Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015

Luke: the wandering get-your-shit-together-er. Making organizations better since 2011.

I liked the sound of "The Future Is Pipes" and saved that sentence structure in case I needed it.

My thoughts exactly! I sometimes use that sidebar to find out about SSC updates (which I read somewhat more often than OB), and when I saw that title, I never even thought to scroll over it to see the link. Obvious Robin Hanson. Something something Great Filter. Well, imagine my surprise...

I wonder whether Scott is aware of the game and deliberately trying to tease...

I'd be more surprised if he wasn't.

Here's my diagnosis of the problem.

Before the internet: "Hey Bob, here's why you're wrong."

On the internet: "Hey everyone, here's my witty response to Bob, explaining why he's wrong and evil."

You can see how that kind of discussion would make people radicalized.

I've been thinking of an online discussion site based on exchanges of personal messages, which eventually get released to the public only if both participants agree. Maybe that would work. At least there would be no name-calling, because that's useless in a one-on-one setting.

If you went to a party (meaning a social event) and started loudly proclaiming that anyone who does not vote for your favourite political party is a selfish git, people would tell you you were being rude, and you might be asked to leave (unless everyone there shares your views).

But on facebook, this sort of behaviour is perfectly acceptable. And once you get used to this online, it carries over into offline life. Faced with this onslaught, people with descenting views either shut up about it or change their views to match the majority.

I dunno if I use anecdotal evidence too much, but from my experience, five years ago it was possible for people to have different political views, to have a civilised conversation about policies, to agree to disagree. Now virtually everyone I know has the same political views and no-one discusses policies (you can't fit policies into a tweet, its too complex).

More generally I get the impression that even physical violence in the pursuit of political aims seems to be argued as justified more frequently, from rioting to throwing stones at politicians to angry jokes about arson against people who support the wrong party.

Tomorrow its the general election here in the UK. Five years ago I would have had several conversations about who to vote for, with no hard feelings on either side. This time, I'm not telling anyone I know in real life who I'm voting for, and all I can think is that all this anger isn't worth it, that posting a picture captioned "We have people who need jobs, we have jobs that need to be done, why don't we just print the money needed? Share if you agree!" is not a sensible way to determine macroeconomic policy, and that we would all be better off if people got into office through examinations or futarchy.

(it's never a good sign when Eliezer Yudkowsky is the one to express your deepest fears about why everything's and everyone's brokenness is unstoppably accelerating)

What's his track record with these so far?

Here's a blog post about how everyone hates each other over politics more than before. [And so on.]

So...I suspect my beliefs on this topic are out of step with the rest of LW, and even if I limit myself to the empirical aspects (i.e. set aside my normative differences) it's going to take a bit of effort to explain & justify my disagreements/doubts.

The first thing I notice is that the blog post talks about political polarization, as well as hatred/intolerance. Something I didn't realize until I glanced at the political science literature on polarization is that political polarization is multidimensional, so it's risky to talk about a change in political polarization in general.

To pin things down, we can first ask whom we're talking about: citizens in general, or politicians specifically? Then we can ask, polarization of what: specific policy preferences, or party identification? Finally, we can ask, is the polarization we care about variance in its own right (i.e. has the policy/party preference distribution spread out?) or covariance (e.g. has geographic sorting strengthened, which would be a rise in spatial segregation by political belief?) or attitudes between partisan groups?

There are therefore at least 2 × 2 × 3 = 12 conceptually distinct things we might mean when we refer to "polarization", and they have very likely changed to different degrees over time. There is clear evidence of decreasing inter-party cooperation in the US Congress, but this doesn't tell us much about the US public at large.

Even if we're clear that we're talking about the whole US public, not just politicians, much of the evidence adduced for polarization is consistent with multiple hypotheses. People often presume a null hypothesis that the public is pulling itself apart on policy, or that different partisan groups have more negative attitudes towards each other, but an alternative hypothesis I find plausible is party sorting: an increase in the correlation between party identification and policy preferences, which can take place even if policy preferences and inter-group attitudes remain constant. (The two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, of course.)

Now I can finally turn to the evidence linked in the blog post. It links a National Journal article which talks a lot about Silicon Valley in the here & now, but much less about change over time (a line which leaps out at me is "Silicon Valley has long been a bastion of liberalism.", which suggests stasis and not change). The blog post also mentions Brendan Eich losing his job, which is one anecdote (and even if it weren't anecdotal, detecting a trend over time would call for two data points). Finally, it links systematic polling data from Pew, which I like. But with only one exception, every graph on that page is either (1) unable to tell us about trends over time because it only shows us results from 2014, or (2) consistent with party sorting.

Let's close in on the exception. (I doubt Pew minds much if I hotlink one figure.)

Because the charts represent responses to "political values questions" rather than something party-related, I don't see how party sorting can explain the widening of the distribution over time; this appears to be a parting of actual political views. Interestingly, there's very little polarization between 1994 & 2004; over that period it's as if the liberal & conservative sides of the distribution merely swapped places. Basically all the action happens after 2004, but even there the effect is not so great. The tails go from capturing 11% of people to 21%, not a negligible shift but not a radical one either.

I think the timing weighs against the idea that the Internet is to blame. Pew have asked US adults whether they use the Internet, and most of the change in Internet use happened in the 1995-2004 period (14% to 63%), not the 2004-2014 period (63% to 87%). One could tweak the Internet-polarized-people hypothesis so it better fits the timing, perhaps by invoking a decade-long time lag between Internet penetration and political effects, or by substituting something like "social networking" for the "Internet". But I would want to see an argument to back that up.

In a way this is all prologue, because you (75th) are talking specifically about "hate" between different political groups, and that might be worsening regardless of people's substantial political views. But I think it was worth warning about the multiple constructs lurking behind "political polarization".

I also hope I've made it less surprising that I believe the typical LW poster probably has an exaggerated idea of how much inter-partisan hate/intolerance has worsened. Worsened in the US, anyway, since that's the place I think most of us are talking about. (As Good_Burning_Plastic indicates, things can be different in different locales.) Given that actual political beliefs haven't changed much, it would be a bit surprising if the level of partisan hate had blown up. I have two more reasons why my null hypothesis is that partisan hate & intolerance haven't exploded.

One, I think of partisan intolerance as coming from the fact that political decisions can have big impacts on people's lives, so people feel strongly about those decisions and readily employ cognitive biases when thinking about them. Since this has always been the case, I expect partisan intolerance has been a constant fixture of political life, and the outside view leads me to predict only gradual & small changes in partisan intolerance's intensity.

Two, US writers have been making overblown claims of bottom-up "culture war" and such for years, so I now expect to see some Americans alleging unprecedented political polarization and partisan culture war regardless of the evidence. Some recent events do catch people's eyes and get brought up as signs that American politics is becoming unusually hostile, but when someone mentions something like the Brendan Eich incident, I have to wonder what the old baseline is supposed to be. Do the 1960s not count? What about the 1990s, when people were inspired to coin the "culture war" phrase? Or, if we want a more specific and more recent analogue, the Dixie Chicks kerfuffle?

(it's never a good sign when Eliezer Yudkowsky is the one to express your deepest fears about why everything's and everyone's brokenness is unstoppably accelerating)

You should be dubious about "unstoppably accelerating"-- prediction is difficult, especially about the future.

It's conceivable that people could get sick of the current level of nastiness.

I think the article makes some sweeping and unjustified statements.

Just a few generations ago, everyone knew that there were two subjects not broached in polite company: religion & politics.

This is not true; in many parts of the USA for instance it was (and is) a quite common question to ask someone which church they go to. This might sometimes literally be the third question you get asked right after "what's your name?" and "where do you come from?"

And, of course, many other parts of the world openly debated politics and religion in public and with strangers, and in some places quite often. This is well-documented, and I have personal experience with this since I used to (in the 90's) live in such a country.

I think you (and the following chain you have gathered) are wrong on your prediction on this matter.

I would not be unwilling to say that Eliezer's prediction (in your direction) is also an inaccurate prediction of the future.

(before I go on; I should warn that this very topic has developed a gang opinion; with echo chambers where it is possible for many people to share the same view on the topic without being disputed)

I believe that the world is still growing in its understanding of what is this internet thing. In doing so; I believe we are yet to get to the "less caring" point of time. if we look at politics ~40 years ago; there was a big politically active shift. Many joined in; many cared! Many protested. And then it all cooled off again. People cared less; people wanted to continue with their lives more and spend less time talking about politics.

I predict many of the public are soon to hit the there is too much politic and not enough living in my life, at which point; people will care less of politics and share less politics. everyone will still have pet issues; and dagnamit! if you can't anger a dog-lover by telling them that dog-lovers are inferior; then it wouldn't be planet earth.

Instead of; "this is all getting worse"; I predict its about to get better.

if you disagree; feel free to discuss.

I like Venkatesh Rao's perspective on this, in his blog post about "escaped realities". He argues that our games and mental models of the world are becoming closer to reality over time, "less escaped", rather than more escapist. He points out that geography is a much bigger filter than online groups regarding the variety of ideas that a person is exposed to. If anything, the internet, overall, seems to be widening people's perspectives. (Although it also lets people get better organized with their tribalism.)

I think the United States is undergoing a sort of cultural civil war right now, which I think makes the perspective of people living there somewhat different than people living in other parts of the world. I don't think that it would be as easy to make the case for "the internet encourages tribalism in politics" in other countries. I don't think that the internet is the reason for the social tensions in the United States right now, (and there are many.)

Here's my half-baked idea.

Since the world is becoming safer, we have less real threats to prevent general ennui and so petty status games start to take on more importance.

Penny Arcade has just written about this as well. Comic strip, column.

I think programmers helping each other on Stackoverflow is an example of people being nice by helping each other. It's possible to create any kind of social norm in an online community.

Often the problem is that there's often no moderation that enforces any community norms. Most newspapers don't invest the necessary resources that would be required to get decently moderated comment threads.

When was the first time you got online? For me I think, 1994-1995-ish. And it was a surreal place largely because the Internet was and still is a lawless anarchistic Wild West. Nazi types set up their Geocities websites because hate speech laws were not enforced. Restrictions on pornography in certain countries were overriden by looking at it from abroad. Age verification, a fairly important rule, was overridden so much that lately many porn sites don't even care anymore and now minors can access it. Hoax websites scammed people out of money. Socially inept nerds became millionaires. Filesharing and piracy. Uncontrolled free speech and under pseudonyms, so you are not only allowed to wear a smear campaign against a political big dog but even they don't know who you are. It was the Wild West where Anything Goes.

I and many "old-timers" got attached this anarchy online because freedom. It is at some level romantic in the Samizdata / Doctorow sense and of course in many things even useful.

But look, can we realistically happen it will always stay an uncontrolled Wild West or sooner or later the Real Powers in the Real World will bend the Internet to their world? I think they will. We will probably lose this marvelous, crazy, anarchistic freedom. But we will probably also overcome these problems as well, as in the longer run it will be corporate controlled, almost like a somewhat more interactive TV. For a lot of people, the Internet basically became Facebook. Much of what they are interested in is controlled by one corporation. And Facebook AFAIK is trying to become more media like.

I'm aware that the entire LW-affiliated rationalist community writes about how things are broken, and desires to teach people to be less broken.

Personal opinion: less has changed than people think. The walls of Pompei have preserved graffiti on them that amounts to 4chan trolling. Political parties once published their own newspapers and newsmagazines that pushed an explicitly partisan viewpoint and served as people's only access to information about world affairs.

Most people are fine, provided that you get them in the right circumstances and mindset. What's amazing about the world's problems sometimes is how you occasionally find out How Problem X Happened, and while it wasn't a conspiracy of card-carrying villains in a smoke-filled room, it often was one person in an office who was feeling particularly malevolent or uncaring, and was able to make up rationalizations they could spout in public without actually being fired from their job.

Like racism. Maybe there's an evil genie out of its bottle that causes epidemics of crime and violence and the police are stuck in a bad incentive gradient. Or maybe someone in power is, deep down, just as much a hateful jerk as your average YouTube commenter, and the ever-so-tragic Unavoidable Genie Problems are actually just that one hateful jerk forcing his hateful-jerk policies on whole groups of people.

See the recent discussion of echo chambers in here.

I would be interested in that, don't know about anyone else.

In a related matter, if I want to study the information theory of hierarchical Bayesian models, what definition of information should I be reading up on? Shannon entropy seems to only apply to discrete distributions; mutual differential entropy seems like the thing I want, but has "weird" properties like occasionally being negative; K-L divergence seems more like a tool for hypothesizing things about out-of-model error than for examining links between random variables.

What I really want to do is: set up a statistical model, and ask a well-defined, well-informed theoretical question about "How much information do I get about random variable Y if I measure random variable X, where the relationships between their distributions are specified by this model I've got here?" Having asked the theoretical question, I want to maybe derive some maths (an analytical expression/equation for the question I asked would be nice), and then run an empirical experiment where I construct such a model and show how the equation holds numerically.

The ultimate goal is to find out precisely how the "Blessing of Abstraction" mentioned in Probabilistic Models of Cognition is happening, and characterize it as a general feature of hierarchical modelling.

Seems right in the core of things LW is likely to be interested in, to me.

I for certain would be interested.

Yes, at best with a how to of applying the concept in python or R.

The phrase, "DO IT!", spoken in an excited tone, comes to mind.

I have an anecdote related to the understanding of historical mindsets.

Firstly, I have spent the majority my evenings the last ten years either inside buildings or along well lit streets in cities. I.e. my description of the night sky would basically go: "it's mostly black, sometimes cloudy". Whenever I have read about celestial navigation, I've thought: "That's clever, but how did they figure out they could do that?"

Come last winter, I took part in a cabin trip. The air was very dry, and the sky was cloudless. When we arrived in the evening, more than an hour's drive from the city, it was pitch dark (you couldn't see your feet). What struck me -- the way a brick strikes one's face -- when carrying stuff from the car to the cabin (walking back and forth, turning around, etc.) was this: "Of course humans have looked at the stars since forever. The stars (and moon and planets) are the only things anyone can look at at night. My eyes are drawn to them whether I want to or not."

And: "When I turn around, the stars stay the same. Of course people could navigate by looking at them --- they should navigate by looking at them!"

And: "Of course the ancients believed the stars were stuck to a celestial sphere. To my eye, the stars appear equally distant, and they appear fixed relative to each other. So when the earth rotates, it is the celestial sphere that turns. This is a model that corresponds to my observations."

Edit to include:

This is an instance of Scott Alexander's "What universal human experience do you lack?". When I put myself in a situation which the ancients would have shared, I gained an increased appreciation of their mindset.

Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato is basically about the differences between pre-literate cultures and literate cultures. It is also a very engaging read. Ditto for Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy. And a very engaging novel about a contemporary pre-literate culture is Mario Vargas Llosa's The Storyteller.

O. Neugebauer's The Exact Sciences in Antiquity is a great overview of mathematical and astronomical thinking in ancient times, particularly in Babylon.

For an exceptionally engaging account of a melding of scientific discovery and religion in ancient times, there is David Ulansey's The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries.

And Karen Armstrong is an engaging writer on religious thought in times past; especially The Great Transformation.

I'm not sure whether books and articles are the best. Talking to people is often more efficient when it comes to understanding people much different from you.

Visiting the Amish would provide you such an opportunity but you might even find people in your own city with radically different modes of thought.

If you go to some New Age event you find a lot of people who don't follow science-based thinking.

You seem to be interested in history of mentalities. Try something that is classified under this label. I can recommend "The Great Cat Massacre" by Robert Darnton [1], which is a short and interesting book about 18th century France that is quite easy to read since it is based on a course the author taught at Princeton University. A few years ago I have read "A history of European mentalities" by Peter Dinzelbacher, which covers a lot of topics and seems to be very close to what you want, but I am not sure if it is available in English.

[1] Curiously, there is another book by the same name which is about a different cat massacre.

Look for original sources-- that way, you'll be getting samples of how people used to think rather than interpretations from more modern people.

You might want to try Ex Urbe-- Ada Palmer is good about how much the way people think has changed.

Forget history, I have a lot of trouble understanding how a large part of the human population currently thinks.

See the chapter on Synge in Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland, the references to his stay on the Aran Islands: '...Synge records all this with a terrified and terrifying accuracy, because he knows that, however spare and beautiful such a culture may seem to the outsider, its costs in human terms are just too high.'

No one's in charge of posting them, so it's probably just a case of "no one thought to post one". There are multiple possible reasons why that happens to rationality diaries and not to the open thread, but I don't think most of them imply that the rationality diaries are pointless or anything.

Feel free to create one. You may do so even for your own diary entry.

Thanks for bringing it to my attention! Having an interest in visual novels, interactive fiction and generally all forms of experimenting with good ol' prose that just might end up advancing 'state of the art' of fiction (I suppose I should call that ambition 'upgrading the prose' - have you seen this or that?) I was immediately attracted by your term 'a story-like object': I am interested in exactly the kind of stuff that might be hard to put a label on.

I decided to take a peek, and read through it all. Didn't expect to enjoy it like I did. You know, something like this might lie at the beginning of a novel or game, but us common readers do not get to read it.

You know, there's a peculiar game studio from London called Failbetter Games, makers of Escapist's 2009 "Browser Game of the Year" called Fallen London. That's a kind of game studio that, when deciding to make an expansion to their game, starts with hiring writers; Fallen London is over 1.5 million words. When asked how they keep track of their established canon and avoid overwriting other plots, they say:

Q.: When it came to designing the plot lines for islands, how did you make sure to keep them from overwriting other plots or established canon? What methods did you use to keep it in check?

A.: Things we use: (i) a house style document (ii) a giant Google spreadsheet of info ranked in rows by subject and in columns from 'public' to 'unrevealable secret'

I presume you are not sure what it is you're writing? If you were to ask me, this story-like object of yours is not a story. Rather it has the trappings of just such a guideline for writing a novel or a series, maybe even written collaboratively by several authors. It has (i) and maybe (ii), too: these individual FAQ paragraphs could as well be made those spreadsheet cells, ranked from 'public' to 'unrevealable secret' and from that you would start picking and choosing details and making that into a story, game or whatever you call it; short story or novella won't even have place for all of the detail; whatever gets shown would be decided as much by the laws of narrative as by the inner logic you present here.

Thanks for bringing it to my attention! Having an interest in visual novels, interactive fiction and generally all forms of experimenting with good ol' prose that just might end up advancing 'state of the art' of fiction (I suppose I should call that ambition 'upgrading the prose' - have you seen this or that?)

I decided to take a peek, and read through it all. Didn't expect to enjoy it like I did.

When I'm in a rush and I'm about to do something that requires carefulness, attention, and "normal speed" as you call it, I tell myself that, if my purpose is to get done with it as quickly as possible, I should deliberately slow down, because more often than not, botching up something and then fixing it takes significantly longer than doing it right at a normal speed.

I think this is a commonly known thing, and the common advice is to calm down and breathe deeply,

I don't think speeding up processes is always bad. It's just not always an appropriate emotional response to the problem one faces.

Speeding up the typing of password makes sense when you know them well enough to make no errors.

It's often problematic when an uncomfortable emotion causes one to rush and one tries to rush to escape the uncomfortable emotion.

When it comes to task such as putting on clothing it's also useful to do them a few times in slow motion to allow the body do find better ways of doing them.

"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."

Is there a name for this process? Has anyone recorded it before?

The following proverb comes to mind:

Haste makes waste.

Recently, the Gates Foundation funded a project in the second largest city of the Philippines, where local advocates and local law enforcement were able to transform corrupt police and broken courts so drastically, that in just four short years, they were able to measurably reduce the commercial sexual violence against poor kids by 79 percent.

Details needed. Social interventions often fail, so it is important to explore what exactly was done right in this specific project.

EDIT: Seems like the strategy is telling the target country "okay, we will show you how to do it our way, plus we will provide resources and oversight". And if the country agrees, their policemen will receive training and resources (e.g. cars), the government will receive expertise on how to discover corrupt policeman, and the organization will apply some pressure to make sure some of the criminals are punished.

This seems to be about third world poverty. They speaker seems to be from the charity International Justice Mission. It's on GiveWell's list as "Considered not contacted"

Given the lack of reply the last time how about posting the question to http://academia.stackexchange.com/?

No one else is probably going to tell you this, but go ahead and do those collaborations. At the end of the day, your thesis is only going to be read by 3 people, and a doctorate degree is just a degree and isn't important in and of itself. The important things are the work and publications you get done while doing your degree. So unless you doubt your ability to get your thesis done on time, you should be looking on doing all the collaborations you can get your hands on. You are the best judge of your own capabilities here.

I think the advice "do whatever you have to do to publish and graduate" is good advice. Whether this is better achievable through secondary authorships (which also are very valuable for networking -- you'll need a job once you get your Ph.D.) or through focusing on your thesis, I can't say. It depends on your field and the specifics of your situation. But you need to be focused on graduating -- "almost there but not quite" for many years is a very common failure mode for grad students.

Are you sure you have the right advisor? If you are so concerned that his interests may be that divergent from your own, it might be better to switch advisors than to continue with this one. Ideally, you want an advisor who already has tenure and looks at you like a son or daughter, and will advocate for you as your career progresses. If that's not the vibe you are getting from your advisor, then look around and see if there's someone whose personality and style of work better suits you. There will be costs to switching advisors, but they may not be as big as the costs of continuing with a mismatch between advisor and student for more than a year.

I'm in a PhD program in the life sciences and although I haven't graduated myself (still in my first year), based on almost all of the advice I've read, this is good advice. The way to prove to your advisor that you deserve to be able to do quick secondary experiments with people outside of your field is to submit a paper of your own, and then you can do those experiments in the interim while you're waiting for the reviews. That said, I don't think I'm all that Slytherin (although I admit that this is what a Slytherin would say).

In sociology literature this will show up as 'moral panic'.

I've seen that picture, but I didn't take it as bragging. IMO the poster just thought it was funny how the dog looked, and he just mentioned the cleaning because he thought if he didn't, he'd get hundreds of replies telling him he should've helped the dog instead of laughing at it.

Self consciousness =/= narcissism IMO. A person might be self conscious for many reasons.

I don't think you can really get at the underlying reality of what you're trying to explore if you use words like "narcissism". I'd take a step back and look at Cluster B personality disorders as a whole to get a better idea of the clinical dimension of "narcissism" in a broader context, and to dissociate the popular meaning from the clinical one. There's general deficits in emotional processing, the ability to take the perspective of others, and various vmPFCish thingies of that nature, and sometimes those present in a certain stereotyped fashion labeled "narcissistic". I'd characterize it as more a deficit in self awareness and other awareness, with the rationalizations filling in the blanks left by that deficit sometimes but not always creating an inflated self perception.

how to spot the narc and how to figure out you are one or not: again, focusing more on the less obvious, shy-type, insecure type narcissism,

Rejection sensitivity, abnormally harsh self evaluations and feelings of inferiority can also fall into Cluster C, especially "avoidant", and depressive states. I think the difference is that with Cluster B, there is at least some level at which a person is trying to defend a positive image of themselves even if they have deep-seated insecurities. There might be periods triggered by negative external events causing them to express some extremely negative feelings about themselves (which they later recover from and can be talked out of) but for the most part they like themselves. In contrast, an anxious, avoidant or depressed person just consistently insists that the low self evaluation is correct and it's much harder to talk them out of it.

I think the briefest way to say it is that Cluster b is associated with basically normal emotional states, but those emotional states do not react normally to environmental cues, and the specific abnormality is what further characterizes them.

In the stereotypical and stigmatized case of narcissism, a person fails to accurately self monitor their own behavior and model how others see them and response to that by constant negotiating status, and if this is paired with a small degree of antisocial personality disorder they might also give more relative importance to themselves due to empathy gaps. The reality is probably more complex, with some people really caring about others but still lacking the ability to model how others view them, and so on.

(Bewarned, these are pretty arm-chairish thoughts. Then again, the DSM is pretty arm-chairish too.)

Another thing I would be interested in is social media

Relevant to your interests.

I suppose I just went ahead and discussed in the clinical sense even though you particularly didn't want that.

I don't know if it is the official definition, but after reading the links I guess it is about thinking "me, me, me" all the time.

And the trick is that it does not have to be "look how great I am" -- because some people believe that it is okay to spend 24 hours a day thinking and talking about themselves (and how other things are related to them) as long as they avoid talking about their own greatness. The authors of the linked texts believe that "greatness" is a red herring. For example, the narcissist can also talk a lot about how they feel bad -- but when a narcissist does it, the focus is always on their emotion of feeling bad, not on what makes them feel bad.

It is difficult to define exactly. For example, two people can say "I feel so sad about children in Africa starving!", while one of them means "please look at those children, and perhaps try to find out something that would reduce their suffering" the other means "look at me and admire me for how altrustic and noble I am". If you are not careful and don't know where to look, you might miss the difference, because technically both of them are talking about starving children in Africa. -- Actually, I suspect that people who didn't have previous bad experience will usually miss the difference, because they will automatically assume that the only reason why anyone would mention starving children is because they care about the starving children. While the narcissist is only thinking about how expressing care about the starving children could make the narcissist more awesome.

Am I right when my narc detectors are buzzing when I see people brag about a good deed as trival as helping a dog clean himself

Depends on context. If someone did it for the first time, they could be happy for having the experience, and want to share the happiness. -- I am proud of myself for being able to change my baby's diapers quickly. Before I had the opportunity to practice, I didn't know whether it will be easy or difficult, so it was a pleasant surprise to find out that it is trivial. That's good for me and good for the baby. And I am not writing this to show how great parent I am, because I expect that most parents have this skill, and it's nothing special. I just mentioned it because it seemed relevant to the topic. In a parallel Everett branch where you didn't post the example of cleaning the dog, I probably never mentioned it online.

But yes, it is a weak evidence; and if someone's Facebook wall is full of such content, if it seems like an advertisement for the goodness of their personality, that is too much focus on themselves. (I still give them credit for choosing this way of highlighting their awesomeness instead of other possible ways of highlighting their awesomeness, such as posting selfies. I just wouldn't expect them to do more good than is necessary to keep the Facebook "likes" flowing.)

Can someone recommend articles to sort it out (or has interesting in-depth opinions) ?

Sorry, no articles. Only the rule of thumb -- is everything the person does and talks about somehow connected to themselves, even when the focus would be more appropriate on other people or even other things? It is about the emphasis, the difference between "look how interesting are prime numbers" and "look how interesting am I for working with prime numbers", or between "let's help these oppressed people" and "look at me how great I am for helping these oppressed people". (Or between this and this.)

EDIT: In the reddit forum you linked, they mentioned People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck, and I recommend the book; I am just sure whether it matches the psychiatric definition of narcissism, or something else. (I do not have enough data about these kinds of people, so I don't know how exactly this part of the thingspace is clustered.)

I'd like to see clearer in the issue of narcissism in the broader, not strictly in the clinical definition sense. [...] in the broader sense, even something like being shy can be interpreted as a form of narcissism

Of course if you look at a term in a broader sense you can look broadly enough that everything qualifies.

What purpose do you want to achieve by having a broad notion of narcissism?

On the off chance that you haven't heard about it, I would recommend Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcisicism as background reading if you enjoy TLP. Lasch treats narcissism as a more general cultural phenomena instead of a strict clinical diagnosis. It is over 30 years old now, it probably doesn't directly apply to modern topics like social media.

Check the following figures:

http://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2352396415001024-gr1.jpg

Biiiiig cloud of points showing a statistically-distinguishable trend by which those in the cancer group had telomere length attrition with age slightly higher than those that did not get cancer. But the variation from patient to patient is much larger than the average variation with age.

http://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2352396415001024-gr2.jpg

In contrast to the previous trend with age, average blood telomere length in patients who later went on to get cancer was statistically distinguishably longer for ~3 years before cancer diagnosis. Again, population averages. The distributions are not shown but I would not be surprised if variations are large enough that for most values a diagnostic test wouldn't be terribly conclusive.

Blood is a funny tissue, its stem cells maintain telomerase activity and the balance of telomere extension and wear-down can be shifted one way or another by conditions. This could be a readout of other deeper things happening elsewhere in the body at a systemic level or might reflect a generalized telomere extension effect in the early stages of cancer as a contributing cause or an effect.

"Interestingly, one longitudinal study of telomere length and cancer development (albeit a cancerous complication of lymphoma treatment) found a similar temporal pattern, with increasing BTL in cases before and immediately (100 days) after treatment, followed by accelerated telomere attrition in cancer cases compared to controls (Chakraborty et al., 2009). The complexity of the relationship between BTL attrition and cancer incidence found here is also similar to that reported in our previous study of BTL and air pollution, where short-term pollution exposure increased BTL but long-term exposure decreased it (Hou et al., 2012b). This underscores the complex “give and take” at the heart of telomere regulation, and reiterates the importance of timing BTL collection relative to diagnosis (and potentially exposure and treatment)."

Strangely, shorter telomeres is not actually a new idea here AFAIK.

Just because a mainstream news article says that something is a new method doesn't mean it is. If you use the word "strangely" when reading a mainstream media article about science it's a good heuristic to instead go to the actual study.

In this case http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352396415001024 (open-access)

I would also be interested in a very rough guess of whether this may be an expensive or cheap test.

Rather cheap. They describe their method:

BTL was measured using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) (Cawthon, 2002). Relative BTL was measured by the ratio of the telomere (T) repeat copy number to single-copy gene (S) copy number (T:S ratio) in a given sample and reported as relative units expressing the ratio between test DNA BTL and reference pooled DNA BTL. [...]

Taking blood samples and running PCR are both not complicated things.

A bit googling around finds 400$ as a retail price (http://www.repeatdx.com/products/pricing-and-cpt-codes/) for telomere testing. There seems to be a failed Indigogo campaign that used 99$ as the default price but was target at salvia instead of blood.

In general unhealthy people need more sleep than healthy people. Removing a factor of stress for your body can reduce sleep needs.

I might suggest that seasonal change in sleep-requirements is enough to add 2 hours; or take 2 hours away. Don't get too excited, and also - start sleep tracking; easiest way to find out if you really do need less sleep.

I use a Basis watch to observe my sleep cycles and a fitbit to track total sleep (and the two of them in case of failure). There are apps that also track but I find they don't work with my pre-bed lifestyle (be awake in bed till I fall asleep, usually on my phone); and remembering to set the app was causing it to not work for me. (I also tried a zeo and I managed to take it off during the night)

The 3rd thing I would say is - trust your body. try to optimise for a lifestyle that does not need alarms; and trust your body to wake up when you are rested. still sleepy? go back to sleep.

I can send you a graph of my sleep/time if you are interested.

Jayman is correct that adoption studies typically show negligible parental effects. But remember the studies can only talk about the environmental variation present in their data, and are generally done on normal, western, middle class cohorts. In studies where they include stronger environmental variation - e.g. Turkheimer et al 2003, you find that it matters.

So basically, the kind of parenting choices that people typically worry about are probably meaningless, but severe trauma, poverty, abuse etc. do matter. That being said, You can't just say "X is difficult to encapsulate" with studies. This is a fully general counter argument to any evidence you don't like.

I cite decision theory, statistical inference, study design, and the related area as being primal over empirical references which have failed to encapsulate the effects he is pointing to in his observables. Statistical inference just doesn't work like that to give such strong conclusions.

I think you need to be more specific about your criticisms here... I don't see why the twin study design, and extensions thereof, don't allow such inferences. The cool part about them is that they exploit some very unusual properties to do what they do. (Unusual enough that when I went looking for uses of twin designs outside of behavioral genetics to get inspiration for a diet self-experiment, I couldn't find any.)

My view: Parenting has some variable effect that is difficult to encapsulate in the studies he references while maintaining the correctness and good taste of genetic arguments.

If there is some variable effect, then there should still be some average effect.

Saying that there is zero influence is equivalent to saying all the relevant variables have been enumerated and assigned exact values for probability & effect and that there is nothing else to be assigned.

I don't think that's true. Could you explain how the twin design requires that, keeping in mind the fundamental logic of the design?

His view: Zero effect & Breast milk confers no advantage either

Breast milk "confers no advantage" compared to what?
(baby dying from starvation? water? cow milk? soylent? infant formula -- which one?)

All that stuff that exists in breast milk -- such as immunoglobulin A, lysozyme, blood albumin, creatine -- it's just completely useless, I guess. I wonder why evolution even bothered to design such system, when it provides no advantage. (This is a sarcastic way to say "my priors for this hypothesis are very low".)

You might be interested in a fairly well-known book, The Nurture Assumption.

I mean, obviously parenting matters, right? You can't just drop kids in the wilderness.

What's actually being said here is that if we remove the extreme cases, the people who aren't really fulfilling the role of "parents" as they should, the normal diversity we see among various types of parenting isn't really a big deal as far as outcomes are concerned. (This is still a bold claim, because, as you said, we might just not be aware of the slice of diversity that matters.)

I think dogs give us the clearest insight on this problem. Dog breeds tend to be vastly different from each other despite being genetically close enough to interbreed. Breeds have certain tendencies common that breed in terms of behavior, but if you really want complex stuff to happen you HAVE to train them. And on the converse side, no matter how well you train a chihuahua it will never be a great sled dog. I think the same logic can apply to humans.

Humans are capable of self-training (eg an ambitious child can go and learn physics on his own), but parents have a huge amount of control of the kinds of training kids get as well as the kinds of social contexts they live in (which Judith Rich Harris in No Two Alike argues is the main explanation for why children sometimes end up very different from each other even if they are both born to and raised by the same parents). Humans (like dogs) learn and adapt to the kind of environment they end up, with their natural genetic advantages and disadvantages playing a hugely important role in how well they do so.

Jayman looks at the failure of all the studies looking for parental influence and finds little effect, but I think he goes too far in dismissing it because he (like most of the researchers in the field) ignore the importance of context to behavior. This is not to mention that the kind of contexts and environments parents are allowed to put their children in these days are extremely constrained. Measuring different parenting styles on how well children do on standardized tests after going to standardized Prussian schools is of course not going to going to find that big a difference. But imagine arguing that kids will end up the same whether their parents apprentice them to a Blacksmith, send them off to join the Army, or give them to the Priesthood.

Here is a government study showing a markedly higher risk for perpetrating violent crime among children who were abused or neglected by their parents. So that's one effect. Bad parenting leads to bad outcomes.

Argument: Does parenting have any effect on child outcomes?

Certainly there are some things affected by parenting. A baby born in Japan to Japanese parents, but adopted in infancy by English speaking Americans will grow up speaking English, not Japanese. If her bio-parents were Buddhists and her adopted parents were Christian, there is a good chance she will be a Christian at adulthood. While I would say these parenting affects are substantial, I get the feeling this is not what you and Jayman are talking about. It would be helpful if you specified what precisely you disagree about.

I think you're essentially right, but just out of curiosity, what are the 'twin-adoption studies' he refers to? As far as I know, there are really very few twins where one twin has grown up entirely separate from the other.

Hint: when the result of scientific studies is confusing, not conclusive, it is probably better to take a step back and try to see things from a common-sense angle, because it helps deciding what would we exactly want kinds of hypotheses we want scientists to test.

So let's generate typical parenting moves that we may think could have an impact.

Positive:

• getting children hooked on reading (worked for me and I guess for 75% of LW)

• getting children hooked on sports (discipline, mature thinking, a friend's 13 year old athlete daughter is literally the most adult thinking child I ever saw)

• an athmosphere of ambition and confidence (don't think CEOs are a separate kind of people who reproduce amongst themselves, think like you can become one)

Negative:

• the usual kind of violent, abusive, drunken non-parenting, the chaotic environment of parents with problematic personality disorders

• not insisting on things like homework, not caring about grades

• anti-intellectual athmosphere at home, against studying, "why care about geography just be a miner like your dad"

• unpredictable parenting

The question is, are they testing these?

A lot of your participation here appear to be you trying to get people to do math/modeling work for you.

I understand that LW has a much higher tendency of autistic thought and if you have it please cooperate with me in how to think.

That's hard when you aren't willing to take a position on issues such as whether you believe that "there are meaningful differences in parenting quality of US middle class people".

If you want to have a decent discussion than it helps to be open about your own position.

I found it absolutely strange

That translates into: "I lack understanding of what other people are thinking." It suggests that your mental model is wrong and needs updating.