Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013

It is known.

(oh, oops, wrong fandom.)

Only tangentially related vague thought:

As I understand it, Stephen Hawking's words-per-minute in writing is excruciatingly slow, and as a result I recall seeing in a documentary that he has a graduate student whose job is to watch as he is writing and to complete his sentences/paragraphs, at which point Hawking says 'yes' or 'no'. I would think that over time this person would develop an extremely well-developed mental Hawking...

It is unclear whether the intellectual output of eminent scientists is best increased by prolonging their lives through existing medical technology, rather than by increasing their productivity through time-management, sleep-optimization or other techniques. Maybe the goal of your proposed organization would be better achieved by paying someone like David Allen to teach the von Neumanns of today how to be more productive. (MIRI did something similar to this when it hired Kaj Sotala to watch Eliezer Yudkowsky as he worked on his book.)

"Most influential/important scientists" would likely tell this organization exactly where to go and how fast. They are usually not short on cash and can handle their own affairs. Or their partners/secretaries do that already. Some eccentric ones might not, but they are even more likely to reject this "help".

I am also wondering whom you would name as top 5 or so "important scientists"?

A more straightforward approach: Give a prize to every leading scientist who reach 70, 80, and 90 years of age. It is counter-intuitive, but it seems that monetary incentives do actually influence people's mortality. Source: I remember reading this somewhere, so it must be true.

Isn't there a known phenomenon where, for example, where Nobel prize winners get significantly less productive after they win their prizes? Is it really true that the marginal benefit of keeping old scientists alive longer would be that great?

It's an interesting coincidence that JvN had both eidetic memory and extraordinary powers of mental computation. Given Hans Bethe: "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man", does anyone think maybe von Neumann had some kind of unusual hardware-level brain mutation that simultaneously made him super smart and super-good at remembering things? (Any interesting implications for the basis of human intelligence differences and thus the intelligence explosion?) Or was it the combination of extreme memory powers and computational powers that allowed JvN to achieve such fame in the first place?

Also, how hard would it be to harvest genetic material from von Neumann's grave and create a zombie von Neumann? Edit: wait, looks like he might have had some worrisome views on nukes. Though is that just hindsight bias on my part?

This seems to be effectively what universities and research groups do. Providing administrative assistance, psychological support etc. to specialist researchers. (While they don't normally provide medical care themselves they often pay for health insurance.)

What would your proposed organisation do that they don't?

Oh, but some of them are such excellent company! Feynmann was such a charming raconteur when he came to visit in 1989...

From the same article:

A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demonstration.

Yep. As I understand it, this is part of standard PUA advice.

Your "running different code" approach is nice... especially paired up with the notion of "how the algorithm feels from the inside", seems to explain lots of things. You can read books about what that code does, but the best you can get is some low quality software emulation... meanwhile, if you're running it, you don't even pay attention to that stuff as this is what you are.

tldr: Fake it 'till you make it.

Yes, IME that's very close to the truth. I think that's the “less strong version” of this comment that people were talking of.

The Blueprint Decoded puts it as ‘when you [feel low-status], you don't give yourself permission to [do high-status stuff]’.

(I also seem to recall phonetician John C. Wells claiming that it's not like working-class people don't know what upper-class people speak like, it's just that they don't want to speak like that because it'd sound too posh for them.)

Related research: Mark Leary's sociometer theory and Amy Cuddy on power posing.

I've had a similar idea that perceived self status was the primary difference between skill/comfort at public speaking. I think the theory might be a good first approximation, but that there is a lot more going on too.

A possible reason rejection therapy has positive spillover effects. When, contra your expectations, people agree to all sorts of weird requests from you, it signals to you that you are high status.

Translated out of LessWrong-speak, this equates to "A boost or drop in confidence can make you think very differently. Take advantage of confidence spirals in order to achieve social success."

Note that the flip side is that (perception of personal) high status can make you stupid, for analogous reasons to the ones you give here.

Have you considered looking into the psychology literature? http://lesswrong.com/lw/dtg/notes_on_the_psychology_of_power/

Onwards to find a combination of electrical impulses or chemicals one can pump into the brain to keep it permanently in high-status mode!

Way simplified; people are not only complicated, but different from each other.

If one stripped away the big claims and just left a correctly-sized claim about human brains, that would be better.

I think it's a grave mistake to equate self-esteem with social status. Self-esteem is an internal judgment of self-worth; social status is an external judgment of self-worth. By conflating the two, you surrender all control of your own self-worth to the vagaries of the slavering crowd.

Someone can have high self-esteem without high social status, and vice versa. In fact, I might expect someone with a strong internal sense of self-worth to be less interested in seeking high social status markers (like a fancy car, important career, etc.). When I say "a strong internal sense of self-worth", I guess I mean self-esteem that does not come from comparing oneself with others. It's the difference between saying "I'm proud of myself because I coded this piece of software that works really well" and "I'm proud of myself because I'm a better programmer than Steve is."

From what I can tell, the internal kind of self-worth comes from having values, and sticking to them. So if I value honesty, hard work, ability to cook, etc., then I can be proud of myself for being an honest hard-working person who knows how to cook, regardless of whether anyone else shares these traits. Also, I think internal self-worth comes from completing one's goals, or contributing something useful to the world, both of which explain why someone can be proud of coding a great piece of software.

(Sometimes I wonder whether virtue ethicists have more internal motivation/internal self-worth, while consequentialists have more external motivation/external self-worth.)

(It seems that people of my generation (I'm 23) have less internal self-worth than people have had in the past. If this is true, then I'm inclined to blame consumerist culture and the ubiquity of social media, but I dunno, maybe I'm just a proto-curmudgeon.)

Anyway, your theory about there being a "high self-esteem algorithm" and a "low self-esteem algorithm" seems like a reasonable enough model. And the use of these algorithms may very well correlate with social status. I just don't think the relationship is at all deterministic, and an individual can work to decouple them in his own life by developing an internal sense of self-worth.

I don't think this phenomenon is unique to status or self-esteem though. I suspect that people have different cognitive algorithms for all the roles they play in society. I have a different behavior-algorithm when interacting with a significant other than I do when interacting with my coworkers, for instance. Of course status/social dominance/etc. has a huge impact on which role you'll play, but it's not the only thing influencing it.

I think people are probably most comfortable in social roles which feel "in line" with (one of) their identities.

Last thing: I think that social status should not be equated with a direct dominance relationship between two people. Social status seems like a more pervasive effect across relationships, while direct social dominance might play a bigger role in deciding which algorithm to use. If someone big and threatening gives you an order (like "hand me your wallet"), it might activate the "Do what you're told" algorithm regardless of your general social status.

Social status would seem to correlate with how frequently you are the dominant one in social interactions. But it's not always the case. A personal servant of the king might have very high status in society, but always follow the "Do what you're told" algorithm when he's at work taking orders from the king.

(As a last note, this is why I'm really concerned about the shift from traditional manufacturing jobs to service industry jobs. Both "car mechanic" and "fast food employee" are jobs associated with a lower socioeconomic class, but the car mechanic doesn't spend all day being subservient to customers.)

That's actually discussed in Thinking Fast and Slow... familiar things that are cognitively easy to process feel nice.

The recent xkcd supports that small hacks have a large time-saving potential.

A contrary hypothesis:

Strong moral intuitions about purity do not carry significant useful knowledge about disease — and indeed can lead people to be resistant to accurate information about disease prevention. Rather, these intuitions stem from practices for maintaining group identity by refusing to share food, accommodations, or sexuality with members of rival groups. These are (memetically) selected-for because groups that do not maintain group identity cease to be groups. (This is not "group selection" — it's not that the members of these groups die out; it's that they blend in with others.)

Thus, we should expect purity memes to be strongest among people whose groups feel economically or politically threatened by foreigners, by different ethnic groups (including the threat of assimilation) or the like — and possibly weakest among world travelers, members of mixed-race or interfaith families, international traders, career diplomats, foreign correspondents, and others who benefit from engaging with foreigners or different ethnic groups.

Not exactly the same question, but see here. (Short answer: yes.)

Given the abstracted tone you seem to be trying to go for here, you might consider modifying the examples in your fourth paragraph to point to more widely separated points in subculture-space, so as to reduce the chance that an uncharitable reader might interpret this as a defensive reaction to how some particular subculture is often treated.

Is there LW discussion on the tendency to trust most everything people say?)

This older post is relevant.

It turns out that the information was exaggerated in such a way that, had I not bothered verifying, I would have updated much more strongly in favor of the efficacy of an organization of which he was a member.

I initially misread this as saying you were impressed with his persuasive skill and strongly tempted to update on the organization's effectiveness based on that.

Ideally we would have Google hits from the day before a product was officially killed, but the past is, alas, no longer accessible to us

Google kinda, sorta, lets you search the past, under "search tools." I think it filters pages by date of creation, but searches current text, so that "recent posts" type side bars pollute the results. And what is probably worse, it probably doesn't return dead pages.

Although the FIU is new, its curriculum seems to fit the old Flexner I mold. I cannot tell the state of UF's program from the site.

Research options at FIU appear limited, but if you have an interest in one among those available, this concern does not hold.

What do you want to pursue in a medical career? Research? Patient Care? Whatever earns the most money?

To find the necessary information if the answer is:

• Research - Visit the school and investigate the status of its research department. Learn about ongoing studies, the attention ratios of the Principal Investigator to Junior Investigator to students, and the amount of freedom allowed in pursuing research interests.

• Patient Care - Ask existing students of all years what their curriculum has been, and how much time they have spent with patients. Flexner I involves two years of study, then two years of practical application; Flexner II (an informal moniker) isn't a set system as individual schools are slowly implementing and trying new and different things, but generally differs from Flexner I - for example, involving patient care as part of the first two years.

• Money - There are many avenues to approach this. Naturally the more prestige your school has the better, as that will help determine the quality of your first post; however, with enough research publications you can make your own prestige, and research will always be a value marker. Your alma mater on the other hand matters less and less as time passes and jobs accumulate.

A good residency match would position me well for a fellowship in a competitive field.

Do competitive fields tend to be the highest-paying? I would have assumed that the fields where there were more people going in to them than spots available had relatively low pay due to supply and demand, and the highest pay was to be found by going in to a field that was somehow difficult, boring, or distasteful in a way that discouraged people from entering it.

Take a third option?

I quit porn three weeks ago and attempted to quit masturbation but failed. Subjectively I notice that I'm paying more attention to the women around me (and also having better orgasms when I do masturbate). My main reason for doing this was not so much that I found the research convincing as that the fact that people were even thinking about porn in this particular way helped me reorient my attitude towards porn from "it's harmless" to "it's a superstimulus, it may be causing a hedonic treadmill, and I should be wary of it in the same way that I'm now wary of sugar." (There's also a second reason which is personal.)

I like sixes_and_sevens' hypothesis. Here's another one: a smallish number of people really do have a serious porn addiction and really do benefit substantially from quitting cold turkey, but they're atypical. (I don't think I fall into this category, but I still think this is an interesting experiment to run.)

General comment: I think many people on LW have an implicit standard for adopting potential self-improvements that is way too high. When you're asking for conclusive scientific evidence, you're asking for something in the neighborhood of a 90% probability of success or higher. I think you should be willing to take probabilities of success in the neighborhood of 10% or lower in cases where the costs are sufficiently low. If you try out enough self-improvements, one of them may improve your life enough to have been worth all of the other failures (again, in cases where the costs are low). Plus, I think it's useful to make a habit out of changing your habits (think of it as simulated annealing on your life). Otherwise, you may just get better and better at arguing yourself out of changing anything.

In other words, I think people should be less risk-averse with respect to potential self-improvements. Anna thinks something like this is particularly likely to be a failure mode of people with a math background, where the demands for probability of correctness are much higher than in most of life.

Hypothesis: arbitrary long-term acts of self-control improve personal well-being, regardless of the benefits of the specific act.

I cannot reach the site from where I am now, but try to look at The Last Psychiatrist blog, it has an article right about that. Its main point is that there's a problem that cause both porn addiction and difficulties with sexual relationships, so that they're not directly related. I have to say that my experience agrees with that: I haven't any particular problem with my sexuality, and quitting porn for a couple of months did not had any noticeable positive or negative effect.

I am not sure that the evidence is conclusive enough for me to believe the validity of the claims.

I don't either. The anecdotal evidence is the usual crap that you'll see for anything, and the research they cite is equivocal or only distantly related or worse (someone linked a blog post arguing for this on LW in the past and I pointed out that most of the points were awful and one study actually showed the opposite of what they thought it showed, although I can't seem to refind this comment right now).

On skeptics.stackexchange.com, the only answer on this topic is that masturbation is completely harmless.

This page has some links to studies and informed-seeming medical opinions on the effects of porn. [comment retraction test; looks like there's no way to reverse retraction]

I've never watched porn on a regular basis for about a decade, so I won't comment about that. As for masturbation, IME there's an optimum: too much of it (more than a couple of times a week for me -- YMMV) seems to cause apathy and increase my need for sleep, but too little (less than once a week) makes it harder for me to focussedly think about anything other than women, and to fall asleep; and after ten days or so I can feel physical discomfort in my testicles (which takes hours to go away even after I eventually masturbate).

My partner (who actually had a résumé posted online, whereas I did not) got calls from two recruiters for the same company; and redirected one of them to me. We wanted to relocate to a warmer climate; we both interviewed and got offers.

In other words, I had sufficient skill ... but also I got lucky big-time.

(A harder question is whether I actually like my job. I've been doing it for 7+ years, but I'm also actively looking for alternatives.)

Comically large amounts of networking. The connection that landed me a programming job was my mom's dance instructor's husband.

I have been vocally anti-atheist here and elsewhere, though I was brought up as a "kitchen atheist" ("Obviously there is no God, the idea is just silly. But watch for that black cat crossing the road, it's bad luck"). My current view is Laplacian agnosticism ("I had no need of that hypothesis"). Going through the simulation arguments further convinced me that atheism is privileging one number (zero) out of infinitely many possible choices. It's not quite as silly as picking any particular anthropomorphization of the matrix lords, be it a talking bush, a man on a stick, a dude with a hammer, a universal spirit, or what have you, but still an unnecessarily strong belief.

If you are interested in anti-atheist arguments based on moral realism made by a current LWer, consider Unequally Yoked. It's as close to "intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism" as I can think of.

There is an occasional thread here about how Mormonism or Islam is the one true religion, but the arguments for either are rarely rational.

The optimal situation for you is that you've heard intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism but your position remains strong.

The optimal situation could also be hearing intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism, learn from it and having a new 'strong position' incorporating the new information. (See: lightness).

I sometimes see refutations of pro-religious arguments on this site, but no refutations of good arguments.

What good arguments do you think LW hasn't talked about?

My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking?

Religion holds an important social and cultural role that the various attempts at rationalist ritual or culture haven't fully succeeded at filling yet.

Clearly, the Less Wrong community generally (unanimously?) agrees about a lot of major things. For example, religion.

The 2012 survey showed something around 10% non-atheist, non-agnostic.

My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking?

From most plausible to least plausible:

• It's possible to formulate something like an argument that religious practice is good for neurotypical humans, in terms of increasing life expectancy, reducing stress, and so on.

• Monocultures tend to do better than populations with mixed cultural heritage, and one could argue that some religions do very well at creating monocultures where none previously existed, e.g., the mormons, or perhaps the Catholic Church circa 1800 in the states.

• I've heard some reports that religious affiliation is good for one's dating pool.

My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking?

You may find this helpful: http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2012/02/results-of-the-.html

I'm much closer to "below average" than to the "top" as far as LW users go, but I'll give it a shot anyway.

My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking ?

I assume that by "way of thinking" you mean "atheism", specifically (if not, what did you mean ?).

I don't know how you judge which criticisms are "legitimate", so I can't answer the question directly. Instead, I can say that the most persuasive arguments against atheism that I'd personally seen come in form of studies demonstrating the efficacy of prayer. If prayer does work consistently with the claims of some religion, this is a good indication that at least some claims made by the religion are true.

Note, though, that I said "most persuasive"; another way to put it would be "least unpersuasive". Unfortunately, all such studies that I know of have either found no correlation between prayer and the desired effect whatsoever; or were constructed so poorly that their results are meaningless. Still, at least they tried.

In general, it is more difficult to argue against atheism (of the weak kind) than against theism, since (weak) atheism is simply the null hypothesis. This means that theists must provide positive evidence for the existence of their god(s) in order to convince an atheist, and this is very difficult to do when one's god is undetectable, or works in mysterious ways, or is absent, etc., as most gods tend to be.

My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking? If you say there aren't any, I won't believe you. I sincerely hope that you aren't afraid to expose your young ones to alternate viewpoints, as some parents and religions are. The optimal situation for you is that you've heard intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism but your position remains strong.

Do you mean to ask this about specifically the religion issue or things in general? Keep in mind, that while policy debates should not be one sided, that's because reality is complicated and doesn't make any effort to make things easy for us. But, hypotheses don't function that way- the correct hypotheses really should look extremely one-sided, because they reflect what a correct description of reality is.

So the best arguments for an incorrect hypothesis are by nature going to be weak. But if I were to put on my contrarian arguer hat for a few minutes and give my own personal response, I'd say that first cause arguments are possibly the strongest argument for some sort of deity.

My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking? If you say there aren't any, I won't believe you.

How legitimate does "most legitimate" have to be? If I thought there were any criticisms sufficiently legitimate to seriously reconsider my viewpoints, I would have changed them already. To the extent that my religious beliefs are different than they were, say, fifteen years ago, it's because I spent a long time seeking out arguments, and if I found any persuasive, I modified my beliefs accordingly. But I reached a point where I stopped finding novel arguments for theism long before I stopped looking, so if there are any arguments for theism that I would find compelling, they see extremely little circulation.

The arguments for "theism" which I see the least reason to reject are ones which don't account for anything resembling what we conventionally recognize as theism, let alone religion, so I'm not sure those would count according to the criteria you have in mind.

My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking?

That's a complicated question in general, because "our own way of thinking" is not a unary thing. We spend a lot of time disagreeing with each other, and we talk about a lot of different things.

But if you specifically mean atheism in its "it is best to reason and behave as though there are no gods, because the alternative hypotheses don't have enough evidence to justify their consideration" formulation, I think the most legitimate objection is that it may turn out to be true that, for some religious traditions -- maybe even for most religious traditions -- being socially and psychologically invested in that tradition gets me more of what I want than not being invested in it, even if the traditions themselves include epistemically unjustifiable states (such as the belief that an entity exists that both created the universe and prefers that I not eat pork) or false claims about the world (as they most likely do, especially if this turns out to be true for religious traditions that disagree with one another about those claims).

I don't know if that's true, but it's plausible, and if it is true it's important. (Not least of which because it demonstrates that those of us who are committed to a non-religious tradition need to do more work at improving the pragmatic value of our social structures.)

My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking?

What do you mean by "your own way of thinking" here? I can think of the following possible interpretations:

• The way I personally think about things
• The way this community thinks about things
• Atheism and skepticism in general

what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking?

I have no sense of what's important, and respond to stimuli that I should just ignore.

"Foos can suffer" could mean "all foos can suffer", "the prototypical foo can suffer", or "there exists a foo that can suffer".

You might clarify whether "mammals" is meant to include humans and other primates.

Thanks to everyone who participated. The survey is now closed, and the results are here. There is one tab for LessWrong respondents and one tab for expert respondents.

Nitpicking: The set of mammals includes humans.

(For the purposes of this survey, 'suffering' is defined as a negative subjective experience--a conscious episode that is disliked because of how it feels like.)

Can you clarify this a bit with examples of what you had in mind?

Linking old posts helps all of the new readers who are following the conversation; this is probably more important than any effects on the person you're directly responding to.

Always err on the side of littering your comment with extra links. IME, that's more practical and helpful, and I've never personally felt irked when reading posts or comments with lots of links to basic Sequence material.

In most cases, I've found that it actually helps remember the key points by seeing the page again, and helps most arguments flow more smoothly.

There is no balance. It's always better to provide the links.

If you got a reference in mind, linking it will always be more helpful than not.

The only failure mode to avoid is implicitly or explicitly stating "Because you haven't read X, your input is not worth considering."

There was a time when that was a common failure mode on LW ("Go read the Sequences, then we'll talk"). Less so now.

I generally take a moment to think about how relevant the Sequence post is. Most of the time, I conclude that <10% of the post is actually relevant to my point, so I don't bother linking, as it seems like it enormously diffuses what I'm trying to express. (I don't link nominally relevant wikipedia articles for similar reasons.)

MIRI has hired an artist, an LW programmer, and probably some others on oDesk. One person I heard about pays $1/hr people on oDesk to just sit with him on Skype all day and keep him on task.

I have used Fiverr to hire a professional voice actor to read short messages. For small scripting jobs or Photoshop work, I have always found reddit's r/forhire subreddit useful.

I've hired TaskRabbits for the following tasks, with the following levels of success:

Drive me from DC to Baltimore and back the next day - perfect & cheap

Assemble a Superintelligence owl costume and deliver it to me on the same day, with just a picture and a suggestion for the method - perfect

Pick up laundry from my back porch, have it washed, dried, folded, and return in in boxes - perfect

Make me an Anki flashcard deck for some faces and names from a business's Our Team page - perfect

Data entry - Good, though slow

Find me a good haircut place and style - meh

Find Toastmasters clubs nearby, schedule times for me to sit in on a meeting - okay, did most of it but the calendar invitations they sent me were in the wrong time zone so the times were off.

Find me a Rolfer - tried, but people didn't return their calls. However, I had immediate success when I made calls myself, so I have to wonder how hard they tried.

Assemble furniture, put privacy window film on windows - furniture ok, windows no

Pack and mail a bunch of books - nope. Took books, brought them back. Cost me time.

Experimental economists use mechanical turk sometimes. At least, were encourage to use it in the experimental economics class I just took.

imagine your ideal workplace, try to quantify what makes it ideal, and then work backwards. Or just try to make the most money you can since you're young and probably have a high stress tolerance given the lack of stressors elsewhere (children, marriage, housing, health, etc.)

A religious person does not just believe in God, s/he alieves in God, too, and logical arguments are rarely the best way to get through to the relevant alieving circuit in the brain.

If I were talking to a religious person elsewhere, that would make sense. But, this is LessWrong, and the respectful way to have this discussion here is to depend upon logic and rationalism. Anything else, and in my opinion we'd be talking down to him.

Interesting. I'd never heard of alief but it's a good way of explaining things. This is partly why I said (somewhere) that I don't think science will ever be able to fully prove this issue one way or the other—religion or lack thereof is necessarily a matter of alief as well as belief, and it's impossible in practice to look at this issue entirely rationally.

(I'm sure it's much too late now to claim I never intended to start a debate about religion. Now that there are about fifteen people all arguing against me I don't think I can keep it up, but I sure was asking for it.)

why the men are "sprinkling the ground"?

Unsure rather than "yes", but: xrrcvat gur qhfg qbja?

Regarding question 1: Fhecevfrq gurer jrer fb srj crbcyr gung xarj jung n "ubylfgbar" jnf. V thrff gurer nera'g znal Cngevpx B'Oevra ernqref urer.

Vs V'z guvaxvat pbeerpgyl, lneqf hfrq gb or ragveryl qveg, fhpu gung vs lbh fcevaxyrq gur lneq jvgu jngre, lbh pbhyq nibvq evfvat qhfg.

I also answered "unsure", and thought it was gb xrrc gur qhfg qbja (ybbxf yvxr V'z gur guveq bar va gung pnfr).

#2 V nafjrerq hafher orpnhfr gur dhrfgvba jnf nzovthbhf. V nffhzr gurl'er fcevaxyvat jngre gb xrrc gur qhfg qbja - wnavgbevny jbex. Jnf gur dhrfgvba nobhg guvf yvgrenyyl, be nfxvat nobhg gur fvtavsvpnapr bs fubjvat n srj zra qbvat wnavgbevny jbex gb gur rarzl? Orpnhfr V qba'g xabj jung gur fvtavsvpnapr bs gung fbeg bs jbex fcrpvsvpnyyl vf.

For #2 Fcevaxyvat jngre ba gur tebhaq gb xrrc vg sebz envfvat qhfg?

Likewise replied with "unsure" in the 2nd question but my guess was fcevaxyvat jvgu fbzrguvat yvxr fnyg fb gung ab jrrqf jvyy tebj.

For question 2, V oryvrir gurl ner jngrevat gur qhfgl tebhaq gb xrrc gur qhfg qbja. Bgurejvfr fjrrcvat whfg envfrf pybhqf bs qhfg vagb gur nve naq vf abg nyy gung hfrshy.

For question 3, zl rkcrpgngvba vf gung fbzr uneq sybbe (cbffvoyl pynl be qveg) vf pbirerq jvgu n yvtug ynlre bs fnaq -- fvzvyne gb ubj fnjqhfg jnf hfrq ba sybbef bs chof naq gnireaf. Gung'f abg na bcgvba va gur cbyy, gubhtu :-)

Regarding question 3, V guvax gur pbeerpg nafjre jnf gbb rnfl gb thrff; va cnegvphyne, V nz cerggl fher V thrffrq vg pbeerpgyl jvgubhg rire univat urneq gung grez orsber (ol nanybtl jvgu fnaqrq jbbq).

I personally don't get on with Anki but there are many many positive reports.

You mean like "get Chrome so you can browse LW on your phone" or like "get Sleep Cycle and, even if you don't trust its measure of how good your sleep is, you can at least log when you go to sleep and wake up every day"?

Would learning Latin confer status benefits?

Some, usually. But there is (almost) no chance that if status is your goal that learning latin is a sane approach for gaining it. Learn something social.

Taboo "status." Who do you want to impress?

Would learning Latin confer status benefits?

It probably depends on where you are, how old you are, and what your social circle is like.

Previous threads: Anti-rationality quotes and Arational quotes. There have also been A sense of logic and A Kick in the Rationals, though these were not restricted to quotes.

Should we standardize on one possibility, or decide on a case-by-case basis?

As a more serious response, I personally try to make one response, unless the commenter is still actively part of the discussion and the discussion has clearly split into two topics. In practice, that tends to weigh very strongly against splitting.

One major disadvantage of splitting an active conversation is that interesting points may go into only one branch, and end up missed in the other branch. Especially if one's main method of browsing is clicking the recent comments.

case by case seems fine.

I'm just enjoying that this post is upvoted for asking a question, by the upvoter did not make any suggestion for the answer. My sense of humor is apparently quite degenerate.

You don't evaluate the level of contemporary preference at each future time.

You evaluate the current preferences, which are evaluated over the future history of the universe.

The people to be slain will likely object to this plan based on these current preferences.

That's even less tractable a problem than summing over the utility functions of all existing agents, but that's not necessarily a game-changer. There are some other odd features of this idea, though:

• It only seems to work with preference utilitarianism; pleasure/pain utilitarianism would still treat the painless death of an agent with neutral expected utility as neutral. Fair enough; preference utilitarianism seems less broken than conventional utilitarianism anyway.
• Contingent on using preference utilitarianism, certain ways of doing the summing lead to odd features regarding changing cultural values: if future preferences are unbounded in time, a big enough stack of dead ancestors with strong enough preferences could render arbitrary social changes unethical. This could be avoided by summing only over potential lifespan, time-discounting in some way, or using some kind of nonstandard aggregation function that takes new information into account.
• Let's say we're now at a point in time . We can plan for using only the preferences of existing or previous agents; all very intuitive so far. But let's say we consider a time further in the future. New agents will have been introduced between and , and there's no obvious way to take their preferences into account; every option gives us potential inconsistencies between optimal actions planned at and optimal actions taken at time . The least bad option seems to be doing a probability-weighted average over agents extant in all possible futures, but (besides being just ridiculously intractable) that seems to introduce some weird acausal effects that I'm not sure I want to deal with. Taking the average at least avoids some of the crazier possible consequences, like the utilitarian go forth and multiply that I'm sure you've thought of already.

There are probably two stronger objections to average util along the lines you mention.

1) Instead of talking about killing someone with net positive utility, consider bringing someone into existence who has positive utility, but below the world average. It seems intuitive to say that would be good (especially if the absolute levels were really high), yet avutil rules it out. To make it more implausible, say the average is dragged up by blissfully happily aliens outside of our lightcone.

2) Consider a world where there are lives that are really bad, and better off not lived at all. Should you add more lives that are marginally less really bad than those lives that currently exist. Again, intuition says no, but negutil says yes - indeed, you should add as many of these lives as you can, as each subsequent not-quite-as-awful life raises average utility by progressively smaller fractions.

You might be interested in Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity. More generally, I was a little surprised at the pure experimental approach that didn't have a look at the degree of corruption in different real-world societies.

Corruption is widespread through our society. From major events like the Enron scandel to low level inefficiency in government it has a massive impact on our day to day lives. People aren't inherently evil, so it is the type of organisations that we create that are at fault.

I recommend "From major events like the Enron scandal to low level inefficiency in government, corruption has a massive effect on our day to day lives."

As for the next sentence, I'm not sure whether I don't understand you or don't agree with you. Admittedly, there will be more crime when there are weak barriers to crime, but I also believe that people who want to get away with something will, if they have the power, try to shape organizations which will let them get away with what they want.

Something to contemplate: Man creates huge Ponzi scheme in EVE Online just to prove he can do it. When it's over, he considers returning the money, which he has no use for, but he just can't make himself do it.