Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2

Should I add the other sequences first, you think? It's already too long, and that'd double the length or more.

How do you put in the editing characters literally? Backslashes?

Thanks much.

I will do so, though I'm worried about what happens after I finish the "Yudkowsky Edition"; there's lots of other Less Wrong wisdom but it's further spread out and I feel like if miss some if it then people will be sad. But at any rate I plan on going back and getting the links to the posts for all the above and then doing the other sequences, then posting the whole giant thing at the top level.

Over the next few days I have a different and probably higher utility post to help Louie Helm write, though.

Most of my social group (comp sci, into metal/alternative/gaming, slightly misanthropic) went through a period of having long hair.

So it is unsurprising to me.

Just to complicate things a little: in addition to being a Vladimir, I was a male with very long hair.

Presumably people who are 'not photogenic' are not made of some different type of material that reacts differently to light than photogenic people. The problem must either be a lack of good quality photographs or an issue with uncomfortable body language when being photographed.

The camera also adds (visual cues that make it look like it adds) weight, and messes with color. My best friend just got married and had lots of photos taken of her and her husband. He looks fine because he starts out skinny as a rail and his coloration works in the photos. But in the very same photos, she develops a blotchy complexion and her hair color looks unnatural and gross. And while she's not fat, the extra ten pounds on the glossy photo nudge her a little that way. Her body language looks fine in photos (and if she were tensing up, wouldn't she also look tense on video? Video of her looks much better), and the quality of the photographer or camera can't be the issue because in the very same photograph her husband looks exactly like himself in real life and she looks weird.

xxxxx

I know why I'm not photogenic:

1. Bad posture (which I can fix when I'm standing at a mirror, but which shows up a lot on candid pictures.)

2. Trouble with facial expressions (I'm not sure how to put this ... I'm not good at knowing how my face looks, and I have a dumb expression in most pictures. The general effect is "chipmunk.")

3. Small total volume of pictures (neither I nor my friends are in the habit of taking lots of pictures of each other.)

One of my defects is -- I'm not sure if there's a shorter way to put this -- knowing what my body position would look like to an observer. It's why I can't do something like, say, golf: you'll tell me to change my form and I won't understand what I'm doing wrong because I can't "see" myself. I think that photogenic people and performers, apart from being physically attractive, are really good at "seeing" themselves.

I like your ideas. Although some become harder to enact the less frequent your desired partner type is, which seems to be a problem for some people.

I'll note that if you are only willing to spend limited time on it and have the choice between improving general attractiveness and A/B testing profiles, I would pick the former.

I'm currently aiming for the increased salary and improved fitness.

I don't hold out much hope for OKcupid, I think I'll do better just getting out more to the sorts of events that the people I am interested in might go to.

the best way to go is to ask someone of the same sex (and preferences)

Definitely. It is often recommended to guys to focus almost exclusively on advice from other males rather than women until you have reached a level of understanding such that you can reliably distinguish between people talking about what the world 'should' be like rather than what the world is. Having a certain level of social presence also makes it more likely that people will refrain from trying to foist the rules for boys on you and actually give honest assessment's of preferenes.

In my case I'm not looking for a transhumanist match: there are lots of really smart, interesting girls out there that haven't heard of transhumanism, and I have a lot more things to talk about than ethics. (Seriously, who talks about bioconservatism on the first date? Once a girl said on a first date, "There are so many books, it's the only thing that makes me really sad that I'm going to die." And I was like, "Oh, don't worry about that. We're not that far off from solving death, you'll be fine. I personally work on the problem; trust me, you'll have trillions of years to read your books." I was still able to get a second date.) I just do it because I think it's hilarious that I can come across as insane and still get girls by being relatively laconic. Social normalcy screens off epistemic oddity, to an extent. I'm not socially normal but I do an okay job at emulating it most of the time.

So those that would take inspiration from my profile, note that the nerdy parts aren't optimized for success. At all. I just like typing AIXI. AIXI AIXI AIXI AIXI AIXI...

Maybe they're just sick of half-heartedly dating folks they don't click with.

I had a brief relationship with a nice boy who had never heard of most of the things I'm interested in -- he wasn't an intellectual type. Nothing against him, but it was surprisingly disappointing. After that, I thought, "Okay, in the long run I'm going to want a deeper connection than that."

Remember, these profiles are selected from the pool of "people who link their OKCupid profile on Less Wrong, and ask advice of the LW pool".

...although I am generally surprised at how anxious people in this group are to signal transhuman weirdness, especially transhuman weirdness that only one in a few thousand people would understand or find remotely sane. Do you really have access to such a high quality dating pool that you're looking for people who will be impressed instead of confused when you name-drop AIXI and state your intention to live forever?

I admit that my profile does gratuitously signal transhuman weirdness... I'm okay with that not because I'm expecting a large number of people to be impressed rather than confused/repelled by that, but because I'm more interested in meeting the (smaller number of) people who are interested/impressed/okay with that.

If I were at all gay I would date him in a second

Last I checked, straight men aren't that into gay dudes. :P

I took it as moderate evidence that that guy is Clippy

Great profile!

witty, + 5

sci-fi and singularity geek, +5

draws a webcomic + 5

wants kids, +2

degree in worldbuilding, awesome, +10

cooking, +3

vegetarian, -2 :(

likes fancy pretentious cheese, +1

I'm too old, live on another continent, and my wife is next to me right now, -50

Thank you. Now I have a face to go with my pointless Internet crush! :)

(Philosophy was my list item. I'm good at that too, and went to grad school for it

Aargh! Surely you know that only low-status people use the preposition "for" in this context!

High-status people say "in".

Oh man, you read like an alternate universe version of me where I stayed in school and kept reading fiction. Or, if it's not quite that strong, you at least send off a lot of "in my tribe" vibes.

One of my friends likes to call me an "antisocial extrovert" - I love and need people, but, like the bandanas, one at a time. Large groups are overstimulating.

I'm almost exactly the same way. I don't need only one at a time, but I like small groups or pairs. The closer I am to the people in question, the more of them I can handle at once. I'm building a list of axes (that's the plural of "axis" here, not "axe") along which humans are distributed for social/relationship purposes, and I definitely think "what size of group do you prefer to socialize in" is important enough to be on it. (It might actually have been the first one.)

I really want to try your cauliflower soup now.

I have a rant about a set of "most private thing" answers that includes yours. You're not obliged to care, but there it is.

It is a well written and interesting profile. I'd go with it being a bit more concise, but that is my personal taste.

You make it clear that you are unapologetic about your liking of Stephenie Meyer, I don't think you need the section about liking kids movies. It seem somewhat redundant (I'm not implying that Twilight is a kids movie, simply that both make the point that your taste in media is your own, not societally driven).

It's a great profile. My preference is for more concision, but not everyone's the same about that.

IMO I think your third picture (the wedding one) should be your main one, it's a very good photo.

Well, a lot of people like physical activity in a partner -- it says something about physical attractiveness, and also a sort of energetic outlook.

As for the predominance of outdoorsy activities -- honestly some of it is a class/culture thing, but so what. I've also noticed that there's overlap between math and mountaineering -- sort of the same kind of "coincidence" as math people liking Bach. Geeks tend to be drawn to physically demanding individual pursuits: running, climbing, cycling, and to a lesser extent weights. (Swimming ought to qualify but I've never met a lot of geeky swimmers.)

I find it really interesting that I'm included in that, but I think I understand why.

I absolutely share your intimidation by really outdoorsy-oriented profiles. It makes me feel like the person would always want to be off doing things I didn't know how to do, wasn't fit enough for, or just wasn't interested in.

I don't place my mentions of cyclling in that category, for two reasons:

1) Bicycling as a primary mode of transportation is common among people my age in my city. Cycling isn't a hobby for me; my bike is my car. I rarely ride just for pleasure.

2) Because of the first point, dating another cyclist--or at least a bike-friendly person--is actually a practical matter for me. If I date someone who has a car and no bike, and we travel together, I'm relying on that person for transportation wherever we go, and cannot leave by myself if I want to. This is inconvenient at best, and potentially scary at worst. We could travel separately, but drastically different speeds make that a bit of a nuisance ... plus, traveling with my date is just nicer.

This is not to say that I wouldn't date someone who didn't use bikes for transportation. But it's easier, and if it's going to be an issue I'd like to establish that up front.

Besides ... it's a filter for the sorts of people who might think "Ugh, why are these stupid bicyclists riding in the road?! Don't they know it's just for cars?!" ;)

Outdoors-adventure stories/pictures: I also enjoy such activities in moderation (e.g. I play beach volleyball several times a week), but doing so is seen as an attractive quality (evidence of "spirituality", health, attractiveness, willpower, etc. in comparison to the stereotypical couch potato or computer nerd). So you should expect people to sell that part of themselves to the extent that it exists in any quantity.

I and 100 others second the recommendation to read OKtrends: simple, frank statistical analysis. It's not the most useful information, but I was really surprised at their frankness when discussing touchy subjects: religion, race, attractiveness. They're very down-to-Earth in their analysis.

Also a bit about what people are looking for dating wise would be useful. Generally that is too dull to put in the profile itself, but required for advice I think.

Good point.

I like the OkTrends blog; the analysis is more casual than scientific, of course, but the content is stuff that I was really interested to learn.

Also, as a more general point, I think that non-scientific but enormous back-of-the envelope calculations (like OkTrends) are a good supplement to tiny but scientifically designed studies. If the big&sloppy approach and the little&precise approach give completely different results, that's cause for further investigation. Pre-Internet, we didn't have the opportunity to do that much big&sloppy statistics, except very crude things like the census; but today, I think it might be useful to double-check the results of small experimental studies (e.g. in medicine) with self-reported stuff from an enormous population sample.

While OKTrends does contain a lot of interesting, well-explained, and often entertaining statistics, I would be very cautious about mentioning it in the same breath as anything to do with how to attract people. The folks at OKC can describe the kind of photos which get a user lots of messages--basically, pointing the camera down your cleavage if you're female, cropping your head out in favor of your abs if you're male--but a fat lot of good that does you if you have a small chest or a belly. (Or if you want to get messages other than "UR HOT WANNA GO OUT 2NITE.") Similarly, knowing that "vegetarian" is a first-message keyword which disproportionately leads to conversation is not all that helpful if you aren't one.

Relatedly, their data is collected from a large and surprisingly mainstream userbase; if LWers are as atypical as we say we are, very few of those users are going to be similar to whomever you're trying to attract. Maybe you know a geeky, intelligent woman who wouldn't roll her eyes at the headless ab shot, but I don't. If you don't believe that the target audience of OKC is very different from LW's readerbase, read the comments on any OKTrends post. They're not all inane, but ...

(I suppose I'm making the assumption there that LWers looking for dates are more interested in someone smart and with common interests than someone who relies on having tits to get attention. If I'm wrong, feel free to disregard.)

By the way, just in case you don't feel insecure enough yet, OKC claims to be quietly segregating its users by hotness. I've seen it theorized that that was a publicity stunt or a sneaky way to pull back inactive users, which seems quite plausible to me, but doesn't make the stunt any less scummy.

Don't get me wrong; I like and use OKC. Just remember that, no matter how clever and statistically sound their algorithms are, most of their data still comes from people who think that what checkout stand magazines say about people, dating, and sex is actually the gospel truth. The site's judgments are based on that standard. So don't take them too seriously.

The author of that blog seems to give advice based purely on statistical correlation without making any effort to distinguish between correlation and causation. See this post for example.

I moused over your photo thumbnails to see what whpearson was talking about and thought, "Man, who does that smile remind me of? Oh, it's Kaylee! That's a Kaylee smile."

And then I read the actual first line of your profile and cracked up.

I didn't realize there were Lwers in the New Haven area; I should've expected that to change once school started up again. Tom McCabe is nearby too, I reckon. There should be a meetup, but I'm not allowed to organize those anymore.

Unsolicited advice: Your third pic with the red dress is the best - but only 3? You could use a few more.

Aspartame is evil!

Ahh you and alicorn make me feel old. I would never have guessed so many people where were under 25.

I prefer the third picture to the first, although that may just be the clothing colours and fewer jpeg artifacts. You might want to crop the third to remove the plastic cups and extraneous people.

Other than that, I think you have a good mix of factual info to quirkiness in your profile.

You might think about re-ordering your categories of interests in terms of what is most important to you. If people are scanning then they might switch off after reading something that isn't so important (movies?) before reading something that is.

I would make your third picture your display picture.

I don't have many specific names/titles listed in the favourites section, but I found that I received more messages when I did.

Things you couldn't do without: Aspartame. Nice. :)

I seem to recall someone laying into superstition surrounding aspartame risks here a while back. Including rather adamant skepticism about a friend's belief that it was the cause of her difficulties. Was that you or do we have another fan of artificial sweetener? :)

Reiterating advice I gave someone else -- you would look better with less blurry photos.

Out of curiosity, why do you consider Schubert lieder to be controversial?

The third picture looks like you're standing at attention. I'd recommend a more relaxed-looking pose!

Hey, you live near me! Neat!

I haven't really followed the thread at all, but I grant permission to anyone to do what they want with it; it's their karma. I have a few LW posts that I'm already busy with for the next 5 days or so.

I believe you haven't written a post yet, Relsqui? I think you should do it. If you want, write a draft and set up a piratepad and link to it from here so that other people can contribute and edit.

Well, you've got preselection going for you, I guess.

I get the sense that your profile content doesn't do you justice - perhaps you could afford to be more arrogant? No one you want to meet would find you boring.

I like most of your pictures, but I would include a few where you look more friendly and approachable, eg. pictures of you at work.

1) I don't want to alarm you, but there's a tiger next to you.

2) I second the comments about your pictures. Get someone with a real camera to take some for you, smile when they do it, and then crop/balance them.

3) You made me giggle a few times; points for that.

4) I do too message men!

5) You get to goad the reader into asking you out and still have it sound like a joke exactly once. The second time it's desperate. (You do it once in the "message me if" and once in a photo caption.)

Where in CA are you from? :)

Perhaps I am alone in this, but the 2nd/middle picture looks terrible - as if you hadn't washed or shaved your head in a week.

I think the blurriness of your pictures makes you look less attractive. There was an OK Trends blog about this: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/dont-be-ugly-by-accident/

I like it. I like the humor, I like the varied skills and interests.

Really like your "you should message me if" section. I would word it a bit differently, but definitely intriguing.

So the picture with the tiger is really you!

I don't think the "head back" picture is a good pose.

97%. But I guess that's really not too surprising. One of the things I like about okcupid is how it's easy to make the match rating act as a warning. Make it ignore choices that differ form yours but you don't feel are important, and put high value on the ones that do. I can usually tell at a glance if someone is religious or highly socially conservative.

If anyone's interested in giving advice on the "actually looking attractive" aspect of OkCupid profile optimization: I am wondering what to do about facial hair. This is what it currently looks like, and I don't like it very much at all. Possible options include going back to something like this, or aborting Operation Facial Hair altogether. (My Best Face ranked the first aforelinked photo as my worst, and the other one as my best (which surprised me a bit). That is some evidence about what people prefer, but not very strong evidence, because there are several other differences between the photos that could account for some of the variation.)

You have the same first name and initials (I'm assuming) as an ex-boyfriend of mine. You're also about the same age, live in the same general area, and look quite a bit like him.

So that was slightly startling. Also, yeah, 96% match rating. There seems to be an LW value cluster that's packed pretty tightly, relative to general personspace.

Yup 96% here. :)

40% match. Wow. Picture me backing away slowly.

You may want to expand the sections "The first things people usually notice about me" and "The six things I could never do without". The former is a chance to provide a random detail about yourself. As for the latter, "eudaimonia" is a great answer, but if I didn't know the transhumanist connotation and looked it up on Wikipedia, I'd conclude that you must be a fan of virtue ethics :)

ETA: Oh, and a while back OKCupid got rid of the "I am _, __, and _" section, and incorporated the text into your self-summary. You may or may not like that.

Just say "No prudes". Why make it more complicated?

Ok, want to ask advice about something ... touchy.

Nice double entendre

Including the phrase 'sexually compatible' seems to send the right signal without being excessively crude. You can also use the question system to filter this kind of thing. There are questions that explicitly handle these sort of preferences and also the ability to select a set of questions as mandatory.

Apart from that you can do a search through all the sex questions and answer every one of them. That is what I did when I lost the 'more desiring of sex' picture on my profile and wanted to reclaim it. This will (obviously) lower the match ratings of prudes and also allow you to see [comparisons on various relevant criteria[(http://www.okcupid.com/profile/sadielou13/compare/bayesian_prior). Even if you haven't explicitly mentioned anything about prudishness you can make a reasonable inference about relative prudishness of potential matches by looking at a get a good indication of that from looking at "kinkier", "more old fashioned", "more desiring of sex" and "more moral".

(I just noticed that my rating puts me at +31% on 'pure'. WTF? I must be confused about what purity means since I could have sworn I was no such thing!)

The girl I'm primarily dating put sex as one of the six things she couldn't do without. That didn't put me off. It also screens off crazy social conservatives.

I've seen plenty of women's profiles that mention sex. I imagine if armies of pervs were a terrible problem that probably wouldn't happen as much?

If you don't want to risk that though, my recommendation would be to leave it off entirely, deal with it in messaging or in person. It seems to me that if you don't want to state it outright, you're likely to be misinterpreted.

I'd keep it impersonal and put mentions of it with words that aren't associated with sex normally or are negatively associated with sex.

"Sex is nifty" is good in that it doesn't associate you with the sex, so doesn't illicit mental images. Nifty is also an odd word to associate with sex.

"I don't have a religious view on sex" is also unlikely to get the pervs going. Both of these are a bit boring through.

Failing that, to keep it more light hearted you might want to try adding in some sexual double entendres? Hard to balance the right level of subtlety and understandability though.

I agree with wedrifed; answering questions is a good way to express this and match on it without putting it up front in your profile. By the same token, you can sort the public answers of a potential match to see if you're compatible in that way.

Somehow I doubt that the part about needing a guy to have lots of sex with you is worth mentioning.

Ok. Replying to self to keep things organized. Have made a profile.

Some of the match questions are really poorly phrased. For example, consider the question "Have you ever had a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex?" which has four possible answers:

* 1 Yes, and I enjoyed myself.  
* 2 Yes, and I did not enjoy myself.  
* 3 No, and I would never.  
* 4 No, but I would like to.  

This neglects some fairly obvious other options such as "no, and indifferent." Many other questions had similar problems. The question about contraception was confusing since it wasn't clear whether abortion was considered contraception for this purpose. I assumed that it was not but I could see someone interpreting it as referring to any form of birth control.

Drop the Myers-Brigg type indicator (very last season), and replace it with the hip and stylish Five factor model.

Or your profile will just end up attracting a bunch of Jung-fanboys who want to talk about their dream journals. :3

I really like this; good pictures, and, yes, good writing.

Your six things made me laugh. But your "private thing" answer annoys me--conveniently, I have already written out a rant about why.

The word you're looking for is probably xenophilia.

I'm going to assume you are interested in a wider range of women than the average (on lesswrong) and point out a profile that I think is successful, and might be useful to you. If you are specifically looking for gender atypical women, then probably ignore this.

Take this guy.

Things he does in his profile worth noting (but not necessarily copying)

1) Implies he gets lots messages

2) Implies that people might want to stalk him

3) Shows he can organise events IRL *

If you look at his journal, lots of people are talking to him, lots of girls are flirting with him. Those sorts of things are a lot harder to engineer than an attractive looking profile, so are good demonstrations of value. You stand out from the crowd.

I've met him in real life and he does seem successful with women. He is easy going and friendly, but intensely cocky and flirty.

*Going to an okcupid meetup is a good way of increasing your exposure on the website as well. You will be featured in diaries + pictures and if you make a good impression you'll get compliments and people to follow and comment on your journals. It can be grey hat if that is the only reason you do it though...

I like to travel and am trying to figure out how to do more of it given the twin constraints of free time and money.

If you figure this out, tell me.

Your food section is making me hungry ... but pickled onion monster what?

Your photos are quite good, and the captions made me giggle. I can see why you picked the one you did for the top picture, but I really like the smile in the last one. Smiles are very attractive.

I tend towards more brevity because I find I get bored of most long profiles (this one mostly avoided that) and I assume most women have the same reaction but I'm not sure if that's a mind projection fallacy.

For what it's worth, I think your profile could be a little longer, but the length of the one whpearson linked is excessive. Information content > brevity, but clarity > length.

Humour does seem effective in profiles but one of the reasons its a good signal is it is hard to fake and I'm always wary of trying and failing, more so in writing than in person.

I agree with this. I find humor to be a mild attraction boost, but obviously deliberate attempts at humor which flop are a pretty big turnoff. (For the record, being funny constantly, even successfully, also is--I need to know someone is capable of taking anything seriously.)

This is the problem with a lot of dating/profile advice which observes that people who are __ get lots of dates/messages. It's easy to say that, looking at the data, but much harder to squeeze any kind of practical advice out of it, since "be __" usually isn't.

That said, if you do add more content to your profile and want an opinion on e.g. whether the humor works, I'd be happy to give it another eye.

I love books. I have enough to fill two 5x5 Ikea Expedit bookcases - unfortunately I have only one to hold them. I'll leave my favorites as a surprise.

I don't recommend leaving this as a surprise. The question it prompts is "Why? What's wrong with his taste in books? Is he embarrassed or something?" And while these questions might go into a message to you from the girl of your dreams, they might also send her scurrying away.

I am a computer programmer at a small software company which provides automation software to central stations monitoring alarm systems. My main project is a framework to render a web application described in metadata by other programmers.

I would leave all that out. You already said you work as a software developer and that you have a technical degree. If a female programmer wants to know more, she can ask. The convention in these profiles is to be conversational. If you were introducing yourself to a stranger in person, and the fifth and sixth sentences out of your mouth were the above, most women would peg you as a hopeless nerd.

The probable reason this section is titled "What I'm doing with my life," is that most profile writers need to be nudged into listing actual accomplishments, but you've already established yourself as an accomplished person in the previous section, so maybe use this section to describe your hopes for the future and what you've been doing to improve yourself.

I understand that you want to discourage readers unaccepting of transhumanism, but maybe spell out how your transhumanism would affect your future partner: "Any woman that gets involved with me would have to understand that a part of my income will go to philanthropic ends -- and unusual philanthropic ends which are ridiculed by some at that! Also, I have arranged for my body to be cryonically preserved on my death, and I would prefer for my partner to assist me in that goal. At the very least, she would need to promise that she will not interfere with my arrangements."

Oops. Did not mean to write so much. I hope this is not unwelcome advice?

If you ever move to Sydney I would be highly interested in meeting you. So I would have to say, looks like your profile is working :)

In my opinion, using DST usually adds unnecessary complexity to problems that can be sufficiently solved in a Bayesian framework. Then again, I think that the same thing can often be said of descending from a Bayesian to a Frequentist approach, which is to say that most problems are simple, and properly using any framework is enough to get a good answer. See neq1's post that inspired my original comment.

That said, I work on problems that I have solved both from a Bayesian perspective and from the perspective of DST, and I have found the former lacking. There are at least a few problems that I feel like DST is much better at. If you search Google Scholar for Dempster-Shafer and look at results in the past few years, you'll notice a really clear trend for using it to extract information from noisy sensor data. That's what I use it for, and seems to be a strength of DST.

As to your second question, I think it is in the realm of possibility that Bayes can be used to construct DST, but I don't know how and if it is possible, it is certainly more difficult than going the other direction. In some sense, DST is meta-Bayesian, because PDFs of PDFs of priors can be specified, but doing that with a strictly Bayesian framework misses the set-theoretic nature of Dempster's Rule of Combination, and results in a weaker theory, that among other things, still doesn't handle contradictions any better than Bayes does.

What?! Seeing Zadeh's name should definitely give you a "fuzzy" sensation! ;-P

I've been working on this, but have been swamped with other things.

Among other things, I've reversed my position on ata's question about the equivalence of Bayesian probability and DST, and am reasonably sure that I can demonstrate that DST can be derived from, for instance, Jaynes' formulation of probability. For related reasons, I've grown to distrust most underlying formulations of DST, and while I still trust the method (it works, after all), I think standard presentations have gotten it Wrong.

Which of course means that I feel the need to get it Less Wrong before I post it here, making this a much more monumental challenge.

Thanks for your feedback. I'm planning on focusing on mindfulness and concentration, as well as the relationship between the two. I think I'll be able to address how those two are related to relaxation benefits.

Sorry but I don't really have a good answer to your question. I haven't explored many other practices with this aim. Sometimes I find that trying to put all one's attention into simple repetitive tasks where one isn't personally invested (like doing dishes) is relaxing, and can help maintain concentration during the day. This can be a form of meditation somewhat akin to walking meditation. The benefit I get from this might be dependent on my daily sitting meditation practice though.

Sweeeeet. You might want to consider putting it in an etherpad somewhere for a quick review (I think piratepad might be the most common, I dunno). If you link to it from here you should get 2 to 10 people to look at your draft.

My particular jumps in Go strength came after reading more new theory, trying to integrate it into my game for a while (and failing), and then frustratedly taking a break. I'd come back a few kyu stronger, and games would consolidate this into maybe another stone or two's increase in strength.

This happened enough that I stopped feeling frustrated (rather just stuck) and proactively took breaks. Usually about a week would do it.

After reading the post about Go, I started playing for a while ... and I was so bad so consistently I quit playing (out of discomfort with opponent discomfort, rather than frustration).

Has anyone had the experience of playing several games with no improvement? On the last online game I played, the person I played against paused to ask me if I understood the rules. The next question was, 'do you understand that you're supposed to surround my stones?' or something like that.

I know that I have trouble making any plans spanning several moves, and when I do make 'plans' I can't recall them after activity on another part of the board..

The one with akrasia is, because I wouldn't think of that as something you were learning.

I have dedicated much of my life for overcoming akrasia, especially after I found LW I've been working hard(well, thinking hard and planning hard mostly), does that count as learning?

Problems with brain biochemistry disguise themselves as psychological problems. This is a big deal and it needs more attention, because I think a lot of people are struggling with problems like this and don't know that fixing it is even possible.

Indeed. What's worse, a lot of them will spend years (and countless dollars) in therapy trying to talk their way out of their biochemical problems...

Sorry, I don't know. Omega 3, vitamins, stuff like that, but I threw the package away. It was some sort of combination box of all those supposedly important nutritients you need to take daily, with quite a lot of different stuff in it.

Are you comfortable elaborating on the problems in your social network? I've had some very frustrating issues which could be described the same way, so any related data is of interest.

I haven't been taking those all that much lately, once every 4 days or so for the last two weeks.

Bonus incentive if they are hot and of your sex of preference. (This is an entirely serious suggestion.)

I needed this too. It did in fact require a significant commitment, so she became a coauthor, which was fine for my situation.

I wrote a seminar paper that I couldn't stand by the time I was "done" with it--did some things well and others unimpressively--but the prof pushed me to publish it. (I'll skip the parts where I was making myself miserable about how terrible it was and the parts where I was running past deadline and agonizing that now it really needed to be good because I was late, so it became even later.)

His research assistant was a friend of mine with complementary skills--I am terrible at details, cleaning up loose ends, making sure ideas aren't left half-finished and unattached to their surroundings; she is good at taking unpolished idea-dumps and turning them into real papers. So when I dreaded the thought of opening it, she did her first pass. (And, uh, then I dreaded opening it again, thinking "oh no, what if it's bad and I have to figure out how to steer it back without making her feel bad". But at least it was a different reason.)

Mostly we exchanged emails and met every week or so, and we finished (and got a publication offer, whee) because I would have felt like a real jerk otherwise for dragging her into it and then flaking out. Also because my role then was mostly reacting to her changes and seeing what they suggested as next steps for me, rather than simply staring at a page I'd already been staring at unproductively.

The only potential helpers competent to discuss the contents live in different cities (except possibly XFrequentist, if he's willing).

I am actually happy with them. The required whipping into shape is editing of the material to the target journals' formats, styles, and expected audiences.

It's the lingering remnants of the severe burnout I was suffering around this time last year. The task is indeed just formatting etc. (See here.)

My suggestions: compartmentalize setting up the work environment - here: put notes on table, open file, etc. - and the actual work. Basically you set up everything you need, then get a tea and then start work. That way the setup is not perceived as real work.

I strongly support this suggestion. The setup phase can be generalized as removing trivial inconveniences and creating trivial impetuses. I often separate this stage from the actual work, sometimes with an explicit commitment not to work before the setup is done.

It is possible for me to open the files; but when I do, I have a fight-or-flight stress reaction with accompanying squirt of adrenaline.

Yup. In fact, it appears I have a mild stress reaction to just discussing doing so online.

I might take you up on it, but not right away. I want to try suggestions that directly target stress reduction first. What are the hours of overlap between your time zone and 8:30pm-10:30pm Eastern Standard Time (UTC -5)?

It won't work. I have an active dislike for the Clippy character.

Very interesting, thank you! According to Wikipedia, Tianeptine isn't available in the UK.

Some behavioral modifications (e.g. a program of exercise) are widely supposed to do better than nothing - would something along these lines serve as a useful placebo?

Things I'm curious about, but probably won't investigate in detail: Does the placebo effect really do significantly worse if you don't "believe" in it, even if you're (for example) told that it's been experimentally shown to work even if you don't believe in it?

I googled "metaplacebo" and found some kind of wiki page, but haven't looked at it yet.

What you say sounds plausible, but I don't see how to evaluate it against conflicting advice.

Quite interesting. I didn't really know much about Medical Hypotheses until I posted a link in another thread (as a minor side point) to an article my dad wrote which happened to be in that very journal, and someone pointed out what it was. Strange connection.

A long while ago I found Duesberg's papers and entered into some online debates taking his position. The end result of all that reading moved me into a position closer to yours, but more uncertain. I just went and re-read Duesberg's most recent 2003 paper and noticed it still has a noticeable pull on me after reading it, but after going back and forth several times between the two camps I usually end up somewhere lost in the middle.

Duesberg, even though probably ill-fated in his main quest, has I believe shown that the orthodox establishment has gone wrong at least in part. The history of the whole affair seems like it should be a lesson that we should learn from, a lesson that somehow results in learning and moving towards a more rational scientific establishment, more cleanly divorced from politics. That may be an interesting discussion to have here, if it hasn't already been discussed much. Deusberg suggests a jury process to replace the current peer-review system, which he is highly critical of. That could be an interesting rationalist angle on this.

I'm not in quite agreement with both of your points. Yes of course HIV is transmissable only through blood, but I don't agree with that being a good criteria for use of the term "sexually transmitted", especially when other STD's such as gonorrhea are actually effective - they are measurably hundreds of times more sexually transmissable than HIV. This is probably due to both evolved mechanisms that those STDs have (such as ulceration formation) and overall low virality and transmissability of HIV.

So it is ingenous I think to change the categorization. HIV is clearly at an extremum, and perhaps would be better classified as a weakly transmissable blood borne disease, not an STD.

The evolutionary relevance is important here. How did this evolve?

However, the typical estimates of transmission rate are extremely low: 0.05% / 0.1% per insertive/receptive P/V sex act 0.065% / 0.5% per insertive/receptive P/A sex act

At an (unrealistically?) independent 0.5% chance per act, a 50% chance of transmission would require 139 sex acts — hardly "years and years".

That is for the highest transmission activity - receptive A, so be careful not to cherry pick. Yes - 139 unprotected sex acts. It would take 1390 unprotected insertive A sex acts to reach a 50% chance of transmission.

So with some assumptions, mainly - gay bathouses and no condom use - yes the virus could spread horizontally, in theory. Although that population would necessarily first acquire every other STD known to man, more or less.

But in the general heterosexual population, not a chance. If you compare to the odds of pregnancy from unprotected sex, the insane requisite amounts of unprotected sex with strangers would result in a massive baby epidemic and far more vertical transmissions long before it could ever spread horizontally in the hetero population.

I don't know why you mention "modern developed-world rates" and then have a link to 1901 NY and Africa . . .

So in my mind this makes it technically impossible for HIV to be an STD.

At best, this can show that pandemic AIDS can't primarily result from sexual transmission of HIV, which is evidence that AIDS has causes other than HIV, but also that pandemic AIDS spreads through other means (as suggested here.

You don't need the "at best" qualifier, but yes I agree that is what this shows. Showing that however opens a crack in the entire facade. Perhaps not a critical failure, but a significant doubt nonetheless.

If the orthodox position had updated on the evidence, and instead changed their claim to "HIV is a borderline infectious disease that spreads primarily through the prenatal and blood-borne routes", then I would give them more creedence. Of course, for political reasons alone they could never admit that.

At an (unrealistically?) independent 0.5% chance per act, a 50% chance of transmission would require 139 sex acts — hardly "years and years".

I don't see why epidemiology should care about the 50% threshold. The relevant number is the expected number of transmissions per year. Thus independence is irrelevant.[1] At 200 anal tops per year per infected person, incidence should double yearly. And every top requires a bottom, so that's 400 anal sex acts per year for just doubling. It seemed to spread more quickly than that, but maybe 800 and 4x per year works. It seems just barely plausible with this transmission rate. I'm not sure of the details of bathhouses, but I thought that there was a lot of non-anal sex, too.

[1] independence is relevant if 70s gays were systematically different from the people in the study; and they probably were, eg, they probably had higher rates of STDs

(Emotional backlash isn't good at math.)

I like this sentence.

I tend to think of "HIV being the sole cause of AIDS" as the central tenet of the mainstream theory, but sure that could be true even if much of the details are wrong. Actually, I think many within the mainstream would admit most of the details are wrong - last I checked all the important details, such as how the retrovirus could come active after many years and damage T-cells and what not are all still hot research items.

And most of the specific results have been failures - no vaccine yet, just some drugs with a bunch of side effects which may or may not even improve mortality, etc etc.

I find hypotheses in the middle more likely overall - examples: that HIV is a mostly harmless retrovirus but in some people with (X, Y, Z cofactors) it can cause immune damage.

And I yes, I am at least mildly concerned about taking an HIV skeptic position in a public internet forum - and just thinking about the reasons for that causes me to slightly update to be more skeptical.

The extremely low official transmission rates indicate that HIV is probably not a sexually transmitted disease, as typically understood. According to the published transmission data, it's only effective natural means of transmission is vertical - from mother to child. From what we know about symbiosis and parasites, this should lead one to suspect it is not that lethal.

However that doesn't destroy the hypothesis that HIV could be a unique disease of civilization - a mutation of a formerly limited retrovirus into a more damaging form that spreads horizontally only through extremely unnatural novelties of the modern world - needle sharing and epic promiscuity in some subgroups. It does of course make the overall hypothesis more complex and overall less likely, but it doesn't destroy it outright.

Frankly, the thing that I most don't understand about people who are skeptical about the HIV-AIDS link is how one explains the fact that anti-virals tailored to deal with HIV work.

This is very difficult to prove ethically, and certainly hasn't been shown to satisfaction. Consider how immensely difficult it has been to understand the real health effects of fat in the diet, for example. In the 80's and 90's, we thought it was oh so simple. Today we (the wise) realize how profoundly ignorant we were then, and still are today. I think part of the rational reappraisal for the strength of the HIV hypothesis should come from a similar update.

In other words one can only cling to a high degree of certainty about the HIV hypothesis when one is profoundly ignorant concerning the depth of one's ignorance about the complexity of human health.

Even the first-gen treatments such as AZT were used due to the biochemistry of HIV (often targeting reverse transcriptase).

That's the theory.

And they worked in delaying the onset of AIDS and worked for giving people with AIDS higher life-expectancy.

Ahh the world would be so simple if that was true. The AZT clinic trial was ended prematurely and double-blindness could not be maintained due to side effects. The skeptics claim that later studies show that AZT increases long term mortality, not the other way around.

I don't see how one can easily reconcile that with HIV not being the cause of AIDS and I've never heard anything remotely resembling a coherent explanation about this.

You need to realize how impossible it would be to concretely show what you presume to high certainty. You would basically need a double blind study with two control groups, one receiving plazebo, and compare total mortality. One immediate problem is any noticeable side effects would immediately end the blindness - and the retrovirals certainly have side effects.

And even showing that AZT or drug X reduces mortality in HIV+ patients does not lead to the conclusion that HIV is the cause, or that AZT or drug X has any effect on HIV. Supplementing patients with vitamin D, or changing their diet, or feeding them aspirin, or any number of other changes could also decrease mortality, but have nothing to do with the viral theory.

Health is complex.

No I haven't seen them until now. I haven't really been looking into or thinking about this until just recently.

I originally quoted the wikipedia data, which several us tracked down and analyzed in another thread (it comes from the CDC and originally from a single medium-ish European study which I think did a fairly good job to control for factors such as condom use and what not given the complexities):

It is claimed that HIV is a sexually transmitted disease. However, the typical estimates of transmission rate are extremely low: 0.05% / 0.1% per insertive/receptive P/V sex act 0.065% / 0.5% per insertive/receptive P/A sex act

Let's compare to the 1st meta-analysis:

it finds 0.04/0.08% for insertive/receptive P/V sex in the 1st world, very similar but slightly lower to the older CDC study (from europe). They find the rates are around 5 times higher in the 3rd world.

For P/A receptive, they find a pooled per-act rate of 1.7%, about 3.5 times higher than the 1st world CDC study. I suspect this is simply because they pooled 1st and 3rd world data together.

This does not show that Wikipedia/CDC have "greatly understated" the risk for P/A sex acts - this data is in agreement. The variance is between 1st and 3rd world studies. The 1st world data is of paramount concern for the historical origin theory of the disease. The 3rd world data is a side point - not historically important and suspect in general, as in fact mentioned in the abstract.

The abstract:

We did a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies of the risk of HIV-1 transmission per heterosexual contact. 43 publications comprising 25 different study populations were identified. Pooled female-to-male (0·04% per act [95% CI 0·01—0·14]) and male-to-female (0·08% per act [95% CI 0·06—0·11]) transmission estimates in high-income countries indicated a low risk of infection in the absence of antiretrovirals. Low-income country female-to-male (0·38% per act [95% CI 0·13—1·10]) and male-to-female (0·30% per act [95% CI 0·14—0·63]) estimates in the absence of commercial sex exposure (CSE) were higher. In meta-regression analysis, the infectivity across estimates in the absence of CSE was significantly associated with sex, setting, the interaction between setting and sex, and antenatal HIV prevalence. The pooled receptive anal intercourse estimate was much higher (1·7% per act [95% CI 0·3—8·9]). Estimates for the early and late phases of HIV infection were 9·2 (95% CI 4·5—18·8) and 7·3 (95% CI 4·5—11·9) times larger, respectively, than for the asymptomatic phase. After adjusting for CSE, presence or history of genital ulcers in either couple member increased per-act infectivity 5·3 (95% CI 1·4—19·5) times versus no sexually transmitted infection. Study estimates among non-circumcised men were at least twice those among circumcised men. Low-income country estimates were more heterogeneous than high-income country estimates, which indicates poorer study quality, greater heterogeneity of risk factors, or under-reporting of high-risk behaviour. Efforts are needed to better understand these differences and to quantify infectivity in low-income countries.

So this supports the original CDC data for the 1st world.

The second meta-study finds a receptive A per act rate of 1.4%, a little lower than the 1st study, and about 2.8 times the 1st world CDC data. They make no mention of what countries, and I assume it mixes 3rd and 1st world data - it is a large meta-analysis of many studies.

There is also some serious wierdness in the 2nd study:

Per-partner combined URAI–UIAI summary estimates, which adjusted for additional exposures other than AI with a ‘main’ partner [7.9% (95% CI 1.2–14.5)], were lower than crude (unadjusted) estimates [48.1% (95% CI 35.3–60.8)]. Our modelling demonstrated that it would require unreasonably low numbers of AI HIV exposures per partnership to reconcile the summary per-act and per-partner estimates, suggesting considerable variability in AI infectiousness between and within partnerships over time.

So something doesn't fit - the per act and per partner numbers don't square up at all. Somewhere else someone posted an abstract with a similar result, how basically your chance of infection levels off quickly in couples and is much lower than you think - you are either going to get it or not irregardless of number of sex acts. This suggests that there are some major unknown immunity factors at work or the entire model is wrong.

I think the conventional theory is that HIV established an initial foothold by means such as needle sharing, blood transfusions, and P/A sex acts. That seems quite realistic to me. Why do you think it's unrealistic?

I think the needle sharing and blood transfusions is far more credible, but the 0.5% ish per act of receptive A in the 1st world could possibly support a sexual vector in the gay bathouse scene, but it is debatable.

The conventional theory requires that HIV came over as a mutated form of harmless simian SIV and spread here, through a single source vector from what I recall. Blood donation might make more sense, but one would have to look at the epidemiological models for that.

Note that spreading the idea that the transmission rate of AIDS is low has negative utility, regardless of whether it's true or not, since it would encourage dangerous behavior.

This is untrue. Consider a similar claim: "spreading the idea that very few passengers on planes are killed by terrorists has negative utility, regardless of whether it is true or not, since it would encourage dangerous behavior."

Informing people of the true risks of any activity will not in general have negative utility. If you believe a particular case is an exception you need to explain in detail why you believe this to be so.

Cocaine is a drug that a) can damage the immune system and b) reduce appetite. It isn't at all unreasonable that HIV positive individuals who were heavy cocaine users would therefore progress to full AIDS faster than others. Note also that a 2-5 timespan isn't that far off from the timespan one would expect from HIV infection to emergence of AIDS given no treatment. Note that the study authors don't seem to think that this is at all unusual and nowhere do they claim that the use of crack cocaine was somehow causing AIDS.

Has anybody ever founds someone with AIDS who did not have HIV?

According to skeptics, yes, in all but name. The standard skeptical argument is that AIDS, as it is currently defined, includes HIV+ as a necessary diagnostic criterion, and that this is a circular definition: if someone presents with all the symptoms of AIDS, but tests HIV-, then they are defined to not have AIDS. This means that 100% of diagnosed AIDS patients will be HIV+, just by definition, not due to a meaningful correlation.

It would seem to require only a microscope, as syringe and a sufficient sample of people with AIDS

The skeptical position here is that you can't actually see a virus with an optical microscope (which I believe is true), and "HIV tests" are actually just testing for HIV antibodies (or substances alleged to be HIV antibodies), not HIV itself.

I'm not endorsing these positions, just passing them along, btw.

I have some skepticism for the HIV/AIDS theory, perhaps on the level of say 20-30%. More concretely, I would roughly say I am only about 70% confident that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS,

This is something that should be relatively easy to confirm to a reasonable level of satisfaction. It would seem to require only a microscope, as syringe and a sufficient sample of people with AIDS. Has anybody ever founds someone with AIDS who did not have HIV?

Yes, unless one defines AIDS as a collection of symptoms plus HIV. I forget the name, but any definition of AIDS which does not include HIV has some HIV-.

Now on the other hand, AIDS is a syndrome of immune supression, not a disease, so there of course could be other things that cause a similar syndrome.

If not is that because nobody has bothered to take a close look? If so then I would certainly support your questioning of the standard of research supporting the mainstream position.

If you are interested in venturing down that rabbit hole, read a little Duesberg:

(warning: reading his papers may result in general increased skepticism about the medical establishment)

http://www.duesberg.com/papers/chemical-bases.html

I find denialism in all forms simply fascinating. I wonder if you could indulge my curiosity.

I will indulge your curiosity in a moment, but I'm curious why you use the politically loaded term "denialism".

As far as I can tell, it's sole purpose is to derail rational dicussion by associating one's opponent with a morally perverse stance - specially invoking the association of Holocaust Denialism. Politics is the mind-killer. In regards to that, I have just been spectating your thread with Vladimir M, and I concur wholeheartedly with his well-written related post.

There is no rational use of that appelation, so please desist from that entire mode of thought.

So, I have to wonder, what do you think is wrong with the cognitive apparatus of all those medical and research professionals who believe that HIV == AIDS and is an STD?

Firstly, I don't think nearly as many quality researchers believe HIV == AIDS as you claim, at least not internally. The theory has gone well past the level of political mindkill and into the territory of an instituitionalied religion, where skeptics and detractors are publically shamed as evil people. I hope we can avoid that here. Actually, I think most intelligent researchers, if they could afford to be honest, would admit that HIV is the major indirect causitive factor, but this is not the same as saying HIV == AIDS. Likewise, I think most would admit that HIV is not quite an STD, not really at all.

Finally, even though I just said what I think is "wrong [with] the cognitive apparatus of all those medical and research professionals", namely that it is more an issue of politically charged public positions; I should also point out that even by the standard of your implied criteria - which seems to consist of counting up scientists for or against, it is even less clear that HIV == AIDS can be supported on that criteria. (which I do not favor as a rational criteria regardless). There are a large number of skeptics on public record for that hypothesis even considering the huge social stigma associated with adopting such a position in public. The HIV==AIDS hypothesis has far more skeptics on record than String Theory, for comparison.

But regardless, counting scientists is not a good rational criteria.

If you want to get into a discussion about rationality and reasoning in highly politicized issues such as this, that is an interesting side topic. But otherwise don't stoop to the moral high ground of politicized orthodoxy - just provide your hypothesis.

This is Less Wrong, not Mere Mainstream.