Query the LessWrong Hivemind

We would give you our estimates, but they're probably wrong.

Seriously: For practical real-world questions, my wild guess is that the most-upvoted answer will be "acceptably close to correct" in about two thirds of the questions that are asked. For more nebulous philosophical stuff like many-worlds and qualia, I'd put our accuracy much lower.

Related is the calibration question in the old survey, though I think the staggering accuracy here was a fluke:

Thomas Edison patented the lightbulb in 1880. I've never before been a firm believer in the wisdom of crowds, but it really came through in this case. Even though this was clearly not an easy question and many people got really far-off answers, the mean was 1879.3 and the median was 1880. The standard deviation was 36.1. Person who put "2172", you probably thought you were screwing up the results, but in fact you managed to counterbalance the other person who put "1700", allowing the mean to revert back to within one year of the correct value :P

The average person was 26.77% sure they got within 5 years of the correct answer on the lightbulb question. 30% of people did get within 5 years. I'm not sure how much to trust the result, because several people put the exact correct year down and gave it 100% confidence. Either they were really paying attention in history class, or they checked Wikipedia. There was a high correlation between high levels of confidence on the question and actually getting the question right, significant at the <.001 level.

• Caffeine: person - 0.9, LW - 0.9
• Nicotine: (not including reasons for smoking, addictiveness of smoking, or taking nicotine products to break smoking addiction) person - 0.1, LW - 0.8
• Piracetam: person - 0.05, LW - 0.25
• Oxi/Ani/other 'potent' racetams: person - 0.05, LW - 0.4
• Amphetamines (adderall, dexamphetamines, ritalin): person - 0.1, LW - 0.8
• Modafinil: person - 0.3, LW - 0.99 (!!)

Source: a rationalist's interest in nootropics and stimulants, gwern's site, personal experience with the first four but no statistics. Typical modern person probabilities from discussions with acquaintances of various levels of openness. Summary of probabilities: nicotine and amphetamines are very useful but have negative associations that require high levels of rationality to overcome. Modafinil is very useful but seeing that and using it properly is probably a tad difficult for the average person.

I cannot speak to the probabilities of others but I can give you an anecdote: me. I am dosing modafinil without a prescription (the deeper irony here is that I would actually qualify for one "on-label"). I studied the literature and 'folk lore' on the issue before making my decision.

If I am at all representative of a reasonable approximation of a rational 'typical' modern person, then I'd say that the probability is very high. (Then again, looking at how my comment history on LW has been treated that may not be a safe assumption.)

Piracetam, on the other hand, appears to have no discernable effect. I'm not even sure that placebo effect occurs; self-reported "diagnosis" of memory is a poor guide for comparing cognitive abilities -- and no material test to my knowledge has demonstrated improved cognition as a result of dosing any of the 'racetams.

As to the "etc" -- case by case basis, really. I know apocryphally ("truth in journalism") there are many college students and postdocs who 'abuse' adderal.

I would assume this varies greatly by individual, based on biological factors. My answer would be "enough to feel fit", where moderate levels of physical play would be considered fun rather than dreaded. For me that's about 40min/day, 4x per week, of weight training. I don't know if that's typical, but having lived on both sides of the line, the benefits of feeling fit are very easily worth that lost time. Everything else I do benefits, it's akin to getting enough sleep.

Going on my own anecdotal experience, I think there is substantial marginal benefit to cardiovascular exercise even at the level of 4+ hours a day of said exercise.

For a while I've been doing 4 or 5 hours a day of cycling and it seems to have weird cognitive effects similar to those of caffeine. While exercising I seem to sometimes go into some sort of trance state where I'm pretty excited and can do lots of work (at the same time as the cycling) pretty quickly without it feeling like actual work. I can listen to the same dance track 30 times without becoming bored of it. I think this might be due to 'runner's high', or due to increased blood flow to the brain.

P(infinite x,y,z) ~ .00001

Isn't that an unknowable? We literally have no means of deriving information about the universe beyond our lightcone. And that's not even touching on what qualifies as "part of" the universe, depending on which definition of "universe" you are using.

It's an undefined question, I feel.

My wild ass guess is one month.

I base this number on marijuana testing supposedly useless after a month. It does work very well for two weeks though because some byproduct is fat soluble and is absorbed by your fat cells where it takes them up to a month to completely rinse out. So, for example if you were eating a lot of high hormone ranch animal meat there may well be junk in there that takes your system a month to completely purge it out after you stop eating the high hormone ranch animal meat and you would not be able to see the effects undiluted for a month. Also this is the time granule I use for my own diet self-experiments which I seem to never get to the end of. My diets are for fitness and health purposes only as I have never been much over- or underweight.

What is the minimum effective period over which one should try a new dietary plan, before reaching conclusions on its effectiveness?

Two weeks. But don't draw conclusions based on, for example, weight even if 'looking like you have lost weight' is actually your goal.

This question could be generalized to other health issues where self-experimentation is appropriate.

It could... but the more generalized the answer the less useful it is going to be. Specifics are kind of the important thing here!

Meta comment: If this questions were in separate comments, I'd upvote/downvote differently. I'm interested in thoughts/arguments related to probability of simulation and I have little interest in solipsism or lucid dreaming. They don't seem very much related topics to me. Am I missing something?

P(Simulation) < 0.01; little evidence in favor of it and it requires that there is some other intelligence doing the simulation, that there can be the kind of fault-tolerant hardware that can (flawlessly) compute the universe. I don't think posthuman ancestors are capable of running a universe as a simulation. I think Bostrom's simulation argument is sound.

1 - P(Solipsism) > 0.999; My mind doesn't contain minds that are consistently smarter than I am and can out-think me on every level.

P(Dreaming) < 0.001; We don't dream of meticulously filling out tax forms and doing the dishes.

[ Probabilities are not discounted for expecting to come into contact with additional evidence or arguments ]

P(simulation) ~ .01 P(other minds) ~ .9999 P(dreaming) ~ .0001

(Learning to dream lucidly is largely a matter of giving this a high probability and keeping it in mind, and updating on it when you encounter, for instance, people asking whether you're dreaming.)

I find this statement curious. Perhaps my memory is simply biased on the matter but every dream I can recall -- or, rather, every dream I recall recalling (and those are far and few between at that) -- has always been lucid. Even growing up this was the case. I've always had bouts of insomnia as well. I cannot discount the possibility that I'm simply recalling those things that conform to the patterns of my expectations, but I do know for a fact that I never had to "learn" how to dream lucidly. I recall one particularly vivid string of dreams I had as a child -- or, rather, one particular recurring facet of said dreams -- that all involved me being able to walk two inches off the ground. This is actually one of my earliest memories (I recall little about my early childhood). This "walking off the ground" was something I did because I knew it was a dream.

I have no inclination towards guessing the significance (or magnitude of that significance) of this.

0.3; 0.9; 0.00hahahaha001

1 & 2: Yes, 80% confidence. However I don't think reading the sequences should be a chore. Start with the daily Seq Reruns and follow them for a week or two. If you don't enjoy it, don't read it. The reason I (and probably most people) read the Sequences was because they were fun to read.

3: "Sane" isn't precise enough to answer. However I would say that the allocation would be more sane than currently practiced with 98% confidence.

P(substantial improvement) ~ .2 P(sound investment) ~ .8 P(rationaltopia) ~ .01

For 1 and 2:

I think you need to qualify 'quality of life' a bit. Are you asking if the sequences will make you happier? Resolve some cognitive dissonance? Make you 'win' more (make better decisions)? Even with that sort of clarification, however, it seems difficult to say.

For me, I could say that I feel like I've cleared out some epistemological and ethical cobwebs (lingering bad or inconsistent ideas) by having read them. In any event, there are too many confounding variables, and this requires too much intepretation for me to feel comfortable assigning an estimate at this time.

For 3: I think I would need to know what it means to "train someone in rationality". Do you mean have them complete a course, or are we instituting a grand design in which every human being on Earth is trained like Brennan?

They are clearly able to maintain the cap for as long as they choose to. This is because the Swiss central bank has the ability to print Swiss francs. They can always make more, and use them to buy Euros. In fact, the phrase 'print' is misleading, as no paper is needed - only electronic money is created.

By this means, the swiss central bank is always able to lower the value of the Swiss franc - it can just carry on printing more until everyone who wants one for the price of 1 Euro 20 cents has one. It is impossible for speculators to buy more Swiss Francs than the bank is able to print.

The strategy seems risk free - if in the future the value of the Swiss franc ever falls against the Euro, they can reverse the process, selling all the Euros they bought earlier with Francs, and buying back their francs at their lower price, and deprinting them. After the deal is fully unwound, they should even have money left over due to the fact that they sold Francs at a higher price than they bought them back.

However, it is not. If the Euro itself were to run into trouble, and become increasingly worthless, the Swiss bank would find that its cap becomes a dead weight - as all the Euros that it bought with printed money become worthless, it will still have lots of outstanding Swiss francs, which will probably be dragged down and become worth much less themselves.

To avoid this problem, they should avoid actually buying Euros. This is done by loudly announcing their strategy of printing Swiss Francs as necessary. Since it's mathematically impossible for speculators to win by buying more Swiss Francs than the bank can print, hopefully no speculator will try, and then hopefully the bank won't actually have to buy all that many Euros after all. This should make it much less painful to abandon the cap if the Euro falls to pieces, and the Swiss want the Swiss franc to be worth much more than 1.2 Euros after all.

My own response is that all Pascal's muggings are not worth worrying about.

I'm curious why you only take into consideration scenarios that someone informs you of. That is, suppose a fourth person sits in their control center and decides that every time MichealOS refuses to give money to a Pascal's Mugger, they will simulate m^^^m people and give them fantastically happy eternal lives -- but they don't inform you of that decision.

The probability of this is vanishingly small, of course, but it's only marginally lower than the probability of your other proposed muggings. So presumably you have to take it into account along with everything else, right?