Open thread, June 20 - June 26, 2016

a dream app would be one that starts as a simple list (like you did), and gradually offers you to add complexity to your system

I like your analysis of this issue, though I think in this particular case the app actually remains very simple.

If you only use the "do it every N days" type of tracking, you get pretty much just a list like the ones I used to have on paper.

One thing I'm definitely seeing more clearly after reading your comment is that if I ever want to add more complexity to this app, I'll instead make a new app that will be the "next step in evolution".

(this doesn't apply to UI improvements of course, which the app still needs a lot)

I'd like to see the whole process to how you got here in the hopes of making sense of your successes/failures of systems

Haha, this calls for a long evening in front of a fireplace :)

I think you're coming on a little strong in ways you don't intend for requesting his process and previous system iterations. This reads as if you should never share any system without also sharing the process of how to get there, and most of the time that is filled with stuff no one really needs to see.

I think your app does this well.

How is it after a week? Do you still use it?

I wouldn't use an app like that without the app being able to export data.

But it does in fact have this option.

(Admittedly, the format of data is not documented, but it's just plaintext K=V.)

Export data....why? Like, what other device are you going to load this data on? You've got your task tracker on your phone...and its records go where else?

I mean, more features = more good, but I'm just curious about the use case here.

This is summed up by the question: "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

For many LWers, the answer is "I'm young," but I think there are also a lot of people where the answer is "I am rich."

The rationalist community has a lot of independent thinkers, and independent thinkers are more likely than the general population to find the game of amassing wealth to be an obstruction to their freedom of thought and an inefficient path to happiness and life satisfaction.

Also many rationalists are quite young, as Vaniver pointed out.

We don't want "are you rich, do you smoke" because the selection effect (we are rich because we were born upper middle class, and we're not powerful because powerful people have better things to do than explore the internet until they land on odd forums).

Otherwise the value of an idea is judged by the types of people who happen to stumble upon them.

What we want is "After being exposed to the ideas, did you get richer", "did you quite smoking", etc. Before after.

why aren't they leveraging their high IQs

IQ is just another selection effect confound to control for. Priors say there is absolutely no way rationality training will alter your IQ (and besides the IQ data is mostly from standardized test scores taken in high school anyhow) If high IQ people land up here that just means high IQ people crawl the internet more and stick around more.

Some random thoughts about the questions:

"if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

Not everyone who participated in the survey is a regular LW reader; it was open to the whole diaspora.

Not everyone who reads LW regularly is also working on their own rationality. Some people are here for the insight porn; some people simply enjoy being in the community of other smart people.

Not everyone who tries to become more rational is doing it correctly. For example, some people may go for the applause lights, or still compartmentalize in something important.

Now, assuming that you are trying to do the rational thing (but of course you are not perfect at it)... Also, assuming you have high intelligence (LW already selects for it), and you are mostly healthy (just a base-rate assumption)...

There are essentially two ways to become more rich: get a high income, or multiply the existing wealth. The second option is not available for those who don't have any significant "existing wealth". For those who do, I guess investing in the passively managed index funds is the standard LW advice.

Assuming that (feel free to adjust the numbers if they feel wrong) you can comfortably live on $2,000 a month, and you believe that index funds will reach at least 4% yearly increase in long term... all you need is to get $600,000, once, and then you can play the rest of your life in the "easy mode". On the other hand, if you start from zero, and you are able to save less than $1,000 a month, the bad news is that you are never going to get there. And if you want to get there in, say, 20 years, you better save about $3,000 a month.

So I guess the answer is that even for smart people, saving $3,000 a month is a difficult task, and 20 years is a long time (LW does not even exist for 20 years yet). In other words, yes, it's true that most LW rationalist are not smart enough to make half a million dollars overnight. But after unpacking "so smart" and "rich", it shouldn't surprise many people. Anasûrimbor Kellhus would probably be able to do it in a few weeks or months, but he is a fictional character.

By the way, from the outside "a person with a lifestyle X" and "a person with a lifestyle X, and with a few thousand dollars saved in index funds" will look the same, even if the latter is richer. Converting the former to latter would mean increasing rationality and wealth, and still would be invisible to outsiders. The difference would be that the latter would see some light at the end of the tunnel, but that light could still be a few decades away.

"if you're stupid, why aren't you poor?"

Society seems to have limits on how poor people can get: bankruptcy, unemployment benefits, not being able to borrow insane amounts of money, etc. (Also, there is the natural limit that people who don't have enough resources to survive, die.) Therefore, unlike intelligence which makes the bell curve, wealth makes an assymetric curve.

Looking from the "99% vs 1%" perspective, we could say that most people actually are relatively poor. That the stupid people aren't much poorer than the average, simply because the average already have very little wealth. Being stupid just means you will waste a little more of your money, until you are out of money, and then you can't waste anymore.

You can't become a "negative Bill Gates"; at worst you can become homeless (and then die). Actually, if you are just smart enough to pay your mortgage first, and only do the stupid things with the remaining money, you will probably even avoid homelessness. The average and below-average people have a script to follow, which will more or less keep them in the fixed position, as long as they can have a job.

I've skimmed them, but I don't remember seeing these kinds of statistics. I'll take another look though. Thanks.

"Unless you state the conditions..." That is not true. You can want to live a finite life without wanting to die at any particular time.

If you were offered the deal, "Choose the number x and you will receive that much utility, but if you do not choose, you will not receive any," then you will want to choose some finite number, despite the fact that you would prefer a greater number to any particular number. Those desires are consistent, not inconsistent. The problematic issue is in the territory, not in your map of it.

I'd classify it loosely as Both; nothing requires an ethical system to distinguish between the two cases, but I think it's a substantial divide in the way people tend to think about ethics.

I'm starting to think "ethics" is an incoherent concept. I'm a strict-negative ethicist - yet I do have an internal concept of a preference hierarchy, in terms of what I want the world to look like, which probably looks a lot like what most people would think of as part of their ethics system. It's just... not part of my ethics. Yes, I'd prefer it if poor people in other countries didn't starve to death, but this isn't an ethical problem, and trying to include it in your ethics looks... confused, to me. How can your ethical status be determined by things outside your control? How can we say a selfish person living in utopia is a better person, ethically, than a selfish person living in a dystopia?

Which isn't to say I'm right. More than half the users apparently include positive ethics in their ethical systems.

Leaving aside the bloody obvious things (universal basic income or other form of care, global internet access, etc)

How's global internet access not funded? Google and Facebook both have programs for it. On another front SpaceX plans to launch the next Iridium satillites.

Prediction market. They tried but it's dead due to gambling laws. Someone should give it a second try.

How is it dead? There PredictIt. There's also Augur (currently in Beta).

Okay, I was wrong to be so vague somewhere where I'm anonymous enough.

My father-in-law is a retired General Practitioner (approximately), but people keep coming to him for help now and again. Recently he was asked to resuscitate a child, but his efforts were too late. The parents drove to our house in the evening, when we were putting our kid to bed, and he (the kid) became quite excited with having unfamiliar people bursting in and asking for help.

I told him he has to behave and not interrupt his grandfather's work, and we went to read a book. My mother-in-law was very upset, and recounted details of the work going on in the yard, and I remember thinking that she needed to compartmentalize more. Then my father-in-law came back, washed his face, picked my kid and rocked him to sleep, totally composed. I had known he's a professional, but usually his professionalism was accompanied by, uh, loud noises (he has a carrying voice). This time... It was a perfectly normal evening.

And I find that I respect him so much more. My model of doctors' professional behavior had been ruined by fiction (think McCoy from StarTrek, etc.), and now it seems just such a simple and hard thing. So...I didn't mean 'learning experience' in a bad way.

Too confidential.

Fixed. I was using the mean wealth instead of net mean wealth. It's still amazing to me that the Aussie average exceeds the US average, given that the averages include megawealthy tech and finance billionaires. And amazing that Greece and Italy have higher median wealth than the US.

I'm trying to get at least a vague handle on what I can legitimately infer from what using data that might, and probably does, contain circular causation. I'm looking for statistical tools that might help me do that. Should I try Bayesian causal inference anyway, just to see what I get? Support vector machines? Markov random fields? Does the Spurious Correlations book have ideas on that? (No, it just seems to be an awesome set of correlations. Thanks, BTW.)

(Also notice that these are not just any correlations. These are the strongest correlations that pertain among a large number of variables relative to each other. I mean, I computed all possible correlations among every combination of 2 variables in hopes that the strongest I find for each variable might show something interesting.)