turned out to be hoaxes or were never confirmed, potentially as the finders became part of the group which maintains the secrecy.

Maybe this is how "being a member of a group which slowly shifts towards evil" feels from inside: Increasingly realizing the importance of loyalty, and that fairness is not as important as it seemed once.

So when you notice yourself thinking: "well, technically this is not completely fair, but our group is good and we do many good things, so in the long term I can do more good by sticking to my group than by needlessly opposing it on a minor issue", you have an evidence of your group becoming just a little bit more evil.

(To be precise, "a little bit more evil" can still be predominantly good, and can still be your best available choice. It's just good to notice this feeling, especially if it starts happening rather frequently.)

Gah... just when I wasn't terrified of politics anymore...

In gist, if your ingroup does things that harm others, you are likely to subsequently shift your moral attitudes away from principles that tell you that harming others is wrong, and towards principles that value loyalty and obedience.

A more generalized version of this would read: "if your ingroup does [x], you are likely to subsequently shift your moral attitudes away from principles that tell you that [x is bad], and towards principles that [tell you that x is good as long as it's your ingroup doing it]." The chapter's from Cialdini's Influence social proof and identity self-modification seem relevent.

The fact that government isn't as good as it says it is, or that progressive ideas aren't fully consistent doesn't mean that either are fully dispensable, nor is it particularly clear that people who want to eliminate government have to stop any minor involvement they have (like voting) in order to achieve that goal.

He's reminding me of Michael Vassar's observation that geeks want explicit language in a way that most people don't. The fact that what government is and does isn't a good match for the way government is usually described isn't a good reason for eliminating government.

His point that people generally don't know anything about governing is salient, but does he have any experience running something more challenging than a solo blog?

To my mind, democracy still has the advantage that it makes it clear to politicians that there's a limit to how badly they can get away with treating the public.

He cheats a little on the the communists vs. Nazis numbers-- 6 million is just the Jews murdered by Nazis. Another five or six million Roma, homosexuals, criminals, etc. were killed in the death camps, and some 25 million (very rough estimate) were killed as a result of the Nazi side of WWII. I have no idea whether Japan would have started its war if Germany hadn't been its ally.

This being said, I agree that communism has a worse record than Nazism, but a better reputation. However, in the US and Europe, there are violent neo-Nazis but (unless I've missed something) little or nothing in the way of violent communists, so it makes sense to be more concerned about Nazis.

My problem with him is the general problem with radicals-- he needs to offer better arguments that what he's suggesting will be reliably better than the current set-up. Speaking of Nazis and Communists, it's possible to make things a lot worse because your theory sounds so attractive.

It was amusing to see that Mencius Moldbug, Dark Lord of the Convoluted Sentence, is a pretty average speaker.

I didn't know he was so young.

1. What meaning is there in doing anything (being a doctor or a psychologist for instance... or any number of other professions) if we can't even trust the research or the schooling? How can I make a difference in the world or do anything useful with no real knowledge?

That makes things sound worse than they are. I disagree that we have no real knowledge, and I'm also not sure about lumping doctors or psychologists together in this context. In medicine there are effects so huge that explaining them away as publication bias or spurious correlations is implausible (maybe because the relative risk is so huge, as with smoking causing lung cancer, or because the base rate is so low, as with asbestos causing malignant mesothelioma), so I count them as real knowledge. But I don't know of similarly huge effects in psychology, so psychology might differ in that key respect.

(Here's a speculative tangent that belongs in brackets. The foregoing might partly explain bad epistemic habits in research. Historically, lots of research went into things we basically fixed with magic bullets. So it didn't much matter when people suppressed negative results or leaned heavily on observational studies; the true effect of the magic bullets was so huge that it held up despite the biases. This might've gotten researchers into the habit of not worrying about, or not finding out about, methodological biases. But now we're searching for smaller effects those biases matter.)

Better still, most of the problems you refer to above are solvable. We could, for instance,

• publish negative results
• learn about warning signs that can indicate flaky study results
• force researchers to publicly announce trials and their endpoint measures before their trials begin
• force researchers to disclose funding sources and possible conflicts of interest
• put more effort into searching the grey literature and foreign literature when reviewing studies
• focus on randomized experiments (and use placebo controls where applicable in medical or psychological trials) over observational studies
• impress the importance of evidence-based methods & treatments on practitioners and professional organizations
• use statistical tests for detecting publication biases in reviews and meta-analyses

So, supposing I did accept the premise that the research base is so bad as to make doctors and psychologists useless, there'd still be an obvious alternative to giving up and walking away: I could become an epidemiologist or a medical statistician or a policy pundit, and encourage people to do the things I listed above.

http://www.bmj.com/content/331/7514/433

("Most published research findings are false... including this one.") ("I heard you like publication bias")

suddenly thinks of a coping strategy

Wikipedia addresses this... I was just reading the wiki on the Paleo diet and saw a bunch of stuff about repeatability and study relevance like:

Loren Cordain, a proponent of a low-carbohydrate Paleolithic diet, responded to the U.S. News ranking, stating that their "conclusions are erroneous and misleading" and pointing out that "five studies, four since 2007, have experimentally tested contemporary versions of ancestral human diets and have found them to be superior to Mediterranean diets, diabetic diets and typical western diets in regards to weight loss, cardiovascular disease risk factors and risk factors for type 2 diabetes."[27] The editors of U.S. News replied that their ranking included a review of all five studies which found that all of them were small and/or of short duration.

I realize Wikipedia isn't credible for citing or anything but I feel heartened because:

• I bet they often link to a credible meta-analysis, making it easier to find them (I've been told by Gwern that one way of coping with this is to read a meta-analysis because it gives you a number of advantages over reading individual pieces of research).

• It serves as a method for finding out about some of the flaws you need to look for when reading studies on the topic.

• It often lists a collection of relevant research, which can save time.

• It might be a good starting point for creating your own thorough reviews of studies because a lot of things will already have been hashed out, so it's just a matter of verifying that what's there is correct, which should save time if you build on it.

Hm...

Wikipedia is not a perfect solution but I think this will help me cope.

.oO I wonder if there are features that could be added to Wikipedia that would encourage the entries to transform into credible meta-analyses...

I keep all of my books as PDFs on Mendeley. If a PDF is not available, I buy a hard copy through Amazon and send it to 1DollarScan to be converted to a scanned PDF.

I can't easily consult half a dozen [e]books at once.

In terms of screen estate, I agree, but in terms of looking for something in textbooks, I find it much easier to consult multiple ebooks at once, since I can easily search through tens of them in a second.

• DRM issues: download an unencrypted backup copy, or de-RM your own.
• Search: use desktop search that indexes unencrypted books.
• Flip through, multi-open: yeah, it's a problem. Especially for scientific papers.
• Visual bandwidth: I cannot relate, I read just as fast on any screen as on paper, with no noticeable eye strain. Also, audiobooks for driving.
• Compatibility: how many old books you own are not available in digital form? Presumably, as formats change, the books get converted.

Personally, I don't buy physical books anymore, though I so have a (small) library where some old books would be hard to find online.

The solution is that causal relations are a map, reality is the territory. You and I could very possibly have different causal structures in mind when we're talking about, e.g., moving billiard balls, and we can both be correct if we have different sets of information. There is only one reality, but there are many correct maps of reality, each one corresponding to a different set of previous information.

I've wondered the same thing.

Some of it might be that no two agents will have the same experiences, and so they will not have the same probabilities assigned to particular propositions even if they started with the same priors, has identical sense-receptors, and are both perfect Bayesians.

But it seems misleading to use the label "subjectively objective" for that phenomena. And I might be totally off track, in which case I am totally confused about what "subjectively objective" is supposed to be about.

PM'd a bunch of ideas, but I dunno why you don't want them public.

Is this going to be based of the Disney film or the Hans Christian Andersen story?

This is going to be really difficult to execute. If anyone else wants this basic premise, please take it. I'd love to read someone else's take on these ideas or ideas like this.

Also, don't take this outline as a promise. I reserve the right to completely change the story's meaning and plot as I wish.

Incidentally, there was a TV cartoon series based on the movie, which takes place when Ariel was younger and hadn't yet developed her humanity obsession.

I don't know what to do with Ursula. It's tempting to make her into the overzealous feminist strawman, but that seems like a weak fight, ideologically, and that's not a message that I really want to send out. Ursula needs to stand in clear contrast to both Ariel and the patriarchal society which rejects her. It would also be nice if Ursula was relatable.

The best idea I've had so far is to make Ursula an extremely jaded and manipulative and pragmatic woman, who neglects what's good in relationships and focuses but this conflict with the Eldritch horror awesomeness that I had planned. I've got vague ideas of how to reconcile the two, but input on this would help a lot.

Having Ursula's default state be an even more powerful version of her boss form was one of the main inspirations for this fiction. Ursula has the potential to be a really cool character, and she's shaping the way that I approach my ideas about the mermaid culture and Ariel's character. I love villains, so I would really appreciate it if people helped me to not screw this one up.

EDIT: Removed faulty link.

In my preferences, I have the option "Don't show me comments with a score less than (Blank for none)" blanked out, because I wanted to see all comments. Despite that, the site seems to hide comments from me. For instance, goplat's comment in this article.

The new change that hides entire subthreads of a downvoted comment from view in the comment streams possibly overrides that old preference system.

I think you left something out of this comment. Probably most of it.

added: In the likely event that Arundelo is correct, the broken code will appear when you click the edit button and you can clean it up.

Disappearing link?

Have you read Schelling? He discusses a wide variety of maneuvers that are much like this. However, I can think of no standard names for this technique.

I suppose you could call such agents voluntary human shields.

"Utility martyr"?

It seems like the sort of thing that one would accuse another of, in order to score political points by making others feel ashamed to have sympathized with the person so accused. IOW, making the accusation is a much cheaper form of manipulation than actually doing the self-modification — and can be used to undermine many claims that one person is harming another. Thus, we should expect to hear the accusation from people who would like to go on harming others and getting away with it.

Subset of utility monster, I think.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AntiVillain ?

driving slowly

When there's snow or ice on the roads, there's really no speed slow enough that you can count on never losing traction. After the first heavy snow, you might want to practice in a low-traffic area until you get the hang of recovering from a slide. Also practice driving as if there's a full glass of water on your dashboard that you don't want to spill.

Do I need snow shoes? Spikes?

Nobody uses those for day-to-day walking, but you might want a pair of insulated boots depending on how much time you plan to spend outside. These are pretty convenient if you want to walk on ice.

Can I expect to safely walk on the sidewalk in the winter without slipping and hurting my everything?

As long as you're careful.

Do I need more/better coats than what I have now? (A duster and leather jacket, both fairly thick.)

Maybe. Again, it depends on how much you'll be outside. You'll probably want gloves.

Will I need to get a sun lamp/UV lights for the middle of the winter when the sun is up for a shorter time?

I guess, if you want to give yourself an artificial tan at home. Or are you talking about light therapy for depression? Those aren't designed to emit UV.

Long underwear is great for being warm without wearing a jacket or bulky sweaters all the time. I live in DC, and, last winter, my basement bedroom was unheated. Long underwear + lots of blankets meant I didn't care too much. Flannel sheets may also be your friend.

Please, let me know winter life hacks/survival tips/things a Texan would not know about cold weather.

The first thing to keep in mind is that winter weather is quite variable. Where I live (MA), the temperature (in Fahrenheit) in the winter ranges from around -10 to +50. It's good to have ways to keep yourself warm at various points in that range.

Going down human anatomy, I would recommend:

Head

• A warm hat that covers your ears
• If you are into outdoor exercise, a headband to keep your ears warm; they can get very cold even if you're producing enough heat to keep the rest of your body warm
• Sunglasses; snow can cause a lot of glare. Make sure they have full UV protection (most do).
• Optional: scarf and/or ski mask; on the very cold days, especially if it's also windy, it can be helpful to keep your face covered.
• Chapstick; the air is pretty dry in the winter.

Torso:

• A moderately warm jacket and a very warm jacket, for varying temperatures; I use a modular ski jacket, which has an outer shell and an inner lining. The lining can be easily detached and used as a stand-alone jacket on less cold days.
• Sweater: depending on the temperature at work, you may feel you need one. Also, at home, wearing a sweater is a lot cheaper than cranking the heat up high.

Hands:

• Get a good pair of gloves. I cannot emphasize this enough. Preferably get gloves with some grip to them, to make things like opening doors easier.
• Moisturizing lotion; as mentioned before, winter air is very dry.

Legs:

• Most people don't really do much differently here.
• Optional: Long underwear can be helpful, depending on how easily you get cold.
• If you will be getting exercise outdoors and are male, wear an extra pair of underwear, ideally not very breathable. Why is left as an exercise for the reader.

Feet:

• Insulated boots are very useful, though not absolutely necessary. In urban areas, there are often a lot of puddles from melting snow, so make sure they're very waterproof, too.
• In a less urban area or on a large college campus where you may have to trudge through deep-ish snow, I would also recommend gators to keep the snow from getting inside your shoes.
• Snowshoes and spikes are unnecessary.
• Wool socks are helpful, depending on how easily you get cold.

Other things:

• I find a sun lamp helpful; YMMV.
• People spend more time indoors with less ventilation, so diseases spread more easily. Take precautions as appropriate.

My mom broke her ankle when she slipped on some ice that was covered with snow (so that it looked safe to step on). 99.9% of the time this is not an issue though (and the snow is safe to step on...

Having been depressed before and having recently read "The Mood Cure" by Julia Ross, I think I'm going to be ordering a lamp soon.

Do I need snow shoes?

Unlikely. However, depending on average snowfall and where you walk, you'll may want waterproof boots that come up to at least your ankle (Gortex or equivalent). This also depends on how much time you plan to spend outside.

Do I need more/better coats than what I have now? (A duster and leather jacket, both fairly thick.)

Depends entirely on how much time you're outside. I tended to walk everywhere in my college days, so I wore an insulated coat. You'll probably want gloves, even if you stay inside your car most of the time. If you're outside a lot, consider a knit hat, especially if there's a lot of wind where you live.

Other things:

• Thick socks are awesome for wearing around your house.
• I like having really cheap fingerless knit gloves for typing inside.
• If you do spend time outside, look into flannel lined jeans or khakis. Thermal underwear works too.
• Heating can cost quite a bit of money; set your thermostat lower in the evenings and load up on blankets.
• At home, drafts are your enemy. If you're in a newer place, I'd assume this shouldn't be as much of a problem. If you're in a place with single pane windows, think about doing putting up window insulation film. In college, this helped with heating costs, but they have the downside of clouding the view.
• If you have your own driveway, you need a snow-shovel. Even if you theoretically have someone paid to shovel the snow.

If you don't care about walking on ice, get a nice pair of some lined duck boots (Sorbel, LL Bean). Expensive but totally worth it I think.

I recently found out about the disposable hand and foot warmers. Not perfect but they do a decent job for being so inexpensive (around $1-2).

I can't speak for his blog writings (since I have only read a few articles), but I have read his book on Nozick and am almost done with his book on Aquinas.

• Show that some medieval philosopher said the jargon claim was nonsense.

• Accuse the original atheist of spewing nonsense and being unaware of the true philosophical underpinnings of Christianity.

I have no reason to doubt your claim, but it seems plausible that he is right in this case (if, in fact, he does so accuse atheists in this way). Why? Because I had 4 years of Bible class in high school and studied philosophy of religion at university and yet still only understood the straw man versions (most likely unintentional straw men, mind you) of the arguments made by "some medieval philosopher", or had any idea about the philosophical "underpinnings of Christianity".

It wasn't until I got interested enough in the history of science to actually bother to read primary texts (in astronomy, alchemy, and "physics") that I was able to get my mind situated in such a way that I could look around at the world from within these alien Medieval paradigms and see that some of these claims weren't just silly bullshit.

Anyway, if it takes such a roundabout sequence of obscure studies to even begin to make sense of this stuff, it is no wonder that modern atheists (or virtually all Christians, for that matter) have trouble getting it right.

The bayesian/frequentist distinction can cover three different things that may occasionally be mixed up:

• The core philosophical disagreement (the "proper" one) about whether probabilities an agent's knowledge / uncertainty about the world, or whether they represent frequencies of some event. For example, a frequentist in this sense might say that it's meaningless to talk about the probability that the millionth binary digit of pi is even or odd. I think frequentist epistemology is mostly discredited, but that it used to be dominant.

• There are a bunch of hodge-podge statistical methods and tests (like p-values); and later on attempts to unify everything in terms of bayesian methods. People used to the "old" methods may not particularly call themselves "frequentists" or care that much about such labels; those pushing for the new (better) methods are the ones stressing the distinction (hunting down the sin of frequentism), sometimes to the annoyance of the rest.

• Thinking in probabilities versus thinking in frequencies (80 women out of a hundred); the human brain works better when a problem is presented in terms of frequencies

The classical way of explaining the difference is through the example of a coin that you know is biased, but you don't know whether heads or tails is favored and by how much. What is the probability that the next toss will be heads?

Supposedly, a frequentist would say that there is an objective answer, given by the bias of the coin which also equals the proportion of heads in a long run. You just don't know what it is, the only thing you know is that it is not 1/2. A Bayesian would say by contrast that since you have no information to favor one side over the other, the probability (degree of belief) you have to assign at this point is 1/2.

This only explains the question of Frequentism vs Bayesianism as philosophical interpretations of "what probability is". The practical issue of Frequentism vs Bayesianism as concrete statistical methods is often tangled with this one in discussions, but it is really a separate matter.

I had the same issue, and I'm personally not convinced there's an actual "Bayesian vs frequentist" conflict as framed in the sequences. Both are useful ways of thinking in different scenarios.

To use Emile's example, there's a distinction between the probability that you think the millionth digit of pi is even or odd, and whether it really is even or odd. Even though you don't know the millionth digit offhand, it can be computed and has a definite value, so it really doesn't matter what you think it is. Saying 50:50, or more generally an equal probability distribution, is in my mind basically the same as saying "I don't know" (i.e. "I have zero evidence for deciding one way or the other.")

There's also a difference between the parity of the millionth digit of pi, and, for example, the wind speed at an arbitrary place and future time. It's impossible to calculate, so instead you can apply Bayesian methods and estimate a range of values based on prior knowledge, and any historical data you might have access to.

I don't think Bayesians and Frequentists would answer that question differently; frequentists also use Bayes' Theorem, they just don't base all their philosophy on it.

to my understanding of the Bayesian perspective, the answer would be 7.8% and would represent the degree of uncertainty that the subject has breast cancer

The "degree of uncertainty" can be extracted from that figure but if becoming more certain decreases the figure then it requires a different word.

Is it useful to learn to REM-nap even though I don't plan to sleep polyphasically? Is it worth going through adaptation?

I don't entirely follow... Is there such a thing as 'learning to REM-nap' without the proposed mechanism of the pressure of sleep rebound forcing a REM rebound during the space of a nap?

I made an outline of polyphasic sleep recently. Feel free to read it or contribute stuff that hasn't been added yet.

https://workflowy.com/shared/5c919540-f8e7-a677-bbf9-e4ebe18b2948/

Suppose an author I like says she'll write a new work if she gets enough donations. Under CDT, it's clear to me that it can't make sense for me to donate - my donation can't increase the probability of me reading the book enough to pay for the cost, and there are much more efficient ways for me to give altruistically. What do other decision theories have to say about this?

Short answer: CDT doesn't donate. EDT, TDT and UDT all donate (assuming enough others are mutually known to be like you).

TDT was literally made for this kind of situation (because it's just a Newcomblike problem). UDT differs from TDT only in areas a bit more obscure than this. EDT is also designed to handle this perfectly too (ie. to get you the book for minimal price). If you donate evidence does suggest that enough people will donate to get you the book but if you don't donate evidence suggests that you will not.

TDT has to say that if the scenario where everyone donates you win, and you know that everyone else is using TDT or that the distribution of decision algorithms is likely to give sufficient "donate" outputs to make it better expected utility, then you should donate. Of course, if you have reliable data on others' decision algorithms, I'm pretty sure CDT and EDT and any other decision theory I've read about will boil down to an expected utility calculation or something pretty close.

Basically, as Vaniver says, all good DTs pretty much agree on this. TDT, CDT and EDT all agree that if you have common knowledge of a sufficient number of other people using the same decision theory (or, with more complicated calculations, various possible theories including those three) are interested in the book, you should all donate. This common knowledge, however, is usually the extremely costly, high-information-value part - the part about figuring out whether to donate or not seems trivial by comparison.

Apologies if sidetracking a hypothetical into the real world: kickstarter attempts to solve this problem.

Fuzzies?

As far as I can tell, any decision theory that disagrees with CDT in this case is mistaken. The author (or you) need to sweeten the deal; either the benefits need to be better, or the cost needs to be lower. Typical ways to improve the benefit are to attach status or other goods to the donation- whenever I talk about the Kickstarter projects I back, I make sure to mention that, you know, I backed them.

I just call it a cult

"Computer programmers trying to do philosophy" is how I describe LW to myself, but I don't know how effective that'd be for outsiders.

Does anyone have any good brief ways of describing LW to outsiders that have been effective? This comes up quite a bit for me with friends and family.

I think the most effective rhetorical technique would be very sensitive to the kind of person you are describing it to. I don't know if it is good, but I once said something like "it is about how you can avoid certain kinds of errors in your thinking, so that you can make better decisions".

HPMOR for everything

"It's a guy, pretty much as intelligent as, and at least twice as effective as a dozen Ph.D's in philosophy examining and discussing how to think better. Look, just... Here, The Simple Truth. Read this. It's basically this kind of thinking applied to everything."

Not that brief, but it's gotten at least a few interested in LW.

Get people to give 90% confidence intervals on 10 questions, and then at the end ask

"Ok, so who got all 10 within their intervals. 9? That's what you should have got... ok, 8? Still no-one? Ok, how about 7?"

I've done this in a few small groups, using:

• the "this is an attention test" video (aka "how many passes does the team in white make") - always a hit
• a calibration exercise just as Larks suggests below, which works pretty well
• the Wason card task - some people find it unconvincing "because it's logic" (!)
• a "learned helplessness" experiment using impossible anagrams - works so-so
• a "priming" experiment where two groups have a phrase-building task with different priming words - my version of that sucks, need to rework it
• I also show the Spinning Dancer often

For something very brief, anchoring bias is easy to demonstrate and fairly dramatic. I tried this on a friend a couple weeks ago, anchoring her on 1 million people as the population of Ghana; she guessed 900,000. Turned out to be 25 million.

The Wason selection task is a good go-to example of confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias, the triplet number test where the rule is “Any triplet where the second number is greater than the first and the third greatet than the second”. Original credit (edit:for my exposure)to Eliezer in HPmoR but I thought of it because that was what Yvain did at a meetup I was at.

Are you familiar with "Today I Die"? (also available on App Store) Seemed appropriate.

I had a brief look at the literature about a month ago and didn't find much. There is some evidence of performance enhancement from practicing motor tasks in lucid dreams (Erlacher, 2010), but the mechanism is unknown. Stumbrys et al. had two very speculative studies on asking dream characters within lucid dreams for help with problem solving (2010, 2011); they concluded that dream characters are terrible at arithmetic, but may be able to help with 'creative' tasks (I don't see good evidence for that from their data).

On lucid dream induction, Stumbrys et al. (2012) is a useful review.

Erlacher's abstract (emphasis mine):

Nocturnal dreams can be considered as a kind of simulation of the real world on a higher cognitive level. Within lucid dreams, the dreamer is able to control the ongoing dream content and is free to do what he or she wants. In this pilot study, the possibility of practicing a simple motor task in a lucid dream was studied. Forty participants were assigned to a lucid dream practice group, a physical practice group and a control group. The motor task was to toss 10-cent coins into a cup and hit as many as possible out of 20 tosses. Waking performance was measured in the evening and on the next morning by the participants at home. The 20 volunteers in the lucid dream practice group attempted to carry out the motor task in a lucid dream on a single night. Seven participants succeeded in having a lucid dream and practiced the experimental task. This group of seven showed a significant improvement in performance (from 3.7 to 5.3); the other 13 subjects showed no improvement (from 3.4 to 2.9). Comparing all four groups, the physical practice group demonstrated the highest enhancement in performance followed by the successful lucid dream practice group. Both groups had statistically significant higher improvements in contrast to the nondreaming group and the control group. Even though the experimental design is not able to explain if specific effects (motor learning) or unspecific effects (motivation) caused the improvement, the results of this study showed that rehearsing in a lucid dream enhances subsequent performance in wakefulness. To clarify the factors which increased performance after lucid dream practice and to control for confounding factors, it is suggested that sleep laboratory studies should be conducted in the future. The possibilities of lucid dream practice for professional sports will be discussed.

I've never heard of a study of whether improving skills via lucid dreaming works.

Two things that make me really want to learn how to do it, are free sex and improving my social skills by getting into unusual social situations that I couldn't try in waking life. I have heard anecdotal accounts of people using lucid dreaming for these purposes.

By the way, this is a really good book on lucid dreaming on the SIAI library thing account: http://www.amazon.ca/Exploring-World-Dreaming-Stephen-Laberge/dp/034537410X

The effect size of the higher level of CO2 on some of the tests is ridiculous. Reminds me of Cochran's speculation on nitrogen content.

My [uninformed] interpretation of mathematics is that it is an abstraction which does exist in this world

It's more fun to think of the reverse relationship!

If I would be better off taking both boxes,
I desire to choose to take both boxes;
If I would be better off taking only box B,
I desire to choose to take only box B;
Let me not become attached to decision I may not want.

This doesn't help in the general case. See, for example...

If I would be better giving Parfit $100,
I desire to choose to give Parfti $100;
If I would be better off keeping my $100,
I desire to choose to keep my $100;
Let me not become attached to decision I may not want.

A step closer to accurate (albeit in need of elegant wording) would be:

If I would be better off having precommited to taking both boxes
I desire to choose to take both boxes...

There have been recent discussions on determinism in Newtonian/classical mechanics within the philosophy of science literature. See, e.g.:

Norton, John D. 2008. “The Dome: An Unexpectedly Simple Failure of Determinism.” Philosophy of Science 75:786–98. doi:10.1086/594524

Newton’s equations of motion tell us that a mass at rest at the apex of a dome with the shape specified here can spontaneously move. It has been suggested that this indeterminism should be discounted since it draws on an incomplete rendering of Newtonian physics, or it is “unphysical,” or it employs illicit idealizations. I analyze and reject each of these reasons.

Wilson, Mark. 2009. “Determinism and the Mystery of the Missing Physics.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60:173–93. doi:10.1093/bjps/axn052

This article surveys the difficulties in establishing determinism for classical physics within the context of several distinct foundational approaches to the discipline. It explains that such problems commonly emerge due to a deeper problem of ‘missing physics'.

Any idea why it went poof before?

I propose that we continue to call them koans, on the grounds that changing involves a number of small costs, and it really, fundamentally, does not matter in any meaningful sense.

Does the LessWrong community have a consensus on the subject of moral accountability, to the same extent that it has a consensus on things like free will and reductionism?

I don't know if this is a matter of consensus, but I generally see it as a matter of translating from third-person deontology to consequentialism by way of third-person virtue ethics and game theory: rather than work with concepts like "culpability" directly, I ask first whether an act is evidence that someone's likely to do other bad acts, and how well that risk can be mitigated, and second whether punishing that sort of act would make it rarer by enough to outweigh the cost and damage of punishing.

What you say is true to some extent, but there's also the fact that holding people morally responsible actually changes their behavior, and if we didn't hold anyone morally responsible for anything, people would behave worse.

their behavior is completely contingent upon their neurochemistry, which they have no control over.

People do have control over their neurochemistry. Invoking the classic compatabilist conception of free will, if they wanted to have different neurochemistry they would.

There is actually an article here titled Causality and Moral Responsibility. You may want to read the linked prerequisites first.

Moral Accountability is a lot like justice: It has a lot of psychological hooks in the human mind that make it very useful for enforcing how you want your society to be, and in the ancestral environment was probably linked far more closely to utility than it is today. The on margin effects of either cultural edifice might be good or bad but we should be careful about trying to dismantle either one.

You can also go for a cheap non-convertible standing desk and a tall stool.

In a more general effort to improve my health, or at least slowing its deterioration, I am thinking about constructing a hybrid standing desk.

Prolonged standing appears to increase the risk of varicose veins. (References: Google search of /varicose standing/.) Are you sure that replacing sitting by standing will actually benefit you?

Another possibility is to have two (smaller) desks side by side, one at sitting height and one at standing height. Use a wireless keyboard, or one with a long enough cable, that you can easily move it between tables. Mount the screen on an arm that is mounted between the two desks, swivels left-right and is long enough to reach the center point of each desk.

Depending on your monitor mount, you could attach a keyboard tray to it. Some higher-end monitor arm manufacturers will sell you a compatible tray, or you could take an existing tray and hard-mount it yourself.

For your keyboard: get a laptop stand? (something like this: http://www.amazon.com/On-Stage-LPT5000-Laptop-Computer-Stand/dp/B001AYONXU/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1350523707&sr=8-3&keywords=laptop+stand)

Or the DIY route: make a stand out of PVC or balsa wood. Or the ghetto college-student route: cardboard box.

My wall mounte monitor Arms do not have the vertical range to go from comfortable sitting to standing. Make sure to check the flexibility and correct mounting height.

"Not checking the exact origin of every single quote all the time makes you a shitty skeptic." -Abraham Lincoln

If you were married, would you rather:

Is all else equal? In particular, do I have to do any more work to earn the $80k than the $40k?

Is my spouse as gung-ho regarding effective altruism as I am?

I am mostly indifferent. I can imagine a situation in which each of those circumstances would be comfortable, given the ideal spouse. My first reaction to this prompt was to consider in what ways the difference would affect my ego: Would I feel inferior to my spouse if I earned less? Or uncomfortable? Would I like to feel dominant over my spouse if I earned more? However, I realize that salary is not an indicator of intellectual capability or compatibility. This is, I believe, a more important determinant in the ideal spouse. I have my preference, which I will not disclose, as to whether or not I like to be the "less wrong" or more knowledgable partner. Since I cannot be perfectly indifferent, I choose to earn $80k/year simply because that is the relatively-better choice for me as an individual, not because it is relatively-better than my spouse's earnings.

I trust myself to spend the money on things I value more than I trust her to. This is a no brainer.

A better question would be 80k/40k or 80k/120k

Don't care too much. $40k/yr seems to imply lesser working hours, which I would probably prefer.

It seems as though this poll breaks the comment RSS feed.

Earning less money than my partner would (in general) mean I could take of children more often with less economic cost to the family.

I would want the 80k, given I've not met anyone who trusted my idea I got from an article at Cracked - that you're supposed to help each other, and not be in debt to them, and therefore contribute the percentage you can, so if you make 20 % of the income, you're responsible for 20 % of expenses - since I've yet to make more money than any potential partners. I basically only want to feel like I'm not freeloading on anyone, including my spouse.

I envision any spouse I end up with as someone that I am entirely comfortable sharing finances with.

Also when I think about people that I have dated and possible career futures for myself, lower earnings for me would likely mean that I'm spending more time on personal projects rather than being less successful in my career, but the opposite is true for any person I've been in a relationship with for over a year.