Open Thread for January 8 - 16 2014

Methods!Hermione got just as much of an intelligence upgrade as Methods!Harry did

Harry's upgrade was much larger. At the recent HPMOR meetup in Boston someone asked Eliezer about this, and his response was that Hermione was already smart enough that this would have made her "smarter than the author" and made writing her much too difficult.

This was also discussed in an hpmor thread.

I was absurdly lucky: the counselor I spoke to is new and motivated to put in the necessary effort for everything, and went to high school with my stepmother; it also turns out that the in-state training center has a thirty-day trial period, during which commitment is a non-issue. They also offered to provide any required technology, be it laptops or note takers or whatever. It could start as early as the first week of February, which is early enough that I wouldn't need to worry about security at my property. So on the whole, a surprisingly good day.

If you have not dealt with something the DSB before, you're probably drastically overestimating how much mental effort they are willing to expend to help you. (I dealt with a similar agency, the California Department of Rehabilitation, many years ago.)

Although it is of course good for you to try to estimate how much mental effort they are willing to make in real time during the interview, I suggest the plan you go into the meeting with assume it is low. E.g. you might consider just asking for a notetaker over and over again.

Try to appear a little dumber than you actually are.

I would not risk alienating your parents to try for a deeper conversation with DSB staff.

It looks like you've already got a list of things you want to answer in the meeting, so you've already done the most important preparation.

I'm unsure as to whether this conversation will be private (me talking to a DSB representative), or if one of my parents will sit in.

This is probably under your control. I expect you have the right to a private meeting, if you ask the DSB rep. If you're worried about how your parents would react to such a request, maybe try framing it as practicing your independence, or something appropriately harmless and fuzzy-sounding?

Interesting, some questions.

1. What is high dose?
2. How was the dosing achieved?
3. What is your sodium and magnesium intake like?

Can you link to your more important sources from you research? They could be useful to others.

I'm interested in this as well, can you send us a link of the research that you found linking potassium supplements to migraines? Thanks!

I think you're talking about So8res's recent posts, but I think they're exceptional. Most productivity posts are about avoiding spending time web surfing, particularly during time that has been budgeted for work. They do this partly because fragmenting time is bad and partly because there are better ways to have fun.

Can you give any concrete examples?

I agree tentatively. I'm working on maximizing my productivity per hour so that I can spend less hours being productive. Productivity measures are really helpful in that regard, but the temptation to take it too far is problematic.

Downvoted for proposing a poisonous idea. You're implying a dichotomy between being productive and experiencing positive emotions. You can find productive tasks enjoyable. Hanging out with people is an important part of staying healthy, for example, and is generally enjoyable.

there's more to life than work - there's actually enjoying life, having fun, etc.

Having fun is certainly something that you can do, but that doesn't mean that it is obviously morally optimal.

This could be generalised to putting any thought into anything. Will the singularity be achieved within one childhood? More smart people may be useful to apply to the problem. If you're smart, make more smart people.

That seems to depend on a number of assumptions -- your timeline, whether you expect a soft or a hard takeoff, the centrality of raw intelligence vs. cultural effects to research quality, possible nonlinearity of network effects on intellectual output. But I'd bet that the big one is time: if you think (unrealistically, but run with it) that you can improve a test population's intelligence by 50%, that could be very significant if you're expecting a 2100 singularity but likely won't be if you're expecting one before they graduate from college.

Depends on the confidence with which you expect it. If you're 95+% confident, probably not. Lower? Probably yes. Even an intervention with only 10% chance of ever mattering may be worth doing if its value if successful is at least 10x greater than its cost+opportunity cost.

Good point. The cutoff is not necessarily the singularity, either - once we have sufficiently awesome genetic engineering, there's no point to eugenics.

It's a short post, so you can read it quickly. What do you think about his argument?

I think it's silly. I suspect MIRI and every other singulatarian organization, and every other individual working on the challeges of unfriendly AI, could fit comfortably in a 100-person auditorium.

In contrast, "trying to fix industrial capitalism" is one of the main topics of political dispute everywhere in the world. "How to make markets work better" is one of the main areas of research in economics. The American Economic Association has 18,000 members. We have half a dozen large government agencies, with budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars each, to protecting people from hostile capitalism. (The SEC, the OCC, the FTC, etc etc, are all ultimately about trying to curb capitalist excess. Each of these organizations has a large enforcement bureaucracy, and also a number of full-time salaried researchers.)

The resources and human energy devoted to unfriendly AI are tiny compared to the amount expended on politics and economics. So it's strange to complain about the diversion of resources.

Is this the new 'but what about starving Africans?'

I think that he sounds mind-killed. Calling the financial system a "hostile AI" sounds cool for about half a second until your brain wakes up and goes "Whaaaaat?" :-)

If he really wanted to talk about existing entities with agency and their own interests, well, the notion that the state is one is very very old.

I think it's spot on.

What ASR said, and also this is a totally different domain. There is no code for the global financial system and no coder is going to fix it. There is no code for AGI, but some coder somewhere IS going to write it. The idea that fighting against billions of people and a system supported by all the money in the world is the same kind of activity as trying to prove theorems of friendliness is simply dense.

What skills do you have?

Yvain wrote a good thing about this sort of situation here.

I suggest you read the comments too, they have some interesting ideas that aren't in the post proper.

I have a friend who uses http://tutor.com .

Freelancer.com is worthwhile.

You can play online poker. If you play the numbers you can make a steady profit.

Me too! http://www.admonymous.com/philh

The CEO of a company I used to work at put up an anonymous feedback form. He was getting a lot of negative feedback, so he removed it.

Problem solved.

Thanks Kaj. This was the nudge I needed to create my own anonymous feedback form.

Hadn't heard about this until now. That sounds like a great idea, and thanks / props for putting this up!

Same here: http://www.admonymous.com/hruvulum

I would like to drink Soylent when I want to focus on something else, and to eat at a restaurant when I want to feel the pleasure of eating. Or maybe sometimes cook at home... but only when I decide to.

If I may borrow your analogy, it would be like moving from compulsively masturbating three times a day to having great sex once in a while and doing something else the rest of the time.

Some subset of rationalists just don't seem to value pleasure at all. I know one who used to say his only goal in life was the acquisition of information; relief was appreciated in that it eliminated a distraction, but satisfaction just didn't count for anything. Struck me as Puritanical.

Interesting distinction, it makes intuitive sense, and it's certainly good to be aware that there is a possible satisfaction component to something - but it's still easily possible to value the satisfaction less than you would value being free from the need for the relief component.

Defecation, or a drink of water when you’re very thirsty bring you relief, but not really satisfaction.

I feel that both of these can provide satisfaction as well, though I'm less sure about the water.

I can understand the desire to minimize or eliminate the need for functions that serve only to provide relief, but I think the “let’s subsist on Soylent” people are throwing the satisfaction baby out with the relief bathwater.

Or they just get more satisfaction from other things than eating.

I would rather get rid of eating but keep defecation, though I don't know that I could say why. The relief/satisfaction thing is certainly interesting.

I once had a conversation in this vein that went like this:

• Him: In Heaven, pizza grows on trees.
• Me: In heaven, people wouldn't need to eat.
• Him: Good point. But maybe eating as a form of pleasure?
• Me: kinda flabberghasted

If nothing else, the parent got me to evaluate my preferences and realize that I was using them hypocritically in situations such as the above.

At the same time, I see many Lesswrongers view eating as a chore that they would like to do away with.

I expect that this is a tiny but expressive minority.

StayFocusd

I recommend StayFocusd, but if it stops working, make a blacklist in your firewall and put it behind a ridiculously long passphrase that scolds you for not working. Use this one device for work and other devices for play.

Oh, and put those other devices in an underground vault 10 miles from your house.

If stay StayFocusd stops working, make a blacklist in your firewall and put the settings behind a ridiculously long passphrase. After this, use this one device for work and other devices for play.

I was using Leech Block for old fashioned reddit-block for some time, but then I switched to Rescue Time (free version) which tracks time you spend on certain internet sites, and found it much more user friendly. It does not block the sites, but it shows you a percentage estimate of how productive you are today (e.g. Today, 1 hour on internet out of which 30min on Less Wrong - so 50% productive).

if we don't have downvoted topics some of the time it means we are being too conservative about what we judge will be useful to others. Only worry if too large a fraction of your stuff gets downvoted.

This must mean that someone saw the title of it at -11 karma and thought "Sounds promising! Reading this now will be a good use of my time." And then they read it and went: "Arrgh! This turned out to be a disappointing post. Less like this, please. I'd better downvote it to warn others."

Not necessarily. Seeing a heavily downvoted post seems to trigger some kind of group-norm-reinforcement instinct in me: I often end up wanting to read it in the hopes of it being just as bad as the downvotes imply, so that I could join in the others in downvoting it. And I actually get pleasure out of being able to downvote it.

I'm not very proud of acting on that impulse, especially since I'm not going to be able to objectively evaluate a post's merit if I start reading it while hoping it to be bad. But sometimes I do act on it regardless. (I didn't do that with your post, though.)

What are you supposed to do when you've nailed up a post that is generally disliked?

Grin and say "Fuck 'em!"

-12 points in the discussion section is a pretty trivial karma hit out o.f the 1132 I see you have at this moment. I'd try to do better next time.

Giving that the post does contain upvoted comments that belong to it deleting it would prevent people from seeing those comments and be bad.

Just leave it. It can serve as lesson to you in the future but in a month no one but you will remember it as it falls off the scroll.

Well, I didn't bother to look this time, but if every bad post got just -5 votes max, the noise would probably unbearable. The extra sting is there for you, not to warn other readers.

One possible solution would be to edit the article, add "[Deleted]" to the title, remove all text and replace it by an explanation like: "The article was deleted because it received a lot of downvotes, but the discussion seems worth keeping; please don't vote on the article anymore."

These are group houses where a bunch of rationalists live together. Sometimes they hold events for the wider community or host visiting rationalists from out of town. I know of several that exist in the Bay Area, one in Boston, and one in New York. There are probably others.

Expanding on Ben's comment: local lesswrong meetup groups often grow into a communities of people who enjoy spending time together, at which point some of the people might decide to rent a house together.

Well, let's try to be a bit more specific about this.

First, what does the claim that "the world is overpopulated" mean? It implies a metric of some sort to which we can point and say "this is too high", "this is too low", "this is just right". I am not sure what this metric might be.

The simplest metric used in biology is an imminent population crash -- if the current count of some critters in an ecosystem is pretty sure to rapidly contract soon we'd probably speak of overpopulation. That doesn't seem to be the case with respect to humans now.

Second, the overpopulation claim is necessarily conditional on a specific level of technology. It is pretty clear that the XXI technology can successfully sustain more people than, say, the pre-industrial technology. One implication is that future technological progress is likely to change whatever number we consider to be the sustainable carrying capacity of Earth now.

Third, and here things get a bit controversial, it all depends (as usual) on your terminal goals. If your wish is for peace and comfort of Mother Gaia, well, pretty much any number of humans is overpopulation. But let's take a common (though by no means universal) goal of long-term economic wealth. We want to create value and keep on creating more of it for a long time. Given this, you want more humans since that will accelerate the process up until certain limits. Where these limits are is debatable but I haven't seen much evidence that we are facing them right now.

Fourth, overpopulation is pretty local. Taking the simplest possible measure of land area, it's hard to argue that countries like Russia or Canada or Australia are overpopulated.

I don't recall downvoting you, but I think that there is a very high chance technology makes the problem moot - either by killing us or by alleviating scarcity until a superintelligence happens.

I broadly agree with your opinion, provided certain socioeconomic problems resulting from population contraction could be overcome.

It's an argument based on false premises. Limitations on resources have, in past, proven to be fairly meaningless, and there's no particular reason to believe this will change going forward. Every time we think we've hit a wall(running out of wood in the 18th century, whales in the 19th century, food in the 20th century, or oil in the 21st century), we've come up with new technologies to keep going without much trouble(coal, oil, GMOs/agricultural chemistry, and tar sands/fracking respectively). Limitations on space are even less relevant.

Conversely, we've built first-world societies on a governmental safety net that only actually works with an increasing population. If we don't grow, then pension plans will start detonating like someone's carpet-bombing the economy. (Yes, worse than they are already). I think the people who created those pyramid schemes should be taken out behind the woodshed for a posthumous beatdown, but it's a bit late to fix it now.

If you want to know what a negative population growth rate looks like, look at what will happen to China over the next couple decades. It's the biggest demographic time bomb in human history.

Also, if you're bringing sustainability into this, IMO the only truly sustainable option is to advance technology so fast that we can defeat the Second Law somehow. Anything else just delays the inevitable.

Concern trolling is a widespread phenomenon, not specific to feminist communities. The definition given in the first two sentences of that article is the exact concept that the phrase was coined to name:

A concern troll is a person who participates in a debate posing as an actual or potential ally who simply has some concerns they need answered before they will ally themselves with a cause. In reality they are a critic.

The article does then go on to broaden the concept to the point where it can be used as a club to invalidate anyone:

Concern trolls are not always self-aware, they may also view themselves as potential allies

Well, no. The whole point of the concept is that a concern troll is lying. They are, in fact, an enemy deliberately, consciously, intentionally, posing as a friend in order to undermine discourse. Someone who is actually a friend with genuine questions that they actually want to be constructively discussed is not a concern troll, even if those who do not wish the questions to be raised at all call them that.

Concern trolling in the false flag political operation sense is a thing that happened

An example of this occurred in 2006 when Tad Furtado, a staffer for then-Congressman Charles Bass (R-NH), was caught posing as a "concerned" supporter of Bass' opponent, Democrat Paul Hodes, on several liberal New Hampshire blogs, using the pseudonyms "IndieNH" or "IndyNH". "IndyNH" expressed concern that Democrats might just be wasting their time or money on Hodes, because Bass was unbeatable.[37][38] Hodes eventually won the election.

"Concern trolling is frequently banned in feminist communities."

It may help if you consider the possibility that some feminist communities do not exist for the sake of rational dispassionate and balanced discussion of feminism. Rather, a feminist community may be a meeting place for the members of a feminist movement of some kind, which exists to achieve its goals. Like any other political movement.

TL;DR. LW is not the real world. In the real world, arguments are always soldiers (even if you pretend them not to be), discussion requires resources, and resources are finite.

The site you linked gives a method for detecting concern trollery, so the concept is at least somewhat operationalized:

Concern trolls can be identified primarily because they will retreat from, rather than engage with or be convinced by, answers to the questions they pose. They may repeatedly ask a certain question in feminist discussions without ever absorbing or replying to answers from previous discussions. They will often back into typical anti-feminist arguments, such as expressing concern that an argument is too "extreme" or a feminist too "strident" or even "hysterical". Another common tactic is insisting that some subjects are more important than others, for example, that media depictions of women shouldn't be criticised while violence against women continues.

This seems quite distinct from "someone slightly to the right of me". If this description is correct, then someone who goes into a feminist space and argues forcefully against some tenet of feminism, replying substantively to the feminists' objections (rather than criticizing their tone), would not qualify as a concern troll.

re: public speaking: There are in person groups like Toastmasters. Alternately, you can record yourself speaking about something and try to give yourself a self-critique.

Here's an exercise I've run before: Person 1 picks a word at random; Person 2 immediately starting speaking about something relevant. At 15 second intervals for 1-2 minutes, Person 1 throws out new words; Person 2 needs to keep speaking about the new words, and to flow smoothly between topics. (You can substitute Wikipedia's random article button for Person 1.)

Imagine we often saw people coming to LW and saying things like

"Hello. I wholeheartedly agree with the basic goals of LW and I think rationality is awesome! But, if I may make a small criticism, I think LW is being a bit irrational itself in its complete dismissal of religion. Yes, many forms of religion are irrational, but others may not be so, and one must no throw the baby with the bathwater, etc. etc."

If there was a recurring pattern of this happening, with the pro-religion arguments being made by "newbies" and being things we have seen many times before, wouldn't we get impatient with it, give it a label (such as "concern trolling") and apply the label dismissively from then on? Perhaps this is not the most open-minded attitude, and it would be very inappropriate in a forum dedicated to open discussion between theists and atheists. But in a forum where most people have decided to their own satisfaction that these criticisms are incorrect, and are more interested in discussing other topics while taking atheism for granted than in rehashing what they see as basic stuff, can they really be faulted for taking it?

2.) In my experience, filling your rhetoric with filler words is a result of being uncertain speaking, or not being sure what you want to say.

For the first item, find public speaking practice/training. This does not have to be toastmasters, volunteer or join a club and step into a leadership position. Take a part time job at a tourist attraction and spend an afternoon a week telling stories to groups of strangers. You may be already at home talking to anyone, but if you are not, this will help.

For the second item, find public speaking practice/training. Too often I find myself repeating my last statement and using other filler methods to hold my place in the conversation while I order my thoughts. Take a breath, pause, figure out what you are going to say before you say it. It feels like an eternity to you, but it is only a moment's pause to the listener. Also, instead of holding your place with filler, practice body language, establish through posture and eye contact that you are still talking. Public speaking is again great practice for holding interest by body language alone.

Disclaimer: I'm from a very Wait Culture, results may vary in a Interrupt Culture

Edit for emphasis: Decide what you want to say then say it! You will use more precise language and less filler.

Ad two: I have no particular expertise in this area, so all I can offer is a few remarks based on what I myself do when I want to change something about my speech (e.g. my accent, but also vocabulary). Basically, it's one of those things where what you need to do is train yourself to pay attention. In order to do this, it's important not to be afraid to speak slowly. There might be an unconscious inhibition to speaking slowly for fear of appearing dumb. If you overcome that, you have time to consciously double-check what you're saying, and to consciously intervene by actively thinking about what you're going to say, and then saying it, or by stopping yourself when you feel that you're about to say something undesirable (like "like").

Also, you couldn't be old-fashioned by wearing a fedora, if I'm correct in deducing from you username that you're a girl. ;-)

Despite his nickname, Gothgirl420666 is a cis male. Update his level of credibility on gender issues accordingly.

Reminds me of my not-quite-awake-dream-state encounters with Q from Star Trek.

Quoting part of an old comment of mine:

I can, though, relay an interesting experience I had in unintentionally constructing some kind of similar mental archetype while dreaming that kind of stuck around in my mind for a while. I didn't reach into any pantheon though, my mind reached to a mythology which has had its claws in my psyche since childhood - star trek. Q is always trolling the crew of the Enterprise for humanity's benefit, in attempts to get them to meet their potential and progress in understanding or test them. He was there, and let's just say I was thoroughly trolled in a dream, in ways that emphasized certain capabilities of mine that I was not using. And just before waking up he specifically told me that he would be watching me with my own eyes since he was actully part of me that normally didn't speak. That sense of part of me watching and making sure I actually did what I was capable of stuck around for over a week.

there no reason not to go down that road

I tried Beeminder and it didn't work. Basically, I just ignored it when there were $5 at stake, was briefly motivated by $10 and $30, and then just started lying. So, you need to have at least some self-respect in order to successfully use it. The most funny thing is that I paid them something around $300, before I found out how ineffective Beeminder was for me.

Yay positive reinforcement! (M&M's had helped me with Anki, to some extent (until I started lying :D))

I have a reason to not go down that road - I have a solid enough Anki habit as it is, and don't need extra push. Anki doesn't feel like a chore.

I watched one of his videos explaining the path integral. It was definitely all correct, and the way he presented it convinces me that he wasn't just repeating something he had memorised from a text book. He was presenting it informally and in his own words. He even had a way of motivating the path integral hat I hadn't seen before. So I'd say that he genuinely does have a deep understanding.

Here's a previous comment I wrote expressing skepticism about the whole Jake Barnett phenomenon (also see here and here). I haven't been keeping up with what the kid has been doing lately, so maybe my concerns are now moot. Briefly skimming some of the recent videos on his channel, he seems to basically know what he is talking about, although there's no evidence of any particularly deep insight into the topics.

I would start with looking at what are the most important issue that you face at the moment in your life.

I recently reread Anathem, and while searching for our world's equivalent of Diax's Rake, found in the online acknowledgements that

Almost every page of Anathem bears some imprint from [Julian Barbour']s more recent The End of Time

So that I had read and taken in his ideas (at that deep level mainly reserved for well-written Conjunction Fallacies), and read the Quantum Physics sequence, probably explains why I found nothing new in the book itself.

You've listed one concrete goal and two stupendously vague goals. My first suggestion would be for your friend to spend the time figuring out what, exactly, they're trying to achieve with something like "form an alternative career" or "become a better person," then using the resulting knowledge to make an actionable plan. Clarifying goals is often the first step to achieving goals.

Other considerations: How far in the future will this be? How much money, if any, does this person have available for training or travel or the like? Is CFAR running a workshop during the relevant month?

Wow, how do you master Mandarin AND French with difficulties with akrasia & drive?

I had the same problem couple of months ago. It was about confirming an e-mail address: I received an email asking me to confirm the address I was using, with a link. After that, I could comment normally. Unfortunately I can't remember what I did in order to receive that email: something in preferences, probably.

I think that sufficiently downvoted users are prevented from commenting. Could it be that?

He touches on that in "Consider Phlebas". Basically there were other technologically advanced civs with different values, not everyone wanted to join the Culture.

Another possible explanation is that the ship Minds controlled immigration in non-obvious ways (memetic weaponry).

Somewhere in the books, I think in Look to Windward, it's pointed out that ambassadors to the Culture end up assimilated and serving unofficially as ambassadors for the Culture instead.

Also, the Culture appears to have trillions of citizens. You could have a large amount of immigration and still not see much of the impact.

I think the Culture accepts immigrants. Why wouldn't it?

I don't think there any advantage of individuals to write blogs in that way. Having the blog separate and the links on "RECENT ON RATIONALITY BLOGS" seems to be a good solution.

Yes, this is sufficient. Well done.

I also didn't see my post appear under discussion/new before I deleted it. Where did it appear so that other people could look at it?

It appeared under Discussion (it is no longer there) and I am not sure why you weren't able to see it there.

You may be underestimating the amount of work involved in being a landlord. If you find financially stable, reliable, non-destructive people, it's a nice income stream. Even so, they will expect you to fix problems sooner than you might get around to doing it for yourself. You probably shouldn't count on having your rooms rented for every month, you might lose a tenant and not have one ready to replace them immediately.

All this is general knowledge. There's probably information somewhere about the expected costs to being a landlord.

It still might make sense to buy the house.

Temporary theraputic hypothermia is very useful for treatment of cardiac arrest and other neurological insults, as it reduces reperfusion injury and the slower inflammatory brain damage that happens in the hours and days after a period of ischemia.

As for life support, people can live for decades on tube feeding and artificial ventilation, and years on chemical feed dripped into their blood (at the cost of liver function). That's just letting normal biology proceed though, substituting some of the functions of a fully functional nervous system or other organ systems. If you are looking to try to preserve degrading function longer, or stretch out the time you have to treat something, you would want to try to replicate a state like hibernation, in which temperature and biochemical reaction rates can be lowered while maintaining the presence of actual life and repair functions. The particulars of such a state would dictate if someone who was already ill or damaged in some way stood much of a chance of surviving it. Though a lot of neurological trauma is already treated with artificial comas to reduce the brain's bloodflow and metabolic rate, and there was a recent report of successful treatment for rabies that involved a months-long induced coma.

...Though you really don't want to spend much time with your blood flow moving through tubes outside your body that you don't absolutely have to. It's just asking for infection and all sorts of clotting/embolism problems, either due to anticoagulants giving you bleeds inside your body, or your blood clotting in tubes not lined with endotheial cells and not shaped for near-perfect laminar flow, or microscopic bubbles entering the flow through a crack in the plastic too small to see. There's even indications that a large fraction of people on heart-lung machines for a single surgery have micro-embolisms throughout the brain caused by the blood issues that come about form extracorporial circulation.

Adding you :P

Being small enough to freeze solid quickly is a nonstarter.

Cells filling themselves up with trehalose (disaccharide that in many organisms including waterbears and my lab yeast serves as both a fast-degrading energy store [faster than glycogen] and protection against denaturing proteins during both desiccation and freezing) under stress is more plausible but runs afoul of the fact that large animals only have so much soluble sugar at any given time and can't make sugars from lipids - in many cases of organisms that use it as a protective feature it becomes like 10% or more of their weight.

Trying to eliminate the inflammatory response to hypoxia? No idea if that's plausible without causing immune system issues.

An interesting case is a behavior that makes an initial good impression, but will sour a relationship when continued. Sharp sarcasm or negative joking is the most common example I've observed.

how easy is it to spoil somebody's impression of you when you have already known them for a bit?

Spoiling is trivially easy -- just mention that you like to torture kittens in your spare time.

Without such drastic admissions, are you really asking whether someone's opinion of you can radically decrease without you doing anything that seems out of the ordinary to you? I guess, but you also have to keep in mind the difference between what the other person things and what s/he is willing to show.

For example, let's say Alice and Bob meet. Alice doesn't really like Bob but she is polite so she doesn't show it in an obvious fashion plus she hopes that maybe Bob isn't as bad as he looks. After a bit of time Alice's opinion of Bob is still the same but now she sees less reason to be polite and have decided that yes, Bob is as bad as he looks. From the Bob's point of view it looks as if Alice took a sudden dislike to him, but from Alice's point of view she just allowed herself to show her true attitude which didn't change much.

The standard advice for starting a physical group is to just pick a timeframe and a nice location, then show up with a good book and stay for the duration. Either other people show up and you've got your meetup, or else you spend a couple hours with a good book.

PM me if you want to talk about founding a group. I ran the Boston community for a while, and it was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.

Alum here... glad to hear! You should do that :)

In the last months I frequently found myself forgetting "'s" after "there" or "ït". It not an issue that I remember being there a year ago.

I like how you do what you describe with the very next word after the description of the problem.

There is what Wikipedia calls interference theory, which is when the act of learning new, similar information throws a wrench into the recall of the old information. For example, I never used to have any trouble with the word iniquitous before I learned the word invidious, but now I get them mixed up.

English is for my a second language

for me

;-)

Well, energy drinks don't have that high a caffeine content compared to coffee -- a can of Rockstar has about 160 mg in it, which is comparable to a strong cup of coffee, but it's got somewhere around twice the volume. Red Bull is more like 80mg. So if your office coffee isn't scratching your itch, you're probably craving something other than caffeine, maybe even just sugar. I'd recommend experimenting with that a bit.

If you want to make good coffee easily, though, I recommend a burr grinder + French press or drip cone (I prefer the standalone kind, though a drip coffeemaker won't kill you), and the best-quality beans you can find: Philz is a good Bay Area choice. Toss a couple tablespoons of beans per cup of coffee into your grinder, grind them at a medium-fine setting, transfer to your coffee production system of choice, then add boiling water. French presses tend to make stronger coffee with more complex flavors, but add a timing parameter -- you can oversteep or understeep coffee made with a French press, while drip coffee is pretty idiotproof.

Espresso is the best for preventing withdrawal. You can buy espresso cans like these. They end up costing around $1-2 per drink.

You can also consider buying a moka pot. Though, moka pot coffee isn't really espresso as it is extracted under much less pressure. But you can make your own and so save money. It tastes quite good.

A single shot of espresso from Starbucks, costs around $1.50. If you want something strong, I recommend a red-eye: a cup of drip coffee with a shot of espresso in it. This usually will keep you caffeinated for a few hours at least.

Caffeine pills are cheap, portable, fast-acting, and you can get an exact dose.

The simplest thing is caffeine pills. They're cheap and freely available over-the-counter.

Making yourself some coffee is not hard at all. Drip coffeemakers are ubiquitous and cheap, if you think the coffee is too weak just put more grounds into the basket. Otherwise try Aeropress, it's good. I also like Turkish coffee but most people think it's too muddy. If you want a hobby, buy a proper espresso machine :-)

Tea is even simpler, all you need is tea and boiling water. Experiment with different teas (they are VERY different), figure out what you like. I strongly recommend loose tea over teabags.

Black tea is easier than coffee because boiling water gives good results so you don't have to worry about letting it cool exactly the right amount.

Middle Eastern import stores sell very cheap bulk tea. Often the quality of their cheapest stuff is not high enough for the tea to be very enjoyable without added flavor, so I recommend Earl Grey or, if you don't like bergamot, plain black tea and adding a cinnamon stick or cardamom pod to the pot.

I am an engineer practicing in Alberta, of course my trade is closer to math pure and physics than chemistry, but all the same I would be available for a text-based interview.

At one extreme is the weekly sudoku puzzle that is completed for my own enjoyment and I am content with my mastery level. At that extreme I pick A, it is not really a goal to improve my sudoku skill, negative results contribute little.

At the other extreme are your hard coding problems, complex engineering problems, and those little bent steel puzzles that you have to take apart and reassemble in apparently impossible ways; Here the long term goal is not to solve the single problem but to learn and solve the problem type. These problems are either without an A solution, or you want greater mastery of the field so that next time only A or B solutions are on the table instead of the B and C solutions. Eventually your peers start coming to you with their A, B, C dilemmas and you can give them the right answer with 100% confidence. After that you will be known as a guru in your field and reap all the prestige and profit that comes with that (results may vary depending on field).

In short it depends on your goal, A to solve the problem, C to solve the problem type. B is a compromise if you want C but the budget doesn't allow for it.

Do you mean "hypothesis" as something that solves the problem?

If yes, then there's a problem. Either your beliefs are inconsistent (as they don't add up to 100%), or the hypotheses cannot be independent. Assuming your beliefs are consistent, your best best would be to figure out what's the correlation between these hypothesis is between choosing one to test. For example, C could be correlated with A. Choosing to pursue A (or C) would then give information about C (or A) as well.

If no, the amount of the information you'll get from testing them is incomparable. For example, B could be about a relatively minor thing, while A about 99% of the solution.

Assuming the average person's utility function is concave with respect to money and given the current income distribution the simplest and highest utility change is to take a fixed amount from high income people and give it to low income people.

When you consider second order consequences, such as the creation and elimination of certain incentives, the effect of currency transfers on utility is not quite so straightforward. Even without those consequences, it is far from obvious that the statement

This follows from simple economics as the people on the lower end of the distribution know best what it is they need.

holds.

I would argue most people's revealed preference of utility wrt money is either incoherent or lumpy enough that describing it with a simple curve isn't really valid.

the simplest and highest utility change is to take a fixed amount from high income people and give it to low income people.

Let's add the time dimension to this analysis. What you say might be true within an immediate time frame, but it is true in the one year time frame? ten years? a hundred years?

There is also the issue of side effects. Forcibly equalizing income (or wealth) has been tried. Many times.

I don't think it's an exact match for a prisoner's dilemma because (as described) they don't have a shared goal like not going to prison. if they have an overarching shared goal like being happy with each other, the situation is different.

I agree with Nancy that this doesn't look like a prisoner's dilemma.

You could think about this as a dynamic game, but it seems simplest to model it as a static game with two strategies: eat heavily and eat lightly. Both have to choose eat heavily to actually eat enough to gain weight, since it sounds like both have to agree every time they eat. The payoffs then look something like:

.....    Heavily     |     Lightly
Heavily |         1,0     |      0,1   |
Lightly   |         0,1    |     0,1    |

with the bodybuilder as the row player and the model as the column player. Then (Heavily, Lightly) and (Lightly, Lightly) are both Nash Equilibria. Do those payoffs seem to capture the situation you were thinking of?

RationalWiki?

.#lesswrong IRC is probably closest.

reddit.com/r/lesswrong ?

so, lower signal to noise, but also more exploration of the edges of the rationalist memeplex? cud b laff.

Check out this thread for a sense of what a bad idea that would be :)

Where is rationalist 4chan?

It is traditional to offer certain images as incentives for answers.

Tits or GTFO! :-D

The wiki entry you linked is extremely unclear. Can you explain what enactivism is in simple words, using the vocabulary like http://splasho.com/upgoer5/ ?

Does anybody think that there is a cognitivist bias in LessWrong?

Bias is a bad word for core axioms that underly thinking. When discussing on Lesswrong I do accept certain axioms as the basis for the discourse.

There are other occasions where I talk to other people where I use other modes. When I attend a NLP seminar, it can happen that there are four meaningful conversational layers active at the same time. It's highly narrated and things that are said mean thing based on the narrative and context in which they were said.

On of my first 1-on-1 conversation with an NLP trainer was an elevator ride. I drove to the 5th floor to go to the toilet on it. The elevator stopped on the 4th floor and he came in. The 4th floor was the floor in which the seminar was held After assessing the situation he said: "You're intelligent." He was just at the toilet but walked down from the 5th floor to the 4th floor to then drive to the floor, and now I was on the 5th floor again because I drove the elevator there.

On that level the interaction is trivial, but to him I made the appearance of low self esteem nerd, so him as a figure of authority telling telling me me that I'm intelligent was something that was very targeted to what he thought I would need on an emotional level at that moment.

The style of the interaction where meaningful points usually don't get made on the most obvious level of the conversation and depend on context is very different from the kind of intellectual discussion on Lesswrong.

I'm not really able to do both at the same time. Both approaches have there use but I don't it makes much sense to speak in terms of bias. Just different frameworks and mental models with other axioms.

The result of such differences is that a lot of the academic literature on a subject such as hypnosis or NLP is bad because a good NLP trainer has the habit of communicating on a entirely different layer than an academic.

And to be clear, I do consider the NLP paradigm to be a form of enactivism.

I'm not familiar with enactivism in particular, but embodied and situated cognition seem like reasonable paradigms. I don't think they really necessarily contradict computationalism or cognitivism, though.

Well ... isn't it? What others are you thinking of? None spring to my mind.