Stupid Questions August 2015

Most of them are pretty darn short-lived, despite their intelliigence...

It is not hard to tame them and train them, but I have not heard of anyone training them to do something that is functionally useful aside from the narrow area of octopus-keeping. They have been trained to get into a bucket for easy transportation, to climb out of the water and interact with their keepers 'politely', and, famously, to take photos of aquarium goers. Bus as far as underwater rescue, exploration, or hunting for artifacts, AFAIK this has not been done yet. But if for some reason we needed them to run an underwater maze -- easy!

Octopuses are solitary animals, whereas most working animals are social. Which leads to another interesting question - is it possible to breed octopuses to become social animals?

Octopodes use hemocyanin... use CRISPR to take that out, lenti vector to replace with hemoglobin, and you've got a super-octopus.

Now just apply MIRI's magic formula for making friendly superintelligence, and you've got your tame octopus. Great basis for a TV show in the genre of "Lassie", "Flipper", or "Skippy the Bush Kangaroo".

"Good on ya', Cthulipper!"

Octopuses have poisonous bites, of course.... some would see that as a bad quality in a pet.

I think this is mostly a function of the subculture to which you belong and, specifically, which things you find interesting, exciting, important, etc. IQ, of course, is a major underlying factor, but it's not just IQ.

Each subculture also has its own social rituals and implicit communication methods so when you cross over to a different one you are very likely to have conversation difficulties -- unless your social skills are highly developed and you have some idea about how that subculture works.

Is this just because we have no practice talking to people of average-ish intelligence?

I believe a lot of practice would make talking to people with average intelligence easier. Not necessarily more satisfying, though. You will always have to debate with them at their level, while you probably enjoy debating at your level.

Is it because intelligence gaps are inherently difficult in social settings?

Could be. We naturally model other people by imagining what we would do in the same situation. If you use this algorithm to model people with much lower intelligence, you will get many predictions wrong.

Is there some factor other than intelligence that's causing this?

Sure. Rationality, culture, past experiences. All of these make modelling each other more difficult.

Are we just socially inept?

Possibly; but what exactly do you mean by "inept"? Unable to learn? -- probably not. Haven't learned yet? -- probably yes. The question is whether learning "how to communicate with normal people" is the best use of your time.

I'm an economics professor at a good college. A fair number of my students are interested in fashion and have written on the topic for one of my "apply economics to anything" paper assignments. Fashion is a deeper topic than you might imagine and can justifiably attract bright minds.

Prediction: A typical fashion designer and physics PhD get into a conversation. If the fashion designer wanted the PhD to greatly enjoy the conversation she could easily do this (even without doing anything sexual) but the reverse probably doesn't hold true.

Is this just because we have no practice talking to people of average-ish intelligence?

We tend to get used to (read: lazy in a system 1 time-saving way.) the systems we are regularly engaged in. i.e. I don't often talk about the weather (and other small talk) with people of higher intelligence (unless in a meta-sense). So I sometimes feel off-guard when trying to respond in the "normal" way that people do.

Is it because intelligence gaps are inherently difficult in social settings?

I usually appeal to stereotypical behaviour where there is common ground. For example - "growth mindset vs fixed mindset", The last time I talked to someone in the fashion industry I equally had a "black box" discussion, and found the bad communication experience too. But then I went on to talk about how I don't know because I had never ever gotten into it, and asked them to "teach me everything you know", which is a way to stump them back in the other direction. At the very least it get's people thinking, at the most you might get the opportunity to learn, they might get the opportunity to think, and you establish a new connection with someone you didn't think was interesting.

Is there some factor other than intelligence that's causing this? Are we just socially inept?

There is something called "social intelligence" which you might not be optimising for. Which is completely fine, but can cause this sort of experience to happen. I have personally recently decided to invest more in social-intelligence. The main take-away from that concept is that there are only so many hours in the day. If you want to expend 100 hours on social intelligence learning, that's 100 less hours on learning programming or tackling UFAI, Or learning about music, fashion, communication, art, biotechnology, medicine, law... There are many things that people find valuable. Not everything is universal. I would consider social intelligence as a meta-skill, in a similar way to improving your memory, increasing your sleep quality, learning to communicate in another language, and 101 other things.

It's up to you whether you want to pursue social intelligence.

We had a discussion about how hard it is to spend all your time around unusually intelligent people, and then go out into the real world and have conversations with normal people.

What do you mean by "hard"? Difficult? Frustrating? Boring?

I don't think that intelligence itself it causally related to any of those 3 things.

• You could be "intelligent" and have "social skills".
• You could be "intelligent" and not be frustrated by normal people. Maybe you're a huge humanist who just loves people so much. Maybe you don't view normal people as being at fault. Maybe your expectations are low for a number of reasons.
• You could be "intelligent" and find normal people enjoyable. You probably wouldn't get to be intellectually stimulated by interactions with normal people, but you might... enjoy the "mere exposure" (humans enjoy socializing), enjoy goofing around, enjoy teaching them, enjoy their kindness, enjoy observing them as a means to better understand cognitive psychology.

My guess is that intelligent people...

• Who spend a lot of time in a certain in-group might "forget" what the norms of other groups are like. I mean "forget" in a "procedural" sense rather than a "declarative" one. A lot of times you might just acting according to the norms you're used to out of habit, but then realize, "oh yeah, normal people don't do this".
• Intelligent people (feel that they) understand that and why a lot of the things normal people do aren't rational. I think that given a "default" perspective, this is very frustrating. But given a different perspective, it isn't necessarily frustrating (I'd love to hear more about this perspective...).
• Intelligent people seem to be somewhat socialized to think that "normal pleasures" are sort of... "lesser". And so they don't derive as much joy from them, and instead need a certain amount of intellectual stimulation.

It seems to be intelligence-related, because it's usually much easier to have a conversation with, for example, a psychology grad student from Singapore than with a fashion designer who lives in the same city as me.

On what basis do you believe that fashion designers have lower IQ?

Your culture is bounded by lexography, not geography

and it simultaneously attracts and bestows the various qualities that it has defined as "intelligence".

There are a few case studies/papers arguing it might help. It seemed to help one guy trying an RCT but the temporal patterns were weird. It didn't do me any harm; on the other hand, I didn't notice any benefit and the initial benefit seems to have been a selection/confounding effect since it disappeared after randomization.

I guess it depends on how much of your time/energy you think 10 minutes usage will cost you and if you think it's worth a shot.

I work with infrared lasers, and the main safety advice I will give you is that 850nm light will look very dim, even if it is very bright. So be careful about shining it in your eyes, because how bright it looks is misleading. That said, it does take a very bright source of visible or IR light to actually damage your eyes.

After trying to imagine a way this would fail badly, I think you should make sure that whatever you do, you can remove it quickly. It's common for homemade electronics to get hot or catch fire, and you don't want to have any trouble getting if off your head if that does happen.

If it has a physiological effect that can reduce inflammation to some unknown process, that process also might have disadvantages and not be all positive.

No way to know unless you measure its output spectrum, but as long as it's mostly IR, it shouldn't.

Question though, why would you do that? I don't see the difference between using this or applying any other heat source.

May we know the purpose of this?

Mostly because "we" are young -- the median LWer aged between 25 and 34 makes more money than the median American in that age range, and the median American LWer in that age range makes even more, but only 50% of LWers are older than 26 and only 25% are older than 31.

1) Because getting rich is pretty hard.
2) Because we haven't been trying all that hard.

Most people who get rich probably got there in one of three ways:

1) Be born with rich parents (or other relatives)
2) Marry someone who's already rich
3) Enter a career path in which it is possible to make lots of money, then be successful enough in that career path to become rich.

My brother did #3 - he won the Goldman Sachs internship lottery, got hired into a permanent position, then, a few years later, jumped ship to a hedge fund that offered him more money than his boss was making. (He even took every one of his co-workers at his trading desk with him, much to the dismay of both his boss and his boss's boss.)

I've not made the attempt. My brother worked his ass off in a way I don't want to duplicate, and it's perfectly rational to decide that there are more important things in life than the expected size of one's paycheck. ;)

What do you mean 'we,' Paleface?

Yvain wrote an article on this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/9p/extreme_rationality_its_not_that_great/

I agree with everyone else: LW skews young (also researchy; not many PhD students are rich) and many LWers care more about other things than about getting rich, and in fact the LW population is wealthier than you would expect from age alone (though I don't know how it compares with what you'd get if you looked at, say, age, family's socioeconomic status, and IQ).

I'd add: getting substantially rich takes luck as well as skill and hard work (some rich people will claim otherwise -- but they would, wouldn't they?).

Becoming rich is a matter of:

• caring about money enough to devote a substantial amount of time to the task;
• a specific financial education;
• discovering a profitable career / market niche.

I've listed those in the order I think they pose an obstacle to LWers.

As an off-the-cuff thought, much LW-content is useful for determining values and bringing strategies in alignment with those values. (I think of a hierarchy: values->strategies->campaigns->goals->actions.) It's also useful for some bug-catching and as some general tools of thought, but amassing lots of wealth is a convergent instrumental goal of many, many value setups. So value-discrimination may not really affect that, since either set of values would lead you to amass wealth.

The above isn't really something that I'm confident of, and belongs in the "only posted because the alternative is not posting" bucket.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLecJrXpOEU

You could look at MIRI's research page to judge if its research is something you could contribute to. You could start by commenting on new AI related posts on LW. My guess is that in a few years time MIRI will still say that there is a high marginal benefit to them having more money. Don't let the fact that you can't donate lots of money stop you from donating small sums, even just $5 a year.

So8res gave a talk on this at the Effective Altruism Global summit, a video of which should be up in a few weeks.

For a stupid questions thread the language sounds remarkably domain-specific. Consider rephrasing in ELI5.

WELP.

When I used home-made soylent, I first put in (all) the water, then the powder. My shaker also has a plastic grid inset in the lid. Putting in the water first also lets you see exactly how much water you have (transparent measuring cup shaker). I don't remember ever having any problems.

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiction_set_in_ancient_Rome

The Golden Ass

If you are after descriptions of society in those days, try "Quo Vadis" by Henryk Sienkiewicz. Historical fiction about early days of Christianity, won a Nobel Prize for literature. Strong religious themes.

Lest Darkness Fall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall

I happen to greatly enjoy Rosemary Sutcliff's historical novels. I'm not an expert on Roman or Anglo-Saxon cultures (that's where most of her novels are set), but as far as I can tell they're pretty accurate. They give a pretty good feel for what it must have actually been like to live back then.

Well there is this little classic that is apparently being made into a movie https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/k067x/could_i_destroy_the_entire_roman_empire_during/c2giwm4

Household Gods

The Ides of March by Wilder

On a related note, how does one calculate within-subject variance, given one baseline measurement? I am afraid that my subjects are small enough that I can't obtain many totally different samples for the variable.

What simple book is there for free, in which it is told how to calculate 'studentized' residuals?

Wikipedia

My stupid question is, does anyone else relate to this?

Oh yes, I certainly do.

How do you manage to not get caught in "analysis paralysis"?

I do not, for the most part.
On the other side, it's a matter of understanding that ultimately, nothing has an absolute value, so you can as well do entertaining things. Or creative things. The universe won't care anyway.

Do I have the entirely incorrect approach to life by trying to base my moment to moment actions on an overall value system?

Of course, since the system needs to compress so much information that updating it is a momentous and futile task. More so if its purpose is to guide your actions.
Better to start with a very imperfect value system and update it slowly on the run.

You might be ironing the parts in the wrong order, or getting the freshly ironed part under something. But the first thing I would try in your position is to just iron every part of the shirt and hang it up for a while, and then see if the wrinkles go away again. Often wrinkles that come about right after ironing are much softer than the ones that you remove by ironing.

In many political systems, a major intention of campaigning is to attract news coverage, not to influence voters directly.

In some cases, being off-putting is the goal. The more you can make potential voters disgusted with the political process, the more likely they are to stay home and not vote. If you are a party that has a base that votes a lot, and your opponents have a more fickle voter base that are more likely to stay home instead of voting, icky political ads serve your purpose.

Given that Western political systems are basically a Darwinian selection process, I would be greatly surprised if the political consultants didn't have a good idea about the effectiveness of their propaganda. They certainly gather and examine the data. Of course, there is not much incentive for them to publish their results.

Do you have any reason to believe that political consultants are particularly stupid?

I have no idea which of the below are true, or to what extent: 1) They're not off-putting to everyone; you are not the target audience 2) Being off-putting is valuable, as decreasing voter turnout benefits their strategy 3) Being off-putting does not matter, as they remain effective regardless 4a) No one is checking if these are effective 4b) The people who DO check if these are effective have a vested interest in showing they are

If no one is gathering data on the effectiveness, then the next best strategy is to copy your competitor.

This really doesn't make sense, because incompetent people generally don't leave descendants.

The criticism tends to be that people were too mean rather than that they were incompetent.

Here's an SSC post and ~700 comments on cultural evolution: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/07/the-argument-from-cultural-evolution/

Apparently since the Enlightenment this idea has gotten about that all the previous generations didn't know how to live properly, even our parents' generation; but that we somehow mysteriously know how to do it right, or at least better.

Has it? That rather sounds like a crotchety old guy's notion about Kids These Days, and as far as I know old people only got that crotchety after 1950 or so (tongue-in-cheek).

Evolution works in the timespan of hundreds of generations or more. A cultural or political trend can wreck a society in a few generations, before evolution has any time to compensate.

We have values besides inclusive genetic fitness.

There's lots of systems which exist, but don't deliver my preferences and goals. I find it extremely likely that know what I want and how to get it much better than a semi-random offspring filtering process.

As far as I can tell, in postmodern western value systems the idea isn't that they know better than Gnon, it's the idea that "principles derived from the collective evolutionary experiences of human survival" shouldn't matter in comparison to postmodern cultural sensibilities, and therefore it's worth expending effort to counter them as opposed to making use of them.

How can people who say they believe in evolution also hold the conflicting idea that they know better than the principles derived from the collective evolutionary experiences of human survival?

Most people don't consider the goal of life to be maximizing the amount of offspring.