Open Thread, August 16-31, 2012

people seem to get stuck on level 30, though Gwern made it to level 31

That sounds, like, offensively speciest towards Gwern! Or something.

He also has a particle physics one: Agent Higgs.

I would say that the level 30 is hard as the plain arcade, special relativity is not that relevant. If only the game allowed you to save midlevel, many more people would pass level 30.

Level 31 is easier because one of the arcade-hard tricks is removed.

ETA: Looks like level 34 is impassable without true arcade skills... It is the first level where you have both periodical obstacle and time limit

Holy shit... after playing that for a while, whenever I quickly move my eyes the page I'm reading appears to stretch along the direction of the saccade and shrink along the perpendicular direction.

This was tons of fun. Doing the wildcard levels in seen view was crazy!

I wish it had general relativity too.

Edit: also, for people wondering about the seen view, the episode of the cosmos called Journeys in Space and Time has a really awesome scene about what it would actually look like to move a significant fraction of the speed of light. Does anyone know of any (possibly more modern) other attempts to do this?

It's about 20 mins in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abp3q7aYOss

Was fun. Difficulty falls off after level 34, so keep trying :)

I wish that at level 35+ the color of the background tiles doppler shifted. Thus if you were going too fast you wouldn't be able to see >:D

It's a very good example. It also illustrates how hard is to specify a useful utility function for an AGI: "get me to my destination and don't kill anyone or cause any damage on the way" can lead to a number of non-obvious unintended consequences, compared to the CEV version "drive as a human would drive if that human were faster-thinking, calmer, clearer-minded, more focused; had sharper eyes, better knowledge of the roads and hazards, better ability to cooperate with other drivers".

None of this is news to me, but it's certainly nice to see the link being made between AI Driving and ethics in a positive light. Most people only jump to the part about "If an AI car kills someone, whose life do we ruin as vengeful punishment?"

Thanks.

I have a notion that things are still moving forward in IT because it's still something of a frontier. It's relatively possible to do good work and get paid for it without formal credentials, or at least we're not very far from the time when that was possible.

Previously, the interface responded immediately, but the vote wasn't immediately applied (if you reopened the same post/comment, you wouldn't see your vote for a while). Sometimes, a vote would be lost, never applied, even though it was reflected in the interface. It looks like now the interface waits for the vote to actually get received, and only updates once it has been. As before, it takes a while for that to happen, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all, but the difference is that now this effect is apparent.

If this delay can't be easily fixed, an animation indicating that the operation is in progress (like one appearing when sending a comment) might help with the interface responsiveness issue.

I have noticed something similar. The length of the delay appears to be correlated with the speed of my internet, so I think that what's happening is that when you click on the 'hand' your browser sends a signal to the LW servers telling it what you did, and then waits for confirmation that the comment has been upvoted before coloring the 'hand'.

Same here. FF14 for Linux.

Same here.

Yeah, been having this problem for a while, but haven't cared enough to report it. Stable Chrome on Fedora.

How long is the delay? On the order of seconds, or 10s of seconds, or minutes?

I have finally posted my self-experiment on LSD microdosing: http://www.gwern.net/LSD%20microdosing

Also of interest: Mathematics and the Psychedelic Revolution

This columnist didn't believe what was asserted by Timothy Leary and others in the GQ article, that the computer revolution and the computer graphic innovations of California had been built upon a psychedelic foundation. She set out to prove this story false. She went to Siggraph, the largest gathering of computer graphic professionals in the world, where annually somewhere in the United States 30,000 who are vitally involved in the computer revolution gather. She thought she would set this heresy to rest by conducting a sample survey, beginning her interviews at the airport the minute she stepped off the plane. By the time she got back to her desk in San Francisco she'd talked to 180 important professionals of the computer graphic field, all of whom answered yes to the question, "Do you take psychedelics, and is this important in your work?"

The article doesn't cite the column or the date. Can anyone familiar with the US graphics computing culture in the 70s and early 80s weigh in on whether the claim is in any way plausible?

What Eliezer calls doublethink most closely fits what is called 'cognitive dissonance' in psychology, but the evidence shows that we seek to resolve that dissonance either by 'compartmentalization' or by, I assume, reflective equilibrium (is there a word in psychology for this?). I don't think we deliberately self-deceive (although, perhaps therapies like CBT seek to do this with memory reconsolidation).

Humans normally get away with their biases by not examining them closely, and when the biases are pointed out to them by denying that they, personally are biased. Willful ignorance and denial of reality seem to be two of the most common human mental traits.

"Salterism refuted: removing wheels from racial Idealist heads" struck me as amusingly Quirrellish — as opposed to Malfoyish.

It does appear that almost all racialists are looking for excuses to hurt others ­— to justify defection and other loser moves in Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and other payoff matrices — by inventing wrongs done to them either by members of other races; or by the existence, visibility, or prosperity of other races.

This seems almost as if an imaginary foe is running a "divide-and-conquer" strategy against humanity: running K-means clustering, reifying the clusters, and trying to convince members of one cluster that they can't trust and should defect against members of another cluster. We know well from the history of organizations and intelligence agencies — and from history in general! — that this sort of thing is a significant risk.

Besides this and the critique of "Salterism" fubarobfusco liked to I'd also recommend these posts. I'm really quite fascinated by his concept of the "eminent self" and wish he wrote an article about how this fits into metaethics and rationality on LessWrong.

There is such a thing as genetic groupings of humans. There is such a thing as groups recognized by a given society based on heritable physical markers that are treated differently and thus develop different cultures. The word "race" is already used to describe the second one. "You're the race cops think you are", and a police officer will classify the Bantu and the San as black and the Scot as white, not the Bantu and the Scot as haplogroup L3 and the San as L0. Why overload the word, if not to justify preexisting racism?

Thank you. Lesswrong needs more race realism under what ever name.

A good article. It's not extreme at all, though. Anyone who believes that sometimes abortion is the right choice has got to agree that abortion would have been the right choice for the author's mother.

I agree almost entirely with this descripton, but the "reactionary" judgment's modus ponens is my modus tollens - that is, I judge that what McCarthy perceived as "communism" around him was an old and respectable Western tradition that did far more good than evil throughout history (according to my preferences).

I do think that this so-called "communism" ("Universalism") was in some sense a miscarriage of mainline Western Christian civilization, and that the Enlightenment's abandonment of theism for clever is-to-ought rationalizations was a time bomb - but for all its sins, it essentially was Western culture in its logical 2000-year unfolding. I insist that Modernity ought to be redeemed, not denounced and buried. And I doubt that things could have turned out very differently, that the Chesterton's Fence of older values, notably mourned even by Orwell, would have protected against all possible disasters in the face of technological change.
I know, the "logical 2000-year unfolding" might sound very far-fetched, but I've read plenty of evidence for it - for starters, see Robert Nisbet's remarkable History of the Idea of Progress and Karen Armstrong's History of God.
(Regarding modern history, I would further argue that the leftward radicalization effectively stopped in 1968, that the "60s' revolution" ended up a kind of counter-revolution in disguise - but that's a difficult subject for another day.)

In particular, it seems to me that Soviet imperialism and Mao's radical reforms, for all their unnecessary evils and wilful stupidity, led to far more net human welfare - never mind the gain in more nebulous things like "Human development"! - than their actual, really present alternatives at the time: America's pre-war relative non-interventionism; Chiang Kai-Shek's conterfactual rule in China (read up on him!) and so on.

Frankly, the absolute worst disaster that resulted from "World Communism" was probably the premature and devastating so-called decolonization - and America even at its most right-wing always disapproved of European colonialism anyway.

"democratic" == does things the State Department, NYT and/or the Pentagon like.
"undemocratic" == does things the State Department, NYT and/or the Pentagon don't like.

I'm just reading the book right now after seeing Foseti's review the other day. (The book is easy to find online.) However, I'm already familiar with most of its arguments from other sources.

This whole topic is a very deep rabbit hole, and an attempt to study it in-depth quickly leads to a baffling situation where on many questions, all respectable sources are silent or clearly wrong or incoherent, while tantalizing clues are provided by various sources that are completely obscure or (often not without good reason) utterly disreputable. But I don't think it's a topic for which LW would be a good discussion venue in any case.

If i wanted to find a way to prolong WW2 as much as possible and maximize the body count (including American one), it would be hard to find better strategy than McCarthy's proposed one. This synopsis managed to get put my opinion about him even lower. Why shall i care about political opinions of someone who never even bothered to look at map (physical map showing mountains, rivers, roads and railroads, not political one)?

Great explanation, but I think you could improve it by putting it within the context of the hierarchy of evidence (i.e., how it should be weighted as evidence), and mentioning its flaws. Often in skeptic circles I saw people using meta-analyses as the nuclear option in arguments with alternative medicine supporters or such -- things got awkward when both sides had a meta-analysis in their favor.

Actually, I'm surprised someone hasn't made a post on how to weight research in general (that probably means someone has).

I'm pretty sure this counts as wearing a clown suit to school.

I don't think it is. These are not new ideas, there are lots of people wearing this particular clown suit, and the unfortunate thing for Pinker is that most of them are clowns. That maybe strikes you as unfair, but I think even Pinker would agree that the quality of his supporters is uneven, at best.

This is just your garden-variety unpopular opinion.

In response to the blog post Nyk writes:

I am of the opinion that “politics is the mindkiller” rule is bad because it allows some unrecognized aspects of mainstream politics (i.e. Universalism) to slip under the radar. Many Universalist ideas are ‘no longer politics’ in the same way that they are ‘no longer Christian’, allowing them to bypass any red flags that might be triggered with politics and religion respectively.

James_G responds: "Echoing Player of Games: my imagined forum design is federalist, like the style of government I favour; LessWrong exhibits democratic degringolade, as does today’s West."

Also, the karma system on LW has all of the bad characteristics of demotism, and the fact that such a system of votes of equal value was chosen in the first place again seems to point to demotist bias. I would very much prefer moderation similar to the dictatorial one of Razib on GNXP.

Konkvistador (me): Razib's harsh style does indeed create a comment section well worth reading.

My opinion is that groupthink is already quite strong on LW at this point in time; I am not sure how it was in the past. Their preference for philosophy and pure reason (rather than experimental science) is immediately obvious to me as an outsider; also, some of them seem obsessed with a few topics while losing sight of other important issues. I presume that is because of their (or should I say our?) highly atypical psychological profile: many Asperger types (some borderline, but many quite beyond that), and heavily risk-averse types. There have even been articles calling for the sabotage of scientific research into computing and AI as long as they consider their current pet obsession (Friendly AI) to be not 100% implemented in a safe manner. I for one believe it becomes impossible to achieve anything at all if you crawl into a hole due to fear of inadvertently creating paperclip maximizers. At some point, you have take some risks and go past analysis paralysis.

James_G responds: "I can’t fault this."

Zack M. Davis criticizes James_G's approach of viewing humans as a collection subagents:

The subagents idea is interesting, but it seems like a metaphor at best. That humans are an incoherent kludge of partially-conflicting values is indisputable, but to say that they meaningfully factorize into subagents seems like a much stronger claim; I don’t understand what is gained by speaking of a dominant hedonistic utilitarian subagent coexisting with ideological upstart subagents, when one can just say “I value (or ‘this brain contains parts that value’, &c.) pleasure, and antivalue pain, and I also value these-and-such political goals, but not quite as much as I antivalue pain.”

Is this a mere semantic quibble?—possibly, but near the end of your “Beyond Moral Anti-realism,” you seem to want to attribute your writings to your hypothesized hedonic utilitarian subagent, and in this post you write that “the strongest sub-agent in an educated mind is usually a hedonic utilitarian[;] [i]deally, all parties to a discussion claim to share the same utility function,” and it seems unnecessary; I don’t need to suppose that my values factorize in any particular way, nor disparage any of them as mere inferior upstarts, in order to be eager to cooperate and discuss ideas with smart, sane people who happen to like things I find distasteful or abhorrent.

I strongly agree with this.

To me, a satisfactory solution to metaethics might be an algorithm for computing morality that can be isolated from the rest of a human mind

The problem is finding this algorithm. After you find it, you may isolate it from the human mind.

It's like if humans would instinctively calculate 2+2, but we wouldn't be aware of what exactly are we doing. So we would need some way to discover that we actually calculate 2+2. Later, when this fact is known and verified, we can make machines that calculate 2+2 without having to inspect human mind.

along with some explanation of why this algorithm can be said to compute morality

Such explanation would include comparing with a human mind. You can explain that the machine calculates 2+2. But to explain that the machine does the same thing that humans instinctively do, you need to compare it with a human mind.

My problem with this fic is the same as with Brutal Harry: Instead of taking a harry with no changes but a different personality and bringing him into the wizarding world, both fics immediately start with giving harry new magic powers.

The trend to moral progress has been one of less accepting of violence, [...] and less standing by while terrible things happen to others (or at least looking indignant at past instances of this).

I find this juxtaposition unintentionally hilarious. The reason modern society does so much looking indignant at past instances of terrible things happening to others, rather than stopping them while they are happening, is because the only way to stop them is to use violence oneself, which modern society is especially uncomfortable with.

In general this is the problem with attempting to blindly extrapolate present trends past the point where they come into conflict with other present trends.

I know it's a first draft, but "Better Angels of Our Nature", much as I love the idea of being able to geometrize moral stature.

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis talks about utopian dreams means hoping that a small proportion of the human race will tyrannize over the whole future.

CEV is problematic if part of my idea of knowing more includes the idea of learning from experience. I don't have unlimited trust in extrapolation.

I don't know what you mean by violence having some good traits. I can imagine an improved society which permits low-level interpersonal violence with a strong norm that equivalent retaliation should be possible. I don't think there's anything gained by big wars, but I could be wrong.

"The wrong side of history" is a way of cheating in an argument. We don't know the future, and "the wrong side of history" just implies a belief that your side will continue to win. I'm willing to bet that "the wrong side of history" is used by people who aren't comfortable with making moral pronouncements.

But it seems plausible to me that acquiring more true beliefs and thinking about them clearly might lead to discovering some values are incoherent or unreachable and thus stop pursuing them.

Some people might reasonably, and coherently, value valuing incoherent or unreachable values (in, so to say, compartmentalized good faith - that is, you might know that an algorithm is incoherent, prone to dutch-booking, etc, but it still feels just fine from the inside) - just as some people think that belief in belief might have worth of its own, are consciously hypocritical, etc.
Therefore, I'm against such one-level optimizing-away of already held values; if you see that some specific value is total mess, you might instead just compartmentalize a little, etc.

(I believe I've already mentioned the above to you at some point.)

BTW, a classic example of people valuing an unreachable value: "Love thy enemies". (Once I had an awesome experience meditating on it.)

I would benefit from seeing a clear distinction made in these discussions between two different questions about moral progress:

1) Have moral intentions improved? Does a typical person educated in an advanced society have better moral intentions (never mind outcomes) than a typical person educated in a backward society?

2) Have moral outcomes improved? Are there in aggregate more moral events and less immoral events (never mind intentions) now than previously?

Of course there is no consensus on what "moral" means in either of these questions. I think Pinkerian "amount of violence" is a pretty good proxy for 2), but not for 1).

Your counterargument to Pinker is pretty central to this thing, but as it stands it seems to boil down to a not yet very convincing "I don't care for vegetarianism. Violence is occasionally entertaining." This part should be the one that makes the reader go, hm, maybe there's a point there, but it's currently doing nothing to make me stop classifying factory farming food industry and a preoccupation with violence as problems instead of things to cherish.

Moving on to

This leads me to suspect Homer's FAI is probably different from my own FAI, is different from the FAI of 2400 AD values. If FAI2400 gets to play with the universe around forever, instead of FAI2012 I'd be rather pissed.

this is also confusing. You're basically restating the exact problem CEV is for, without mentioning that CEV is for this problem. This also really only makes sense if you antropomorphize FAI into basically an equivalent of the cultural norms of the era. There are way too many unknown unknowns in how the basic cultural backdrop would come out in the end when operated on by an AI as compared to when operated on by collective human minds for the equating to outcomes of a culture run by humans to make much sense. I'm basically assuming that the hopefully better understanding of just how intelligence works at 2400 would dominate over whatever the human cultural norms are like for how FAI2400 as opposed to FAI2012 would come out.

If I wanted to attack the thesis that we're experiencing moral progress due to cultural evolution, I'd go for looking at how we currently have unprecedented energy resources at our disposal, and can afford a great deal more social signaling of every sort than in pretty much any other point in history, and how the past 300 years we've been on a rising gradient towards the current level of resource use.

From historical perspective, I'd be interested if we can quantify any sort of differences in moral progress separate from material progress in the various geographically and culturally separate historical large civilizations, and what we can make of the collapse of the Roman Empire into the Early Middle Ages.

The article might also try to say something about what it could mean for a society to be moral, independent of how technologically advanced and resource-rich the society is.

I don't think I should be a vegetarian.

You bastard.

EDIT: That's a joke, in case it's not clear.

Literally speaking, a model, like, airplane is isomorphic to some degree or another to the real airplane of which it is a model. Is that how a scientific theory works? Is there some isomorphism between the parts of the theory and things in the world?

Yes, just like that.

In science, a model is a set of variables that stand for physical quantities, together with a set of relationships between those variables, which are asserted to correspond with the relationships among the physical quantities. The relationships are typically expressed mathematically.

For example, s = (at^2)/2, where s is the distance travelled in time t by an object under constant acceleration a starting from rest. This is a model of what happens when you drop something.

More generally, there is a Wikipedia page, which is sound but I think over-complicates the idea (and the section on "Business process modelling" doesn't belong there at all), and even more so the disambiguation page for "Model", but the same fundamental idea runs through the whole.

A model is a map of the territory. For example, we could create an emulation of a light bulb using the most the most basic understanding of a light bulb. I.e., you flip a switch, magic goes through a wire, and on goes the light bulb. Or if you wished (and could) make the model more accurate, you would go down to the level of electrons, or even further. However, you wouldn't want a model at the most fundamental level if you're trying to understand how artificial light affects human behavior, for example. Models are a tool for explaining, understanding, and predicting phenomena conveniently.

One for the startups thread?

How high are your standards for non-evilness? Singapore and Switzerland seem non-evil to me and are reasonably easy to immigrate to.

Move to a less evil society. Better yet, move to a good society, assuming such a thing exists.

Otherwise, keep you head down. Do what the society compels you to do (pay your taxes, obey the laws, etc.) because there is no sense fighting against it if there is no significant chance of reform.

Beyond that, try to live as though you lived in a good society. Focus on following your passions, finding a romantic partner, getting a fulfilling job, and so on.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/sc/existential_angst_factory/

You could try self-modifying to not hate evil people ("hate the sin not the sinner"). Here's some emotional arguments that might help (I make no claim as to their logical coherence):

If there was only one person in existence and they were evil, would you want them to be punished or blessed? Who would it serve to punish them?

If you are going to excuse people with mental illness you are going to have to draw some arbitrary line along the gradient from "purposely evil" to "evil because of mental illness." Also consider the gradient of moral responsibility from child to adult.

If someone who was once evil completely reformed would you still see value in punishing them? Would you wish you hadn't punished them while they were still evil?

Although someone may have had a guilty mind at the moment of their crime, do they still at the moment of punishment? What if you are increasing the quantum measure of an abstracted isomorphic experience of suffering?

Per Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms, the ancients had noticeably less future time-orientation than modern people. Furthermore, there were relatively few ways to make profitable investments - it's not as though a farmer could take loans out to buy a tractor.

In that context, lending is more akin to drug dealing than responsible investing. It hooks in people with poor self-control who will spend it on consumption not investment. So the logical thing to do is to crack down on the practice. Yes there are some responsible users who lose out, but that's far outweighed by the benefit to those who'd end up in debtor's prison after blowing the cash on one glorious drunken weekend.

I mean, we as a civilization still have a problem with payday loans.

I ran into a relevant paper on the 'economics of religion' which offers some interesting theories:

As one example of the approach, consider Ekelund et al.'s treatment of the church's usury doctrine (analyzed more formally in Ekelund, Robert Hébert, and Tollison 1989). Here rent seeking is seen as the primary motivation for the maintenance of a particular doctrine. The central church's monopoly position allowed it to extract rents from downstream producers (the clergy) and from input suppliers (banks) by controlling the borrowing and lending interest rates. The authors argue that usury rules enabled the church to borrow at low rates while lending (through papal bankers) at much higher rates, and they cite many sources spanning several centuries to defend their claims.

One can, however, tell a very different, though perhaps not mutually exclusive, story. Carr and Landa (1983, p. 153) and Edward Glaeser and José Scheinkman (forthcoming) argue that usury laws acted as a form of social insurance against shocks that were not otherwise insurable. In all societies, but especially simple agrarian ones, individuals face the constant threat of bad harvests and other unpredictable disasters. Interest rate restrictions can benefit the victims of bad shocks (who will have high demand for credit) while penalizing those who had experienced good shocks (and are thus in a position to lend). Glaeser and Scheinkman formalize this model and derive a variety of nonobvious predictions, including some that they test using American data. The model's greatest appeal lies in its ability to account for the pervasive nature of interest restrictions, which arise in societies and religious traditions far removed from those of medieval Europe.

Does human intuition need to be explained, or just mapped? There are explanations available for why there are many cities along rivers, and they are of positive but limited value if you want to understand why Baghdad is where it is. The history of usury laws tells a very interesting story about human intuition, and it can be used to make predictions about people's reactions to similar but novel proposals. But how to tell if there should be a more elegant explanation?

Bahá'í Faith

Is Usury Good ?:

Interestingly enough, in the tablet of Ishraqat, Baha'u'llah explicity lifts the ban on usury formerly instituted in Islam. ...

I wonder what has changed in 1300 years that it was once under the "devils influence", destined to "incur hell", and is now "lawful and pure" and instrumental to worship with "joy and fragrance, happiness and exultation"? I don't mean this flippantly, I am really interested to know if there are practical reasons for such an abrupt shift, similar to the lifting of the ban on eating pork.

Ancient Middle East

Johnson, Paul: A History of the Jews (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1987) ISBN 0-06-091533-1, pp. 172–73.

"Among the Mesopotamians, Hittites, Phoenicians and Egyptians, interest was legal and often fixed by the state. But the Hebrew took a different view of the matter."

Deuteronomy 23:20 Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon interest; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon interest; that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all that thou puttest thy hand unto, in the land whither thou goest in to possess it."

Probably because it would have had less of an impact if the Bible had said "Thou shalt not lend upon interest greater than 6% to thy brother."

That has a link to a new article by Sylvia Engdahl who has written on the importance of space for years, http://www.sylviaengdahl.com/space.htm

To reduce the inferential distance, remove the metaphor or replace it with one appropriate for your audience. "Belief is not reality", "wishing does not make it so" are some examples. Once people are comfortable with the idea, you can introduce the map/territory metaphor and link first to the Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia generally has more credibility than any niche site like LW. The "simple truth" parable on yudkowsky.net is quite engaging, but rather wordy and vague, and so should not be a primary reading, but rather a supplementary one.

People mean different things by "the map is not the territory". For instance, it's sometimes used to say "no description is perfectly accurate" whereas other times it's more like "be careful not to confuse levels of reference." And sometimes it's more like a critique of magical thinking: "changing the map doesn't change the territory."

There's a Wikipedia article about it, too ... which also isn't especially great ...

A very simple and easy first step is cutting out all liquids except for water (if that is too difficult, start with the soda). This helps a lot.

I think there is a vague consensus that, all other things equal, eating less will make you lose weight and eating more will make you gain weight? I might have seen someone post a counterexample at least once, but I might simply be misremembering.

Paleo seems to be popular around here but I am pretty skeptical of it actually being a good idea (I am open to updating if evidence is presented). Intermittent fasting is the only thing I really feel like I can recommend, and even that is something that will work for some people but not others (did not work for me, but LeanGains makes specific enough predictions that a sufficiently large number of people seem satisfied by that I am convinced it is a real phenomenon).

Also fixing any deficiencies you have (more water if you are dehydrated, for instance; probably more protein if you are a vegetarian).

If you're looking for a good diet, the first question is - a good diet for what?

The consensus I've picked up is that if you focus on just eating the right macronutrients and getting some exercise, everything else usually works out - try to replace sugar, refined starch, and processed fruit/vegetable product with protein, lowish glycemic index starch, and less bland fruit/veg.

Another idea that was useful to me is that mass-produced food has to have a low water content, or else it goes bad really quickly, and so replacing water with fat is a great way to make mass-produced food better. But in fresh food there's no such limitation. This means that eating fresher food basically substitutes fat for water in a lot of your food items.

1. Make it difficult to consume more calories than the amount of calories necessary for maintaining your target weight. E.g., make it such that you need to eat a lot of food everyday to reach the maintenance level for your target weight (fast food, e.g., makes it very very easy to go over that target). Or you only eat after a certain time late in the day.

2. Religiously monitor your progress. Take pictures of your back, side, front every week. Weigh yourself everyday. Take measurements -- use us navy body fat calculator. Find a way to show off your progress. (This is all purely motivational.)

3. Do the kind of exercise that you will excel at with your desired body type. If you want to be muscular, do a lot of body weight exercises. If you want to be lean, do a lot of long distance running. But note that some body types require different nutritional compositions.

4. This must be a lifestyle change, and not a temporary thing to just lose fat.

5. You need to believe it will work, and continually adapt to setbacks.

eta: this is what I've gathered from the research showing the strategies of people successful at losing body fat and maintaining a lower bf%.

See what you can learn. Try to steel-man the arguments that you encounter. If you're faced with bad arguments then three things that you can focus on (in declining order of priority) are: 1) what good points are in the neighborhood of this argument, 2) what is the central flaw of this argument (which gets at its core), and 3) why would someone find this argument plausible? #3 is especially useful if it can lead you back towards 1 & 2.

In most philosophy classes, you can get a good grade if you make clear arguments, and clearly lay out the arguments that you disagree with before expressing your reasons for disagreement. So it's probably worth at least giving that a try (especially if you have opportunities to try it out early in the class that won't have much effect on your final grade). If it doesn't go smoothly, before jumping to the mind-numbing "guess the password" solution, try looking at it as a problem of inferential distance. Are there ways of getting your points across more clearly based on how you frame your argument, what background information you give, which claims you leave out of your argument (because they are inessential and too many inferential steps away), etc.?

I took several philosophy-related classes (in a few different departments), and only had one where I had to do something like guessing the teacher's password. In that class the professor was a postmodernist type, who designed the course as a way to explain his worldview and assigned papers for us to write that had to follow a template that fit within his worldview. On the whole that class was a good experience. I didn't have to worry much about password-guessing except when writing those papers; in class I was sincere & engaged and focused on inferential distance (including trying to point out flaws in his reasoning in class discussion in a way that was concise, catchy to other students, and non-annoying). It took some thinking to figure out what was going on in his worldview, and where the main flaws were, which seemed like a useful exercise. I learned some things, and could have learned more if I'd put more effort into steel-manning; looking back there were a lot of arguments in the same neighborhood as Robin Hanson's points about signaling, group affiliation, and X not being about X (as well as contorted versions of other valuable LW ideas, like warnings about the mind projection fallacy). There wasn't room within the papers I wrote to raise questions about his worldview, given how the assignments were structured, but I was careful to notice when I was bullshitting or glossing over things to fit the assignment (with one paper I even created a version with footnotes that identified the flaws in what I was writing; I turned in the footnote-free version).

So, how did the first day go?

First look at the syllabus especially the teacher's title. Intro classes that are also commonly taken by out of major students tend to follow pretty strict departmental guidelines and/or be taught by people who are pretty low on the academic totem pole. Thus there is good chance that the teacher won't be able shoehorn too much of their pet projects in. Before I go one can I ask about how large the class is?

-edit I was going to customize it a bit based on the class format, but was intending to say more or less what Unnamed did, minus the personal anecdotes. I was also going to add that if the teacher is completely horrible you might be able to transfer to another section. On a final note you might want to look into pragmatism and late Wittgenstein. From what I've seen they aren't up to the standard of the sequences, but do provide a high status/low inferential distance (to philosophers) way of pointing out some of the most common ways people misuse words.

Apropos: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/08/beware-of-the-ancient-of-days/

Worrying. They're too good at general-domain planning and learning. Might they be people?

I think the most important realization re typical conversation is that its purpose is not for information exchange, it's for bonding (like apes picking nits off each other). A good conversationalist has a lot of anecdotes (and continually generates more), listens and mentally models others well, and makes no overt attempts at lowering the status of others within the conversation (this could be something as seemingly innocuous as pointing out that someone is wrong about something).

Practice conversation and you will get better at it. That's it. More helpfully, if there is a random stranger near you, you can open them and talk for a bit about any random smalltalk bull you like. This will improve general conversation skills. If you live in a large anonymous city you don't need to care if people think that's weird because people will not be getting together to share these impressions. Advice I picked up from reading PUAshit; jump between topics without feeling the need to link them or segue at all. Advice that sounds good that I haven't tried out; record yourself in conversation to pick out flaws. Oh, and pause, don't um. Improv will help, and remember, keep calm and carry on.

What worked for me better than anything was standing on a busy sidewalk holding a sign that said "Free Hugs" for a few hours. I came away feeling very high status and had a friendly, open orientation towards everyone I saw.

Another idea is to play the eye contact game lukeprog mentions in one of his skill-building posts: stare in to a friend's eyes for 15 minutes straight. Seems to have permanently made me way more comfortable maintaining eye contact (this is more than a year after doing the exercise).

I'm also interested in this. I want to know what specific social situations I can put myself in to build social skills. Raw exposure doesn't seem to work well for and in any case isn't time effective.

If you feel you lack confidence you could try exposure as others have suggested. If you want put yourself in an awkward situation you could maybe Skype with me or someone ells willing. That way you can pick out the flaws afterwards as Barry pointed out .

I notice that you've listed things you do that are not working. Can you think of people you interact with who seem to have achieved victory? What do they do? How do other people respond? It may be easier to decide if improv or rejection therapy is helping if you have more metrics to check to see if people are comfortable and/or enjoying conversations with you.

Feelings of confidence are an internal signal, and not a very trustworthy one, since you will feel unconfident when you're experimenting. Look for some external signals like the body language of people you're talking to (arms uncrossed, duchenne smiles, etc). Combine rejection therapy and data gathering and ask some friends outright what you could improve. (Tell them to be specific).

One thing that I did was to notice some people who seemed good at socializing and then just try to impersonate some aspects of what they did. Don't mimic to the point of parody, but pick out a few specific things they do (relaxed, splayed leg body language, asks questions to draw out others, etc) and then just try them out for a week.

Social abilities are useful when you are prepared to say awful things like agreeing, when disagree. People would reward if they feel you are part of they social/groupthinking. For this infere that there is habilities you could train in terms of general competence, but is is better to have some specific groups in mind.

It sounds like you're describing two attitudes towards immortality, an abstract one and a concrete one. The concrete attitude: "I don't desire never to die, but rather not to crumble away into something just more than nothing." "What's more likely in any given ten year period, pristine immortality being fully resolved, or somebody awakening my mind to an existence I would never want?" "The opportunity for suicide does not alleviate these issues, incidentally, because of my certainty I would not choose it." I will not comment on these concerns today.

The abstract attitude is summed up by:

I believe that death as a horizon event is necessary to my sanity.

The map-territory distinction is useful here. You should say instead

I believe that "death as a horizon event" is necessary to my sanity.

The idea of death allays your anxieties by inspiring healthy emotions. That doesn't mean that the idea of death should inform your decisions. It's possible to comfort yourself with the thought of death and then go ahead and sign up for cryonics anyways, just like how people can comfort themselves by not thinking about death and then go ahead and wear a seat belt. But you no doubt have other, more concrete objections to cryonics, which takes us back to your first attitude. Those objections are better reasons to make "deathist" decisions.

Better yet, you could use a different narrative to comfort yourself. Just because the thought that you're going to die someday succeeded in allaying your anxieties doesn't mean it's the only narrative that can do so. (That it is sufficient for your sanity does not imply that it is necessary for your sanity!) It's worth spending some time on looking for an alternative narrative that's just as comforting and which is more concordant with your preference "not to die tomorrow".

If you do switch narratives, you might find that you're no longer "deathist" but none of your decisions have changed. In that case all that changed was your aesthetic. But I suspect if you change your abstract attitude towards death, you might find that your concrete attitude changes as well: You might notice ideas you didn't notice before, which make important life decisions more or less compelling.

It was a realization that permanence was a faulty assumption about anything except death. It freed me to take risks, and even to engage in permanent modification of myself, both physical and mental.

This problem has been solved already. Keep backups.

Shouldn't you be working on that phobia directly? Even without the part where it makes you want to die, it sounds pretty unpleasant. It might help to spend time around disabled people, especially those who aren't just adapting to their disability but actively building culture around it, like the Deaf community. Paralympic athletes with better-than-natural accommodations also come to mind, but you might react better to people just going about their daily life in slightly unusual ways than to awesome flashy gizmos.

What is frightening you exactly? Your circumcision example suggests visibly losing body parts is the problem, but the rest of your post mentions loss of abilities more.

The image I associate with "something just more than nothing" is that of the kind of patients uncharitably called "vegetables". Is that correct? I don't know how much limits-pushing badassery appeals to you, but I'd like to present another view: someone with a broken body and a broken mind, who refuses to give up and every day deploys great courage and cunning and perseverance to achieve what you do without thinking, through pain and fear and confusion and repeated failure. It's very bad, but the attitude is awesome.

I don't think this reasoning actually makes sense, but regardless, why do you think this makes it okay for other people to die, if they don't want to? That's what deathism is.

My brother prefers the label "anti-liveite".

Hum, I don't get the reasoning. You say the perspective of death allows you to better handle the thought of permanent injury. But "conquering death" also implies conquering permanent injury. I really don't see how we could prevent death but not be able to regrow a limb (or foreskin). So if we remove both the risk of permanent injury and death at the same time, what's your need for death ?

In theory it seems an excellent way to practice what are called "openers" by PUAs, short introductory statements that grab peoples attention by amusing or engaging them. I should point out that some consider talking or flirting to other people with the intention of practicisng social skill unethical. I'm not sure why.

I've had very good experiences and made tons of new acquaintances just starting conversations with strangers in such a manner. This is somewhat rare behaviour in my culture.

Keep in mind that speed dating is an artificial situation. Seemingly trivial details unique to the setting will change outcomes considerably thus reducing how transferable the skills and calibration you gain will be. To give an example of such factors, it has been shown that when you rotate the men in such an event and the women stay put, they become choosier about the partner. When you reverse the roles men become choosier.

Afterwards, if you ever want to impair your social skills again, I recommend speed trolling.

DNB?

My impression is that a lot gets "forgotten" because it wasn't noticed in the first place. Have you tried mindfulness meditation?

I don't know whether your mind works the same way, but I find that sometimes (if I remember to check!) I can tell whether I've actually done something by checking for tactile/kinesthetic memory in addition to visual.

You may already have heard of it, but spaced repetition is the solution to the problem of retaining memory-worthy information.

I've found Study Hacks to be particularly helpful.

Why doesn't this apply to every minority? For example, when anti-Semitism broke down, why didn't it leave behind little Jewish ghettos of swirling social dysfunction and failure as the best Jews escaped into goyish society? Why not any Asian group? etc.

Good try anyway.

The origin of such ghettos can be traced back to segregation. Some of these communities thrived at a time and were fairly self-sufficient. The Black middle class fled these places. And all that was left behind were the poor and a crumbling society. The middle class Blacks might have served as role models to those less fortunate. The Whites didn’t care about them either. Everyone that could afford to get out, got out.

I think that hits the nail on the head. Evaporative cooling! When the segregation and anti-black sentiment are weakened but still in effect, of course it'd be the brightest, best socialized and most driven blacks who would break through the weakening celling, but the majority of blacks would remain an isolated community, suffering constant brain drain and hardly any "brain input" (from non-black assistance to the community, etc).

If this is model is correct then we should expect it to also work when dealing with class. If so it might explain the rise of the native British underclass, as the old culturally enforced class barriers where lessened by meritocracy in the early 20th century, evaporative cooling ensured the remaining lower class suffered more and more social pathologies.

If Charles Murray's Coming Apart case that such a cultural divergence between classes is taking place in America is correct, we should be able to make a few predictions about the near term social future of that country. At a glance these predictions seem plausible as they match most current recorded trends.

This seems related to matters discussed in my public draft on Meritocracy and the comment section there:

Let us leave aside problems with utilitarianism for the sake of argument and ask does this automatically mean we have a net gain in utility? The answer seems to be no. A transfer of wealth and quality of life not just from the less deserving to the more deserving but from the lower and lower middle class to the upper classes. If people basically get the position in society they deserve in life they are also costing people around them positive (or negative) externalities. Meritocratic societies have proven fabulously good at creating wealth and because of our impulses nearly all of them seem to have instututed expensive welfare programs. But consider what welfare is in the real world, a centralized attempt often lacking in feedback or flexibility, it can never match the local positive externalities of competent/nice/smart people solving problems they see around themselves. Those people simply don't exist any more in those social groups! If someone was trying to get pareto optimal solutions this seems incredibly silly and harmful!

With humans at least centralized efforts don't ever seem to be as efficient a way to help them as would just settling a good mix of talented poor with them.

Here you are: Best of short rationality quotes 2009-2012. I created it with a one-line modification of the script I used here: Best of Rationality Quotes, 2011 Edition. The threshold is 400 characters including XML markup. The user-names for the newer quotes are missing, I'll fix this for the 2012 Edition.

I hope you don't expect that the majority of the people here will just take a random stranger at his word regarding this, even if many of them are too polite to say so plainly.

I have a significant higher estimation that you're lying for purposes of trolling, than that you are accurately describing what happened.

In the slight possibility that you're telling the truth, I hope you're not offended by my low estimation of the likelihood of such sincerity.

Dude you are looking at numbers through some 9/11 Truther eyes, you definitely got a long way to go if you plan on travelling the world "working towards life extension". It's great that you are donating money to these funds, but please don't use your story as a "The SAI might be God" thingy. It will only make people look at transhumanism as a religion (like plenty already do).

Congratulations

I just won the New Zealand national lottery.

Congratulations!

For the sake of people reading this post who may not be familiar with the concept of backwards causality:

As a fun test, I called on any future super intelligences to come to my aid, appealing to the notion of backward causality. Asking for clear evidence of the hand of a superintelligence in the event I won, I choose a number of high significance to me personally. The number I chose was 27, which I placed in all lines of the ticket. (All the other numbers I selected at random).

This is not the typical LW understanding of decision theory. Here's an example of what "backwards causality" could actually mean:

mjgeddes and lottery employee both believe an agent will be created in the future that likes to grant wishes and will reward people who help grant wishes. The lottery employee somehow knows mjgeddes made a wish, and fudges the lottery results in the hope of a future reward from the wish-granting agent.

Thinking of it as "backwards causality" enacted by the hypothetical future wish-granting agent is a useful way of thinking about certain decision problems but should never preclude a normal, traditional explanation.

Lest anyone claim I am ruining the mood: Praise be to the glorious Eschaton; that acausal spring from which all blessings flow!

The odds of me winning this prize at random as calculated by the NZ Lotteries Commission were 1 in 639,730 for randomly selected numbers.

And therefore I am skeptical. I don't believe stories of people who beat odds of 500,000 to 1 against by calling on help from the post-singularity future. Therefore something is fishy about this story.

Which airline did you fly, and what type aircraft has a seat numbered 27? Every aircraft I've ever seen with more than 10 seats numbers them with a number and letter...

Congratulations!

Im starting by pledging donations to the Brain Preservation Fund and the Kim Suozzi fund.

It's looks like the whole world got lucky!

It appears that either Im just astonishingly lucky or the SAI is with me!

If you think it's the latter, I would urge you to keep the specifics of your summoning-the-SAI strategy to yourself. Perhaps share it with lukeprog. But please don't tell us how you did it---I wouldn't want that information to fall into the wrong hands!

Mine is, which is a little weird and surely can't be right given my many comments over the last 30 days.

What the hell? Did you catch Konkvistador disease or something? What is up with high-quality contributors deciding to up and leave?

I, for one, think that your posts are valuable to the community.

(I'm assuming you mean that you suspect your comments cause harm to others, obviously if you think you're spending to much time procrastinating on LessWrong then leaving is fine.)

I think being epistemically rational entails learning the mathematical part of QM first and reading through the QM sequence afterwards. Before you can seriously attack the problem of interpretation of QM, you needn't necessarily know the experiments and hard data and evidence for QM, but you must know the mathematical structure of the theory, because that's the thing what you are going to interpret!

Be sure you operationally understand QM under the collapse interpretation, that is, you should know how to calculate probability distribution of observed results in series of subsequent measurements of different observables and you should understand the standard jargon. You will probably have to learn Hamiltonian mechanics in the course (if you don't know it already); it is not strictly necessary for the collapse-related questions, but most textbooks assume familiarity with it from the beginning, and besides, broader and more general understanding of QM is probably a better goal than understanding only the aspects which EY had decided to write about. I suggest starting with the collapse interpretation because it is the easiest one to understand for a person accustomed only to classical mechanics. The downside is obvious., but, on the other hand, from what you've written I don't get the impression that you could be easily biased in favour of quantum collapse theories.

Your attitude towards the problem is apparently healthy, so let me just point out few (some of them perhaps obvious) things:

• Interpretation of a particular scientific theory is important for professionals working on the cutting-edge research (mainly because although different interpretations may be precisely equivalent in their experimental predictions, they may be profoundly different in their ability to inspire new ideas). For the non-professionals learning such things may serve to satisfy their intellectual curiosity, but it is certainly not the hallmark of general rationality. (I recall Yudkowsky has written that MWI is actually not an interpretation but rather a full theory distinct from the Copenhagen interpretation, but the arguments for that were, as far as I remember, mostly semantical. Even if we agreed upon MWI being a theory it would still not change the fact that one's opinion about it isn't that much correlated with one's rationality.)
• In comparison to the other sequences, there aren't many rationality-related insights in the QM sequence.
• The sequence doesn't give a faithful account of the alternatives to MWI. The matter is presented as if there was practically one alternative to MWI - wave-function realism with objective collapse (i.e. "there is an ontologically fundamental observer-independent thing, the wave function, which discontinuously changes upon measurement"). This is even not a true description of the Copenhagen interpretation, which is more of a positivist "here is the mathematical formalism you need for your calculations and who cares about ontology". Of course, even under other sequence posts people regularly accuse Yudkowsky of distorting the conventional philosophical positions to make his own look better, but nowhere this is as apparent as in the QM sequence. (This may be my own bias, though, because I am originally a physicist and therefore, when reading the sequences, I had been more informed about QM than, say, about philosophical zombies, and thus had been better equipped to spot the problems).
• The sequence lacks the level of formality I would consider suitable. When speaking about Many Worlds, one should for example try to define precisely what constitutes a "world" in the technical sense. I don't remember seeing such definitions in the sequence (although it's quite a long time since I have read it and my memories may be faulty; I suggest you judge for yourself).
• Quite surprisingly the approach taken in the QM sequence seems to contradict some of the EY's positions expressed elsewhere. Namely there is a recognisable realist stance without enough emphasise on the map/territory distinction. Although "probability is in the mind" is a central thesis to many EY's posts, "wave function is in the mind" is not considered a viable alternative. Somewhat similar maxim "shut up and calculate", again defended elsewhere in the Sequences, is rejected for the quantum-mechanical context in a quite rantish post. But again, I may be missing some subtleties in EY's positions.
• Another thing which is not properly addressed is the fact that in among all physical observables time plays a special role in quantum theory (being the only observable which can't be represented by an operator) while it is perfectly on par with position coordinates in general relativity. There are attempts to strip time of its unique role, mostly pursued by people trying to quantise general relativity, but it is not clear how MWI could survive such a change. On a related note, since quantum measurement is apparently not time-reversal symmetric, contrary all other microscopic dynamical laws, there is the possibility that quantum measurement is in fact an essentially macroscopic emergent process whose irreversibility has the same origin as the irreversibility of thermodynamical evolution. I don't remember seeing a discussion about this in the QM sequence; granted, this is a hard question, but at least the possibility of the non-fundamental nature of collapse (or world-splitting, if you prefer) should be noted.
• I remember few people commenting about the QM sequence as being the worst of the Sequences, an opinion I agree with, mostly for the reasons given above.

Read through the sequence, but every time there is a many worlds assertion, stop and think whether adopting it lets you do anything more than feel superior to single-worlders. Take notes of the sort "without MWI, the following argument advanced by EY would not work: ...", then try to see if someone interpretation-agnostic would still be able to make the same argument. Simply learning the EY-path through QM is little better than memorizing scriptures (= guessing teacher's password). Feel free to post your progress and questions in the appropriate thread.

I think the expository part of the QM sequence can be skipped without significant loss of understanding of the broad philosophical point EY is attempting to make. However, if you are interested in QM for its own sake, I would recommend reading a quick non-pop-sci introduction to the theory before reading the sequence. Otherwise I think you will emerge from the sequence with only the illusion of understanding. In my experience on this site, it is far too common that people whose main exposure to QM is the sequence misunderstand not just the mathematics of the theory but also the conceptual structure of MWI.

If you want a really good, really short introduction to the mathematics of QM, this book is excellent. It's written in a very engaging, non-textbooky way, so don't worry about it being a dry read. It does presume some mathematical sophistication though. If you're not comfortable with differential equations and linear algebra, I would advise against reading it.

If you don't have that sort of mathematical background, read this instead. It actually is an introductory book, presuming very little knowledge on the reader's part. I recommend it over standard intro textbooks (such as Griffiths) for someone with your interests, because it focuses on developing a deep conceptual understanding of the theory rather than on doing calculations.

Finally, you could try David Albert's idiosyncratic but compelling book on the philosophy of QM. Again, the book is completely introductory. It won't teach you much about the math of the theory (for that, read Hughes), but it will give you a short overview of the main extant interpretations of QM, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. The author is skeptical about MWI (in fact, he seems skeptical about pretty much every interpretation), but he's a very sharp philosopher, and his arguments are worth considering seriously.

Are you reading the Sequence in order to learn about QM, or in order to complete the Less Wrong course in rationality? The most sober way to think about QM is as a recipe for prediction, for which there are several competing explanations, and all of which might be wrong. The Sequence aims to rise above the disputes of physicists and rationally pick the winner. It doesn't really rise above, but neither does it sink below. An argument by a physicist in favor of a specific interpretation usually contains a mix of good points and blindspots, and Eliezer's argument is at that level. Understanding why QM works is a problem of the first order, and you won't learn the answer by reading the Sequence or even by reading a hundred textbooks. But you will learn more about the problem and about what we do know; and if you read the comments, you may even avoid acquiring false knowledge.

As for studying rationality, it's even easier to avoid going astray - just study the arguments bearing in mind that the specific conclusions about physics may be wrong, and ask how substantively that would affect the higher-level lessons that you're asked to draw.

That SEP article is the article on MWI. The other SEP articles on QM don't say that.

How should I go about being epistemically rational about this, what is the strong attack (and response) on what SEP claims is MWI's weakest defense (essentially, that MWI acts as a curiosity-stopper in the face of theoretical "collapse", if I understand correctly), and should I proceed with my plans of reading through the Quantum Physics sequence?

As prase and David Gerard have said, to understand QM, first learn QM. The actual mathematics and physics of it, not any popularisation. When you can pass a finals exam in the subject, with distinction, making minimal use of reference materials, then you will have reached a position from which you may be able to begin to participate in useful discussions about QM. How many similarly qualified people there are on LessWrong to have such a discussion with, or who they might be, I do not know.

I hasten to add that by that standard, I am certainly not one of them. I do not know QM. I hope I have never pontificated on the subject here or anywhere else, but I certainly do not do so now.

Anyone wanting a quick self-test, and with access to a university library, might entertain themselves with this volume, a book of exercises in QM, with worked solutions. If you can do even one of the problems at sight, and get it right, then you know more QM than you will ever discover from popularisations. When you can do all of them, you can claim to know QM.

It is not the fact that the person has black friends that is supposed to count as evidence of their racism. It is the fact that they say that they have black friends in response to an accusation of racism. The response is the evidence, not the fact (if it is a fact) that the response is reporting. So what would be evidence against the racism hypothesis is not saying things like "I'm not racist; some of my best friends are black."

I'm not saying this is great evidence either, but it is not as obviously ridiculous as thinking that not having black friends is evidence against racism. I wouldn't be at all surprised if saying "Some of my best friends are black" is anticorrelated with actually having black best friends.

Translated to mathematics, the fact that a white person has black friends, is considered an evidence for hypothesis that the person is a racist.

That's a bit of a bad faith interpretation; I see it as meaning something more like "Having black friends is not sufficiently strong evidence to push you out of the 'racist' category".

A bit as if I spent all day laughing and pointing at ugly and disabled people, and when someone called me an asshole I replied "I'm not an asshole, I helped an old lady cross the street last week". Even assholes can point to examples of nice deeds they did, even racists can point to black "friends".

Alternatively, the immediate statement "I'm not racist" is actually the evidence that you are a racist. The additional statement "Some of my best friends are black." may or may not be evidence against racism, depending on context. It seems like one piece of evidence, but nothing stops you from taking it as two entirely different pieces of evidence and evaluating each one separately. Or alternatively, the mere context of the fact that the statement is immediate might be the indicator itself.

Consider: A person named John Doe does not even appear willing to consider that they might have, for instance, offended a person of another race with whatever they just did, and they just immediately deny that person of the other race is saying something plausible and start making excuses as to why they are wrong. Ignoring John Doe's specific words for a moment, does that context make John Doe sound more or less likely to be racist?

There is a huge variety of alternatives one could offer as a defense against racism, and giving one rather than others inevitably provides evidence about the various features that get called racist. If the best defense someone can offer (assuming people lead with their best defenses) is "some of my friends are X," that can be evidence of racism by indicating the absence of more persuasive defenses, perhaps one of these:

• My spouse is X
• My best friend is X
• My best man/maid of honor was X
• My roommate is X
• I am 1/4 X
• I have voted for X political candidates A, B, and C
• I am a member of the pro-X political group A
• I chose to live in an area with a high population of X
• I send my kids to a mostly-X school
• I don't believe [false] racist-sounding claims A, B, C...
• I don't believe [true] racist-sounding claims A, B, C...
• I believe [true] anti-racist-sounding claims A, B, C...
• I believe [false] anti-racist-sounding claims A, B, C
• I have a low score on the IAT for anti-X associations
• I love X, an X saved my life in Iraq
• I donate to charities that primarily help X folk
• Haha, yeah, right [insert funny joke or self-deprecating humor as countersignaling]
• I participated in the boycott against anti-Xers
• Look at my demographic characteristics: in surveys and IAT studies people of my occupation, education level, religion, and political affiliations show low levels of racism, so your prior for me being racist should be low

This might actually be true. If you consider the categories of white people who would be most likely to have black people in their social network, what comes up is a list of categories correlated with racism (e.g. poverty, religiosity).

You're forgetting an alternative here. The only possible non-racist thing to say is "I'm not racist, all of my best friends are black." Clearly, no such person can be racist. Again, by conservation of expected evidence, having any non-black friends whatsoever is evidence of racism.

That's exactly the kind of comment a racist would post!

(WARNING: THAT WAS A JOKE)

"Don't do this nice project that feels warm and fuzzy to you" is guaranteed to provoke a strongly negative reaction in the vast majority of people hearing it, and there's the obvious double standard (which people won't hesitate to point out and make you look stupid) of objecting to such charitable projects but not objecting to somebody buying a movie ticket, say. Besides, buying fuzzies is perfectly fine.

And that's even without the status considerations that paper-machine points out. People think we look weird already. Attacking a high status individual famous throughout the Internets isn't going to make that better.

I doubt LW has the social capital necessary to intervene without considerable backlash. Oatmeal is the Randall Munroe of 2012.

At a guess, the Oatmeal is raising new contributions from people who were highly unlikely to be donating to charity in the first place (selfish young geeks participating for solidarity with their social group at the order of their leader); attacking it will probably shift very few dollars to better charities and will be very expensive for us. I think there's an XKCD comic on this, actually...

My first guess would be no, given that any amount of capital significant to the project (which seems like it would just generate warm fuzzies anyways) is probably a crapload of dead kids.