Brainstorming for post topics

Take into account the possible prisoners' dilemma where the technology works out so that to maximize expected IQ you have to expose the genetically engineered babies to a huge risk of nasty genetic conditions and China goes for it and the United States must either accept that in 20 years China will gain a huge advantage or breed these damaged geniuses ourselves.

I endorse this approach. Ever since high school (so for about 12 years), I have deliberately stayed ignorant of all politics local to my country and of local news. I absolutely never watch or read the news, and I rarely find myself discussing these topics with my friends.

News and politics are designed to generate outrage and promote anti-rationalism and epistemic dark arts. They also strongly select for bad and depressing news, and for non-representative surprising incidents. On the other hand, the value from my knowing about the news is very small (e.g. in terms of changing my behavior).

Sometimes politics steps into your life. For example, you want to teach people rationality, but a religious political party just made religious education mandatory in schools. Or you invented a better way to teach maths to kids, but you can't use it, because in your country all schools must strictly follow the plans written by government. Etc. The idea is that the political power can prevent you from doing the right thing, so unless your plan is just to break the law and go to jail, you must somehow get involved with politics.

Of course, you could also just give up this specific topic, and choose some other topic where there is no direct political opposition. Or you could just write a lot about your idea, and hope that someone else will notice it and do the dirty work for you.

This is a great topic. I know of three good resources on it:

I Hate The News by Aaron Swartz

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier by Rolf Dobelli in The Guardian

Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet (PDF) by Rolf Dobelli - a longer version of the one in The Guardian.

Would almost write this post myself - btw does 'rah' mean 'yay'?

Be careful how you phrase this. Because I want Friendly AI, I do need politics - in a different sense of the word, one that has little to do with keeping up with the news or what the pundits are saying.

Little, but not nothing. The mundane political wars contain many object lessons on how to win at politics in the broader sense.

I would like to read it, as long as there will be more than just the basic idea of "you can't be reliably better than the market, and the index funds copy the market".

For example, there are many index funds. I know they are supposed to be better than all other options, but how do I compare them against each other? Or, how much of the historical success of index funds is a survivor bias, that USA was simply not destroyed in a war, while many other countries were? (If you had invested your money in 1900 in Russian or German index funds, how much would you have today? Let's suppose you would put 1/3 in Russian, 1/3 in German, 1/3 in American index funds, how much would you have today? Is the advice for your readers to pick a random country, to always pick USA because that worked in the past, or to diversify internationally?)

LessWrong a summary since it seems that a lot of people around here know that they're supposed to be good, but don't really understand all the reasons why

I would think that the reasons are fairly well known, what kind of reasons do you think the average person on LW misses?

In addition to my upvote, this comment is confirmation I, for one, would be interested in this.

If LW is declining/failing

I like the idea in general, I just recommend caution in evaluating whether the LW is declining. I mean, it's obvious from the context of this thread that many people feel so, however...

There was a time when Eliezer wrote a new article every day, for a year. And I loved reading those articles, but writing them was not how Eliezer wanted to spend the rest of his life, so it is natural that he gradually stopped. This feels like a decline from the "less new cool stuff to read every day" point of view. But on the other hand... all the stuff Eliezer wrote, it's still there. We are not in a newspaper business, the old copies are not automatically thrown away, and don't have to be repeated every year. It's collected to the e-book now (by the way, how's the progress there?). There is CFAR as a separate organization; they do seminars. There are meetups in many countries around the world.

What I'm saying is that the important part is the rationalist movement, not merely its website. If people at meetups actually accomplish something, that is more awesome than debating online. So we shouldn't judge the whole thing only by the daily number of new articles in the Discussion. Ironically, the fact that until recently the Discussion page was cluttered by meetup announcements was a signal of success (and of a bad design - which later got fixed). Now, if the number of LW meetups were declining, that would be something to worry about; and I didn't look at specific numbers.

I have been mostly lurking for a couple of months, but organizing people is one of my main areas of interest, and I have some practical experience in doing it. I have had thoughts along these lines, and right now I'm having a biweekly Google hangout with some friends and family to discuss the issue and get feedback on my ideas. I'd like to very gradually introduce the topics to the rationalist community. But the core idea that I'm working on right now is that rationality is not interesting to the general public because rationality is too abstract. I would like to form a community where the main outreach is "Success Clubs" or something like that, basically a support group for improving your life designed by rationalists. I would also like to create a currency that people earned by attending the meetings and participating in the broader organization. I think the success of cryptocurrencies, video games, and karma systems is evidence that this could be a very useful motivator.

What are the best things someone without very low tech skills can do for the rationality movement, and for the world?

Probably depends very much on the other skills the person has. I don't see how tech skills are central.

How much can we raise the sanity waterline without transhumanism (i.e. assuming current human biology is a constant)?

As phrased, the parenthetical assumes that biological improvement is the only or primary cause of raising the sanity line. That is not necessarily true - I personally suspect it is false.

How much can we raise the sanity waterline without transhumanism (i.e. assuming current human biology is a constant)?

The question presupposes mind body dualism. Biology get's changed through mental interventions and it's not at all clear how many interventions are possible.

I would be interested in helping with this post. (I am a gay man who does not partake in casual sex, primarily because of the health risks.) From what I recall when I looked into this last, there's huge value in breaking out the various kinds of sex, because of huge risk differences.

There is no "overall risk for gay sex". There is a risk for how you meet partners, and there is a risk level for each particular sex act you engage in and which protections you take.

Anal isn't mandatory. - a pretty high percentage of all gay men (30%) don't do the back door at all, coming or going, and it carries the same risks irrespective of your partners gender.

Having unprotected anal with someone you are not in a long term relationship with and who has tested clean is basically nuts, but a lot of guys do it, which is why gay men have such depressing averages. But those are averages. If you have good boundaries and behave reasonably, it's as safe as any recreational activity ever is. That means condoms. On a practical level, get some where you like the flavor and carry them around because, uhm, well.. Remember what I said about anal not being mandatory? If you have a problem with oral, that's going to be an issue.

I'm also a gay man who would be interested in this topic. It seems extremely narrow though so perhaps not appropriate for discussion. Maybe more suitable for a personal blog with a link post (but I don't have a personal blog). If you're going ahead with it, I'd like to help but I have little experience in this kind of research.

wearing a condom is safer than wearing a condom

You presumably meant "than not wearing a condom".

Legal risk seems unlikely-- I've never heard of anyone sued for just giving bad advice.

Saying something boneheaded and damaging the site's credibility seems more possible, but not what I'd call an extremely likely. A substantial compendium of research may well be likely to do more good than harm, but damned if I know how to compute that.

In my response to this post, I realized I was basically starting to write what the post you were talking about.

Anyway, as someone who has done research into this, the answer is the risk is higher, but not all that much. Suggested start here: http://www.aidsmap.com/Consistent-condom-use-in-anal-sex-stops-70-of-HIV-infections-study-finds/page/2586976/

Yes! I see so many arguments that the environment simply doesn't matter in depression, and most of them seem to come from, say, grad school administrators who benefit from denying that they're creating a horrible environment with no clear expectations, no positive feedback, no opportunities to socialize, etc. If depression is always a purely random chemical imbalance, well, it's a pretty neat coincidence that mine vanished within a week of my quitting grad school.

There was an RSA clip about this awhile back. Smile or Die

Omid, do you mean "If you're depressed, maybe it's because your life sucks" ? Just curious if you're implying causation. I don't think the claim that the two are correlated is all that controversial.

That seems just obviously true. What precisely is "If you're depressed, maybe your life sucks" designed to refute?

Who/when/why endorses any of these statements:

1. Depression is not significantly correlated with actual life problems to feel bad about.
2. It's practically impossible to have a positive attitude about some really bad things if they happen to you. And if you could, it probably wouldn't be a good idea.
3. If there's a problem that's making you depressed, it's better to learn to cope with it and adopt a positive attitude, then to try to fix the problem.

This post seems relevant. Advice shouldn't be formulated as pushing behavior in a certain direction, because different people benefit from pushing behavior in different directions.

Existential angst?

I've found success by focusing on the appearance of sincerity of what I say. The other key insight was making sure that I was spending time trying to figure out what the other person is actually proud of, instead of what I was most interested in.

In other words, don't worry on originality - focus on saying something positive about the thing the other person is interested in.

I would suggest the fix is to carry a smartphone at all times rather than a notebook. The phone fits in your pocket and odds are you might need one anyway.

I can't see how this is true. It isn't obvious to me that one could conclude anything from a video like that without a substantial prior knowledge of mathematical physics. Seeing a red, vaguely circular object, move across a screen tells me nothing unless I already know an enormous amount.

This DeepMind paper describes their neural network learning from an emulated Atari 2600 display as its only input and eventually learning to directly use its output to the emulated Atari controls to do very well at several games. The neural network was not built with prior knowledge of Atari game systems or the games in question, except for the training using the internal game score as a direct measurement of success.

More than 3 frames from the display were used for training, but it arguably wasn't a superintelligence looking at them.

I can't see how this is true. It isn't obvious to me that one could conclude anything from a video like that without a substantial prior knowledge of mathematical physics. Seeing a red, vaguely circular object, move across a screen tells me nothing unless I already know an enormous amount.

He elaborates on the claim a bit in this comment.

I'm guessing that the super-intelligence would deduce more from the details of the webcam than from the details of a short film or single image.

It couldn't know whether the image represented something real or a hypothetical construction.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has made the claim "A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis—perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration—by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.”

This is one of those grandiose and silly claims that gives this site a bad rap. There is no way to prove this statement of faith in Bayesian Superintelligence (BS for short), because: there is no BS (ehm...) around to test it with, and even if there were, the setup itself (BS+webcam) is so ridiculous, it would never be tried. Anyway, as far as I know, Eliezer's absolute faith in Bayesianism is not shared by anyone else at MIRI/CFAR, at least not nearly as fervently.

Mathematics for rationalists

Ooh, what was in this one?

I would love to see these as posts. (I really enjoyed your posts on the CFAR list about human ethics).

What does "The instrumental lens" hint at?

Related: Mundane Magic and Louis CK's "Everything's Amazing, Nobody's Happy" routine.

Can I ask why?

Speaking of akrasia, I'm hoping some people will write and post articles about these intriguing topics.

Do we know whether akrasia is just one thing?

Even so, having a place where people can post ideas for posts and see if those ideas are liked isn't a bad idea anyway.

I'm interested in seeing your ideas-- you could give them a preliminary test in this comment thread.

Also, an article can be posted at LW and in some other venue, even though it's annoying to have to reformat the links.