Open Thread, July 1-15, 2013

This is not quite what you want, but if you are a grad student giving a talk and a senior person prefaces her question to you with "I am confused about...", you are likely talking nonsense and they are too polite to tell you straight up.

depersonalizing the argument is something I've had great success with. Steelmanning someone's argument directly is insulting, but steelmanning it by stating that it is similar to the position of high status person X, who is opposed by the viewpoint of high status person Y allows you to discuss otherwise inflammatory ideas dispassionately.

I frequently use "Hmm, it's not entirely clear to me that [X]...", which seems very directly analogous to yours.

"Outside view, ..."

I think it entirely depends on what you do during your commute.

A lot of drivers who drive during rush hour feel stress because they get annoyed at the behavior of other drivers. That's terrible for the happiness of the commuter.

Traveling via public transport also gives you plenty of opportunities to get upset over other people. It provides you the opportunity to get upset if the bus comes a bit late.

If you travel via public transport you can do tasks like reading a book that you can't do while driving a car or cycling.

Does anyone else experience the phenomenon of perceiving the duration of a commute to be shorter when the distance is shorter? For example, it feels like it takes less time or is more enjoyable to walk 3/4 mile in 15 minutes than to travel a few miles by subway in 15 minutes. I think its because being close in proximity makes me feel like "Hey I'm basically there already" where as traveling a few miles makes me think "I'm not even in the same neighborhood yet" even though both of these take me the same amount of time.

I download loads of music and audiobook and books (though it's more bothersome to read while moving) and listen to them on my commute to work, it takes me around 45 minutes commute to get to work via train system and it takes the same time to get back home. Doing this, I totally don't mind the commute. Look forward to it even since It was the only time I get to read or listen to anything.

Better in what way?

According to Freakonomics, public transportation may actually be less efficient than driving: http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/11/07/can-mass-transit-save-the-environment-right-wing-or-left-wing-heres-a-post-everybody-can-hate/

"superpower" is overstating it. Picking up paperclips is neat and being able to feel metal detectors as you walk through them or tell if things are ferrous is also fun but it's more of just a "power" than a superpower. It also has the downside of you needing to be careful around hard-drives and other strong magnets. On net I'm happy I got them but it's not amazing.

It's all fun and games until you need to get MRI and your fingers burst into flames.

Then it's just fun.

Do you notice the accumulation of ferrous, for the lack of a better word, dust fragments?

My magnets I have for misc. projects at home quickly pick up a collection of small fragments, but maybe my world is just to closely tied to steel fabrication shops.

Is there any practical use for having magnets in your fingers? It seems like a bizarrely bad idea to me.

I give you credit for noticing you're running on automatic in as little as five minutes.

This is a guess, but meditation might help since it's a way of training the ability to focus.

Are you sleep deprived? This kind of attention lapse sounds like the calling card of a microsleep.

I'm talking about that effect when I'm reading a text (any kind of text, textbook, blog, forum text) and suddenly I discover that two minutes passed and I advanced six lines in the text, but I just have no idea of what I read. It's like a time blackhole, and now I have to re-read it.

I do this all the time. I have seen it referred to in literature (a character reading a page three times before realising he can't take it in, as a way to show that he's extremely distracted), but that's not quite the same as just zoning out.

If it's material you want to/are required to learn from try taking notes as you read the material, to force yourself to recall it in your own terms/language.

If it's just recreational/online reading try increasing the font size/spacing or decreasing the browser width, or using a browser extension like readability. Don't scroll with the scroll bar or the mouse wheel - use pg up/pg down to make it easier to keep your position.

Probably automaticity is what you are looking for. I am not sure how to force one's mind to attend to a repetitive task. One trick for avoiding reading automaticity is to paraphrase and check for potential BS every paragraph or so.

I have this happen sometimes - usually it's because I let my mind wander to something unrelated but I kept my eyes moving out of habit.

I can't remember where I read it, but I remember hearing that in order to really understand an argument, you have to take a leap of faith & accept all of the propositions & conclusions in that argument. If you don't, you will be automatically & subconsciously strawmanning it. After you've exposed yourself to the whole idea, you can go back & look at it critically. I have no idea if this is BS & wish I could track down where I came across it. Cheers to any help.

Aha, It happens to Redditors too! Rage comic, thread.

I'm sorry to drop references without a summary, but this will have to do at the moment: "Lost thoughts: Implicit semantic interference impairs reflective access to currently active information"

.....Slicereader which breaks text into paragraphs that are displayed one-per-page. To advance to the next paragraph, you press the spacebar.

I second the recommendation. I found it interesting that I enjoyed it so much despite learning almost nothing at all. Everything in the video was stuff I'd heard or thought about before, but seeing it presented in a unified, artistic, humorous fashion was very entertaining.

I had no idea that the purpose of twelve tone was to teach people how to decontextualize musical sounds. Is listening to such music more valuable than meditation?

That is amazing.

I see them as purple, and I'm neutral for purple vs. the previous green.

My strategy is to avoid conversations of this form entirely by default. Most Greens do not need to be shown that the belief system they claim to have is flawed, and neither do most Blues. Pay attention to what people do, not what they say. Are they good people? Are they important enough that bad epistemology on their part directly has large negative effects on the world? If the answers to these questions are "yes" and "no" respectively, then who cares what belief system they claim to have?

Yes, like moving-the-goalposts, this is an annoying and dishonest rhetorical move.

Yes, even withing the Green movement, some people may be confused and misunderstand our beliefs, also our beliefs have evolved during time, but trust me that being Green is not about believing that the sky is literally green.

Suppose some Green says:

Yes, intellectual precursors to the current Green movement stated that the sky was literally Green. And they were less wrong, on the whole, then people who believed that the sky was blue. But the modern intellectual Green rejects that wave of Green-ish thought, and in part identifies the mistake as that wave of Greens being blue-ish in a way. In short, the Green movement of a previous generation made a mistake that the current wave of Greens rejects. Current Greens think we are less wrong than the previous wave of Greens.

Problematic, or reasonable non-mindkiller statement (attacking one's potential allies edition)?

How much of that intuition is driven by the belief that Bluism is correct. If we change the labels to Purple (some Blue) and Orange (no Blue), does the intuition change?

This process can be a stage in the process of leaving the Greens-- I've heard stories of deconversion which sounded a lot like that.

Karl Popper came up with the Falsifiability Principle as a direct response to watching Marxists, Freudians, and others do exactly this.

Ideologies and theo-philosophical schools are rarely if ever defined precisely enough to exclude true facts about the world or justifications for genuinely good ideas. They're more collections of rules of thumb, methods, technical terms and logics. If mathematically formulated scientific theories are under-determined then ideologies are so, but ten-fold. The problem of inferential distance when it comes to worldviews isn't really about shear decibels of information that need to be communicated. It's that the interlocutors are playing different games and speaking different languages. And I suspect most deconversions are more like picking up a new language and forgetting your old one, than they are the product of repeated updates based on the predictive failures of the old ideology/religion. It's a pseudo-rational process which is why it doesn't reliably occur in just one direction.

Back to your point: since people have egos, memetic complexes usually have self-perpetuating features and applause lights don't constrain future experience it makes sense that if anything is held constant it will be Greens being really sure they are right. That's non-optimal and definitely irksome to people like all of us. It's inefficient because we're spending a resources on constructing post-hoc justifications for how the real Green answer is the true one and the corrections to our model may not be more curve-fitting. That is, what ever beliefs and assumptions that led the Greens to be wrong in the first place may still be in place. Plus, it is kind of creepy in a "we've always been at war with Eurasia" kind of way.

But on the other hand it is sort of okay, right? At least they're updating! You can think of academic departments of philosophy, religion, law and humanities as just the cost of doing business to mollify our egos as we change our minds. And changing people's minds this way is almost certainly much easier than making them convert to the doctrine of the hated enemy and engage in extend self-flagellation. It's a line of retreat.

Making the modern Green cop to the literal beliefs of her intellectual ancestor seems like an exercise in scoring points, not genuine persuasion. Who needs credit? The curve fitting is still an issue but you might be better off trying to make room for better beliefs and assumptions within the context of Green thought. Especially since it isn't obvious the opposing movement did anything other than get lucky.

A few out-there scholars think Descartes was an atheist. He almost certainly wasn't. But there is a reason they suspect him even though much of the Meditations is an extended argument for the existence of God. The thing is that the practical upshot of his non-empirical argument for God is that we should completely abandon the Christian-Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition and use our senses to discover what the world is really like. "The sky is certainly Green and this proves that the ideal method for discovering the color of things is visual examination and use of a spectrometer."

Ideological multi-lingualism is a crucial skill; I'd like to hear ideas for cultivating it.

This sounds very much like religion - I'd be interested in hearing about a solid non-religious example.

I think there's a related rhetorical trick that's something like redefining the applause lights, or brand extension.

Greens believe the sky is green. I want them to believe the entire world is green. I will use their commitment to sky greeness and just persuade them it means something slightly different.

Clouds are kind of like the sky so should really be considered green if you're being fair about things. And rain is in the sky, who are you to say it's not green? Rain falls on the ground, which is therefore also part of the sky.

After a while, you can persuade people that, since the sky is green, obviously rocks are green.

This explanation isn't great but more practical examples are somewhat mindkilling.

Some selection effects: I wonder if the perceived solidarity of most identity-heavy groups is due to vague language that easily facilitates mind projection within the group. Surviving communities will have either reduced their exposure to fracturing forces, or drifted towards more underspecified beliefs as a result of such exposure. I think religious strains fall very nicely into these two groups, but I'm not so sure about political groups.

If you talk with a rationalist about making decisions via intuition, he has to grant you that their are domains of problems where intuition is very useful. Rationalism is about winning, so of course a good rationalist will use intuition for those domains.

If you look at medicine, In the last decade Cochrane has finally found that chiropractors can successfully treat back pain, even through their mental model of the human body conflicts with the model of mainstream medicine.

Most big mental systems get updated over time. As long as you do update towards new evidence, you don't have to trash your old beliefs completely.

It seems fairly believable that an oppressed underclass that is intentionally deprived of education and opportunity will, on average, be cruder, less intellectually inclined, have less wealth and status, and more prone to failing at life in various ways due to the lack of a support structure. This is true of any group, whatever their intrinsic nature, simply due to the act of discrimination.

I remember once reading an essay about Jews in(IIRC) Rudyard Kipling's works, where they're portrayed in pretty appalling ways, while all sorts of other groups are portrayed positively. The author came to the conclusion that acting in cowardly and profiteering fashion was a survival tactic created by anti-semitic laws, and that Kipling was probably just conveying the reality of the time. (I'm not enough of an expert to judge the truth of this, but it seemed reasonable)

Related.

{Totally irrelevant remark: The squiggly brackets are because [this sort] which I'd normally use for noting what I've edited interacts badly with the Markdown hyperlink syntax.}

The escape character, which solves this and various other potential problems, is "\".

This comment by JoshuaZ was, when I saw it, voted down to -3, despite the fact that it

• addresses the question it's responding to
• gives good reasons for making the guess JoshuaZ said he made
• seems like it's at a pretty well calibrated level of confidence
• is polite, on topic, and coherent.

I downvoted that comment and encourage others to feel free to downvote any comment of a type they would prefer not to see on less wrong. Most (but not quite all) cases of people using social politics to force their preferences onto others are things I wish to see left of. This includes but is not limited to sex politics. Being 'on topic' is no virtue when the topic itself is toxic.

At your prompting I have downvoted the parent of the comment in question. To whatever extent a comment is justified by being an answer to a question the asking of said question must assume responsibility. For the same reason I have no objection if others choose to downvote my own contributions to that thread for what could be considered "Feeding". Kawoomba has a good point.

Note: This is a different issue to the systematic downvoting of a user on all subjects (sometimes referred to as 'karma assassination'). That is universally considered an abuse of the system. However the example you give only demonstrates your subjective disagreement with the evaluations of some others regarding the desirability of a particular comment.

You have defined your campaign by references to "this sort of abuse" where 'this' refers to comments like the example comment being downvoted. As such I cannot support it. People are allowed to not like stuff and vote it down. If you had instead made your campaign to be against karma-assassination then I would support it. I myself have lost several thousand karma in bursts like that. I suggest revision.

If the information needed to take action against this sort of abuse is difficult to do anything with because it requires grovelling through whatever database underlies LW, I hereby volunteer (if told it would be useful by someone with power to use it) to make whatever software enhancements to the LW code are required to make it easy.

(I have no experience with the LW codebase but am an experienced software person. Getting-started pointers would be welcome if anyone takes me up on that offer.)

For some strange reason, it rather resembled the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. So whoever did this knew about Hermione Granger and the Burden of Responsibility. That wasn’t much comfort...Someone was mocking him, or at least mocking his self-insert as Godric Gryffindor. The alicorn pony he had become sighed.

:)

One could try ranking biases by the size of the correlation between susceptibility-to-the-bias and damaging behavior, for example, using the correlations in http://lesswrong.com/lw/ahz/cashing_out_cognitive_biases_as_behavior/

This is totally worth a discussion post.

You may not have noticed when you posted this, but the formatting of your post didn't show up like I think you may have wanted, with the result that it's hard to read. (If you're wondering, it takes 2 carriage returns to get a line break out.)

If you intended the comment to look like it does, I apologize for bothering you.

For a while I was in the habit of putting my little life lessons in the form of Anki cards and memorizing them. I would also memorize things like conflict resolution protocols and checklists for depressive thinking. Unfortunately it didn't really work, in the sense that my brain consistently failed to recall the appropriate knowledge in the appropriate context.

I tried using an iOS app caled Lift but I found it difficult to use and not motivating.

I also tried using an iOS app called Alarmed to ping me throughout the day with little reminders like "Posture" and "Smile" and "Notice" to improve my posture, attitude, and level of mindfulness, respectively. This worked better but I eventually got tired of my phone buzzing so often with distracting, non-critical information and turned off the reminders.

My very first post on LessWrong was about proceduralizing rationality lessons, I think it's one of the biggest blank spots in the curriculum.

I'm not sure this applies to your particular situation, but a general solution for proceduralizing behaviors that was discussed at minicamp (and which I'd actually done before) is: Trigger yourself on a particular physical sensation, by visualizing it and thinking very hard about the thing you want yourself to remember. So an example would be if you want to make sure you do the things on your to-do list as soon as you get home, spend a few minutes trying to visualize with as much detail as you can what the front door of your house looks like, and recall what it feels like to be stepping through it, and think about "To do list time!" at the same time. (Or if you have access to your front door at the time you're trying to do this, actually stepping through your front door repeatedly while thinking about this might help too.)

And if there's some way to automate it, then of course that's ideal, though you said you don't know when the next conference will happen so that's more difficult.

Or another kind of automation: maybe you could save the bio you wrote in a Word document, and write a reminder in it to add the edits you want... or just do them now, and save the bio for future use. Then all you have to remember is that you wrote your bio already. Which is another problem, but conceivably a smaller one: I don't know about your hindbrain, but upon being told it had to write a bio, mine would probably be grasping at ways to avoid doing work, and having it done already is an easy out.

For a problem like this, remembering for something rare in the indefinite future, the important thing is to remember at that time that you know something. At that point, if you've put it in a reasonable place, you can find it. It seems to me that the key problem is the jump from "have to write a bio" to "how to write a bio," that is, making sure you pause and think about what you know or have written down somewhere. Some people claim success with Anki here, but it doesn't make sense to me.

What most people do with bios is that they reuse them, or at least look at the old one whenever needing a new one. As Maia says, if you write an improved bio now, you can find it next time, when you look for the most recent version. But that doesn't necessarily help remember why it was an improvement. If you have a standard place for bios, you can store lots of variants (lengths, types of conferences, resume, etc), along with instructions on what distinguishes them. But I think what most people do is search their email for the last one they submitted. If you can't learn to look in a more organized place, you could send yourself an email with all the bios and the instructions, so that it comes up when you search email.

Discuss the failure in person, face to face, with a helpful colleague. Admit your failure. Make a conversation out of it. Brainstorm the fixes you've already made to the bio and any others that come up. Let the conversation have an attached emotion, whether it be a feel good problem solving session or a public shaming.

Memories with emotions stick around better.

I found that even the small act of saying "Yep, I did forgot to update the new widget part number" to a supervisor / team-member helps me remember to in the future.

a jpeg is an image, and a PDF is a document

Sir, you are wrong on the internet. A JPEG is a bitmap (formally, pixmap) image. A PDF is a vector image.

The PDF has additional structure which can support such functionality as copying text, hyperlinks, etc, but the primary function of a PDF is to represent a specific image (particularly, the same image whether displayed on screen or on paper).

Certainly a PDF is more "document"-ish than a JPEG, but there are also "document" qualities a PDF is notably lacking, such as being able to edit it and have the text reflow appropriately (which comes from having a structure of higher-level objects like "this text is in two columns with margins like so" and "this is a figure with caption" and an algorithm to do the layout). To say that there is a sharp line and that PDF belongs on the "document" side is, in my opinion, a poor use of words.

(Yes, this isn't the question you asked.)

That isn't the standard use of "tacit knowledge." At least it doesn't match the definition. Tacit knowledge is supposed to be about things that are hard to communicate. The standard examples are physical activities.

Maybe knowing when to pay attention to file extensions is tacit knowledge, but the list of what they mean is easy to write down, even if it is a very long list. Knowing that it valuable to know about them is probably the key that these people were missing, or perhaps they failed to accurate assess the detail and correctness of their beliefs about file types.

Unfortunately, everything I know about tacit knowledge is tacit.

Uh-oh indeed. Like most statements involving the word "is", this is probably one of those questions that should be dissolved. Thus I will ask:

What do you mean when you say document? I.e. what are the characteristics that a document has which a JPEG file does not, and which a PDF does have? Why is it wrong for something that is an image to also be a document?

At least a few months.

This sounds like you think of them as mooks you want to show the light of enlightenment to. The sort of clever mathy people you want probably don't like to think of themselves as mooks who need to be shown the light of enlightenment. (This also might be sort of how I feel about the whole rationalism as a thing thing that's going on around here.)

That said, actually being awesome for your target audience's values of awesome is always a good idea to make them more receptive to looking into whatever you are doing. If you can use your rationalism powers to achieve stuff mathy university people appreciate, like top test scores or academic publications while you're still an undergraduate, your soapbox might be a lot bigger all of a sudden.

Then again, it might be that rationalism powers don't actually help enough in achieving this, and you'll just give yourself a mental breakdown while going for them. The math-inclined folk, who would like publication writing superpowers, probably also see this as the expected result, so why should they buy into rationality without some evidence that it seems to be making people win more?

Taboo "rationalist". That is, don't make it sound like this is a group or ideology anyone is joining (because, done right, it isn't.)

Discuss, as appropriate, cognitive biases and specific techniques. E.g. planning fallacy, "I notice I am confused", "what do you think you know and why do you think you know it?", confirmation bias, etc.

Tell friends about cool books you've read like HPMoR, Thinking Fast and Slow, Predictably Irrational, Getting Things Done, and so forth. If possible read these books in paper (not ebooks) where your friends can see what you're reading and ask you about them.

The problem with rationality is that unless you are at some level, you don't feel like you need to become more rational. And I think most people are not there, even the smart ones. Seems to me that smart people often realize they miss some specific knowledge, but they don't go meta and realize that they miss knowledge-gathering and -filtering skills. (And that's the smart people. The stupid ones only realize they miss money or food or something.) How do you sell something to a person who is not interested in buying?

Perhaps we could make a selection of LW articles that can be interesting even for people not interested in rationality. Less meta, less math. The ones that feel like "this website could help me make more money and become more popular". Then people become interested, and perhaps then they become interested more meta -- about a culture that creates this kind of articles.

(I guess that even for math-inclined people the less mathy articless would be better. Because they can find math in thousand different places; why should they care specifically about LW?)

As a first approximation: The Science of Winning at Life and Living Luminously.

How about bringing up specific bits of rationality when you talk with them? If they talk about plans, ask them how much they know about how long that sort of project is likely to take. If they seem to be floundering with keeping track of what they're thinking, encourage them to write the bits and pieces down.

If any of this sort of thing seems to register, start talking about biases and/or further sources of information.

This is a hypothetical procedure-- thanks for mentioning that The Simple Truth isn't working well as an introduction.

Derren Brown demonstrated this scam on TV and called it The System. That might help you track down a name.

Later in that chapter, McCorduck quotes Marvin Minsky as saying:

...we have people who say we've got to solve problems of poverty and famine and so forth, and we shouldn't be working on things like artificial intelligence... [But I think] we should have a certain number of people worrying about... whether artificial intelligence will be a huge disaster some day or be one of the best events in the universe...

...You might be the only one who can help with the disaster that's going to happen [decades from now], and if you don't prepare yourself, and instead just go off into some social welfare project right now, who will do it then? ...Yes, I feel that there's a great enterprise going on which is making the world of the future all right.

...which sounds eerily like a pitch for MIRI.

Unfortunately, Minsky did not then rush to create the MIT AI Safety Lab.

There is a difference between "I want sex with you specifically (because you attract me)", and "I want sex with anyone (and you are the nearest one)". For me, the former would feel nice, but the latter would feel... creepy.

This may be another situation of not being specific: when women report that "men were put off by them being direct about wanting sex with them", I don't know which one of these situations it was. Also, it depends on context; there is a difference between getting a sex offer from a friendly person in a romantic situation, or getting a sex offer from an unknown heavily drunk woman at a disco (happened to me, and yes I was put off). These details may change the situation, and are usually not reported, because of course the goal of report is to make the other people seem horrible.

How about the Wiki?

Mine, on LW.

In response to 'so why can't you fly?' the answer is a lack of mental discipline: after all, its hard to control your thoughts

How do you know what you claim to know? (Okay, not you, but whoever said this.) Do you have any reproducible experimental proof of whatever violation of physical laws using mental discipline?

Isn't it suspicious that undisciplined thoughts are enough to create an illusion of physical reality perfectly obeying the physical laws, but are unable to violate the laws? That sounds to me like speaking about an archer who always perfectly hits the middle of the target, but is unable to shoot the arrow outside of the target, supposedly because he is too clumsy. I mean, isn't hitting the center of the target more difficult that missing the target? Wouldn't creating a reality perfectly obeying the laws of physics all the time require more mental discipline than having things happen randomly?

I am sure there can be dozen ad-hoc explanations, I just wanted to show how it doesn't make sense.

This also implies there is reincarnation, of a sort - there is no body to die, so you just construct a new illusory reality.

So, if you get killed, your mental discipline will improve enough to let you create new reality you can't create now? Interesting...

It looks like you and your friends have rediscovered Lebniz's monadology. Leibniz believed that only minds were real, matter as distinct from minds is an illusion, and minds do not interact causally, but they seem to share a same "reality" by virtue of a "pre-established harmony" between their non-causally related experiences. This last part can perhaps be reexpressed in modern terms as acausal communication.

I guess the fact that I lack mental discipline is also the reason that I lack mental discipline, and the reason that lacking mental discipline causes me to lack mental discipline, too.

Where do your friends get this stuff? Did they read the Sequences on LSD or something? Do they do anything differently in everyday life on account of it (besides talking about it)?

To a large extent, this boils down to: how do I distinguish between the hypothesizes that the universe is lawful, and the hypothesis that the universe is determined by my beliefs, and I believe it to be lawful.

How did you get the belief that it is lawful?

7) But Tegmark's level IV multiverse is true, so we can acausaly communicate between worlds, in fact all conversations are actually acausal communication between worlds.

That latter part seems to rely on a misleading use of words. There seems to be a rather distinct difference between acausal conversation and causal conversation.

In what sense does the mental world exist and physical is an illusion? What's the difference between an illusion and reality in this case?

areyoufuckingkiddingme.jpg

I don't completely understand what you mean (in particular, I would really like you to be more specific about what you mean by "noisy" and "indistinguishable"), but this looks like it shouldn't be true on cardinality grounds. There should be uncountably many possible distinguishable noisy behaviors of a dynamical system.

you should probably update towards "being convincing to me is not sufficient evidence of truth." Everything got easier once I stopped believing I was competent to judge claims about X by people who investigate X professionally. I find it better to investigate their epistemic hygiene rather than their claims. If their epistemic hygiene seems good (can be domain specific) I update towards their conclusions on X.

Assuming you don't have any particular reason to expect that this couple will be abusive, it's more ethical the better your genes are. If you have high IQ or other desirable heritable traits, great. (It seems plausible to anticipate that high IQ will become even more closely correlated with success in the future than it is now.) If you have mutations that might cause horrible genetic disorders, less great.

The child is wanted, so if they don't actually neglect it it'll grow up fine.

Note that if you donate sperm without going through the appropriate regulatory hoops as a sperm donor (which vary per country), you will be liable for child support.

I am surprised no one else has brought up the LW party line: consequentialism.

What is the alternative?
What is the consequence of your decision?

Probably the alternative is that someone else donates sperm. Either way, they raise a child that is not the husband's. If creating such a life is terrible (which I don't believe), is it worse that it is your child than someone else's? Consequentialism rejects the idea that you are complicit in one circumstance and not the other.

There are other options, like trying to convince them not to have children, or to get a donation from the husband's relatives, but they are unlikely to work.

If the choice is between your sperm or another's, then, as Qiaochu says, the main difference to the child is genes of the donor. Also, your decision might affect your relationship with the couple.

What can possibly be unethical about it? You are the only one who is vulnerable, since you might be legally on the hook for child support.

Given that the child won't exist if you say no, it's hard to assert that they'd be worse off if you decline. Just make sure you don't get too clingy.

There are some concerns about overpopulation, but I'd say that developed countries are underpopulated. Minimum wage is significantly above subsistence wage, so people are generating more wealth than they must consume.

There is the problem of factory farming. The child is likely to eat meat, which funds factory farming. Since there is little if any concern for the animals, they are not treated well, and I find it unlikely that their lives are worth living.

I answered as close as I can remember, but I think touch typing is more of something I kind of picked up as time went by, rather than something I specifically learned at one point in time. I remember pushing myself to practice touch typing at various points, but the general recollection I have is that I didn't really practice in a focused, systematic way, and yet now I can type this without needing to look at my keyboard (and in fact, when I look at my keyboard I'll be likely to make more mistakes).

So I probably picked it up in my early twenties with a lot of typing of homework and essays and posts on forums.

By “touch-typing” do you mean typing without looking at the keyboard, that and typing using all ten fingers, or that and using the formal start-with-your-fingers-on-the-home-row techniques?

I'm a sysadmin now, but I learnt to type when I was a rock critic.

I replied randomly

Note: I did not read the first paragraph and mistakenly answered the first two questions nonrandomly. Both of these questions have a spurious N/A answer.

I said 'primarily through own efforts', but 1) really I partially learned through a class, and partially independently of it, and it's hard to recall the mixture of influences, and 2) 'efforts' is not really the right word, since the learning was really incidental to the fact that I was typing a hell of a lot; it wasn't a deliberate act.

Not sure how this influences the survey. :-)

That's hard, because search engines have been dumbed down to the point where you can't google for a literal 'Q*'... A local search turned up http://lesswrong.com/lw/1zv/the_shabbos_goy/ as having one use of 'Q*' and bringing up 'lost purposes'.

What do you mean by "a good program to use for SQL?" A database engine to run queries in? A command line or GUI client for connecting to such a database? Something else entirely.

For what it's worth if you're looking for a database engine, my recommendation is Postgres. Free, open source, and a lot stricter than MySQL, even if you make MySQL as strict as you possibly can.

As for learning, I don't know any tutorials that are still around nowadays. I do recommend if you're learning it, to actually build something where you need to use queries.

Toy example: Build a weblog.

• Start by creating tables for posts and comments.
• Write an admin interface for creating new posts. Write a form for saving comments on a post.
• Then simple queries to pull out the latest few posts for display, and comments for display on a post's page.
• Add a simple tagging and other meta data facility.
• Write some reports using data available to you (eg, find top ten most commented posts, find most used tag, if you add viewer ratings, or unique view tracking, then grabbing most viewed posts, and counts of times viewed).

This should take you through exercises from very basic and easy statements through to some more advanced topics (grouping etc), and I find using a skill incredibly valuable to learning and internalising that skill. My first computer program was a blog, and while it was a disaster and a mess in many ways, I learned (or internalised) a lot about programming, and a lot about SQL in the process.

I prefer PMs and do them often for both comments & posts. A minor correction is of no enduring interest and it's better if it didn't take up space publicly. (Can you imagine if every Wikipedia article could only be read as a sequence of diffs? That's what doing minor corrections in public is like.)

programming interview google site:lesswrong.com; first hit: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hd1/maximizing_your_donations_via_a_job/

You're not getting anything wrong. You're not cosmically required to be a perfect altruist to be a good person.

Prenatally.

Just this: If you friend starts saying that their problems are solved and everything is going to be okay, become more careful. Sudden improvement in the mood and later returning to the original level is more dangerous than the original situation, because at this moment the person has a new belief: "every improvement is only temporary". Which makes them less likely to act reasonably.

I've been there, and this is one of those situations that requires professional help, not random advice from the Internet. If you're in the U.S., call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 and explain the situation. They can assist you further. If you're in some other country, just Google for your local equivalent.

Read the serial numbers on the paper money in your wallet?

Pick a nearby object. What letter does its name begin with? Convert that from a letter (base 26) to a number and truncate.

Probably has some systematic bias from the names of common everyday objects overwhelming it, but a decent start.

EDIT: Oh wait... that also has the problem of being biased because you're truncating and there are only 26 numbers. Maybe the bias against zxwq will almost cancel it out?

Use the random numbers from your watch in groups to get more digits.

A mobile phone with an Internet connection and random.org.

You can cast a lot of dice into a shoebox and shake the box on edge so that they all end up in a line and then read them off as a base-6 number, or other bases if you have other shapes. This is just from the diceware page. I personally can't think of a more efficient way of consistently generating random numbers.

Use something like 10 biased RNGs, like just trying to think of random-seeming sequence the naive way, then convert them to binary, reverse the order of every other one, and XOR them.

This isn't an even smearing, but looking at a random piece of text and converting the letters into 1-26 should be sufficient for many purposes. If you want additional randomness, add the letters of the first nontrivial word up mod 26(or mod 10, or whatever).

Use memory techniques to memorise a hundred is what I plan to do.

Do you care about the piece of paper? If not, you can likely attend courses in the literal sense - just show up for the lectures - without paying anything at all. Old textbooks are cheap, if you want problem sets, and you almost certainly do - I strongly opine that you cannot learn anything even remotely math-oriented without doing problems. But no rule says you have to do the same problems the others in the class are doing.

Clearly, this is not the method for you if you need a lot of feedback and guidance, nor if you want the credential in addition to the knowledge.

Mostly depends on what languages you speak fluently, what countries you can obtain visas for, your willingness to relocate to said countries and your plans on what you'll do with the "science-type stuff". If you want advice, edit your post accordingly. Most of the answers will come out to public colleges in your home state, or Europe. Or plumbing.

How can I measure my aptitude for various fields (for cheap/free)? (I did an undergrad degree in education which was so easy I don't know if I could make the grades in a demanding field).

Get a textbook of the appropriate level on the subject that has exercises and the correct answers to them, read the book, then do the exercises and see what you come up with? If it's math or physics, you should be able to tell by yourself whether your solutions resemble the example solutions in the text, seem to make sense and come up with the correct answers.

I don't know how well this will work with evolutionary biology or cognitive science. If you want to include philosophy in the "mind" part, it's my understanding that you need to be a trained academic philosopher to reliably tell fancy garbage and acceptable academic philosophy apart, so the approach probably won't work there.

After reading a couple of introductory textbooks, try to find grad students in the field in online chats and ask them about the stuff to gauge how well you've understood it. You can probably find plenty of math and computer science literate people on Lesswrong to bounce stuff off of.

Also, do you actually know you need to attend lectures to learn things, or are you just planning to do this because attending lectures is what people who get educated are supposed to do in the standard narrative? I'm pretty much incapable of following spoken academic lectures myself, and basically learn most everything by reading. If I wanted to get an education, I'd just go for a big stack of textbooks and a good note-taking system and ignore live lectures entirely at least on the undergrad level.

Are you wanting a degree, or are you wanting education?

If you're just wanting the information, the university in question may permit low-cost auditing

Are there any legitimate way (I mean actually achievable, you have first-hand experience, can point to concrete resources) to attend an adequate university for no or low-cost?

Of course, I just go to any university in my city and they don't cost anything.

I've started investigating free online education (lesswrong, edx, coursera, etc) but I have concerns: don't I need credentials?

Whether or not you need credentials depends on your goals. Yudkowsky started SI/MIRI without any credentials.

Don't I need classmates/colleagues/collaborators to help teach me,

When it comes to programming questions that I face as part of my university studies I go to StackOverflow.

motivate me,

Depends on your ability to self motivate.

and supply me with equipment?

Depends on whether you want to do something that needs equipment.

How do I know if I really understand the material?

If you can remember the Anki cards about a topic it's likely that you understand the topic. But more importantly, what's your goal? What do you want to be able to do with your "understanding of the material"?

I went to a college in the United States where admissions are need-blind (they don't consider how much financial aid you'll need in their decision to admit you) and that offers full-need aid (once admitted, they will meet any financial need you demonstrate). I was an international student, so the aid was not in the form of a loan, but a straight-up grant. I basically ended up paying nothing to go to a college that normally charges $60k+ a year. So if you're not American, this is a possibility. If you are American, I understand that most (all?) of the financial aid is in the form of federal loans, which you may or may not want to incur.

Wikipedia says there are only seven US universities that offer full need-blind aid to international students. There are many more that are need-blind and full-need for US students, although this will probably involve loans. That Wikipedia page also lists four non-US universities that offer need-blind and full-need aid to all applicants. If you are American, applying to one of those may be a better bet, because you might get a grant instead of a loan. I've heard good things about the National University of Singapore.

I think it is true. Self awareness is not hardware (wetware, whatever-ware) dependent. Just upload yourself and everything would be just fine. You'll be on two places at the same time, but with no communications between your instances, the old and the new one.

The same situation here, only that you have more than one natural born upload. Many billion, in fact.

The naturalism leads to this (frightening) conclusion.

What would you do on the hypothesis that this was true that you wouldn't do on the hypothesis that it was false?

I endorse this theory and it all adds up to normality: in the end, the theories that you offer as alternatives are all true. (I have not read anything other than your comment.)

(Partially derot13ing for clarity:)

What does everyone think of Bcra Vaqvivqhnyvfz

Nonsense on stilts. Next!

If there's only one person and everyone else is simulated in their minds then that simulation is powerful and uncontrollable enough that for all practical purposes they can act like there are other people.