Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015

Upvoted for updating.

The large field of the so-called out-of-body experiences is precisely about the "location of self" moving outside of the body. I understand that specific types of meditation and mental exercises can produce this effect fairly reliably. So can some psychoactives.

the sensation of being "in my head" persists even when I have my eyes closed

Don't forget that your ears which provide you with hearing and the sense of balance and orientation are on your head, too.

I've occasionally been able to move my sense of self downwards from my head. From what I've read, people didn't put their sense of self in their heads (it was typically in the heart or abdomen) until the importance of the brain was discovered.

I think this is learned - Aristotle considered it is in the heart and the brain is just about cooling blood. I think it is because we are taught from childhood to "use your head" etc.

I always thought my sense of self was in my head because of where my eyes and ears were. I look out at myself and see my hands typing and my legs when I am walking and I am looking from my head. I.e., I am in my head, that is the center.

http://www.yale.edu/minddevlab/papers/starmans%26bloom.pdf?hc_location=ufi

I'm not sure this is definitive, but it's at least interesting.

When I'm reaching into a space I can't see with my hands to say, untangle something, I definitely have more of a sense of space around my hands than my head. Closing your eyes and untying/retying your shoes right now might simulate this.

I have had out-of-body experiences. Nothing too major; just the sensation of floating above my 'actual' body, sometimes only a few centimeters, other times a full human body length (as if I was standing on my own head). I had a burst of these out-of-body experiences around 2005-2006 (perhaps four or five in a two-year period) and have not had them since. Each episode lasted only a minute or two. Once, a friend was present, and they told me I had 'zoned out' for several minutes. It's worth mentioning don't know what caused or triggered the episodes. During the episodes my eyes were fully open and I could see what was happening in front of me. However, I wasn't focused on sensory input but was more inward-focused on my own thoughts.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.

I'm very doubtful of the significance of this because it seems unlikely that evolution would have selected for this kind of perception (there are many points of failure, not just a single one). It seems more likely that this notion only arises when you ask this very question, and that naturally, the mind is simply concerned with the position of all body parts (for safety and coordination, a.k.a. proprioception). With drugs or some dedication we appear to be able to override parts of our self-representation which are concerned with proprioception with arbitrary stories that incorporate sensations that we focus on, but it should better be something romantic ("the brain with which I think, the feet with which I feel the ground"), as people would laugh at your if you said your self is located at your anus because you defacate from it.

I haven't had this experience myself, but apparently it's not difficult to induce: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/25/134059271/creating-the-illusion-of-a-different-body

A hypothesis; if you think your sense of self is connected to the location of your eyes; try spend some time blindfolded; say 1 hour in a normal/safe environment without vision and see if it moves. It might just be in your hands as you feel your way around; or your feet as you travel around.

it would seem reasonable that the focus of your interaction with the environment feels like its at one of your strongest senses but might be elsewhere for other people with different sensory wiring.

Cool question.

I have experienced a change in 'location' of my sense of self- it 'spreads out'. It is a feeling that "I" do not reside in the particular head/body of Bageldaughter, but instead in both my head/body and the other things I happen to be keenly aware of. If I am deeply engrossed in a conversation or social activity, "I" will begin to be identified with the group of individuals as a whole. The particular intentions, thoughts or feelings that I typically associate with myself lose some of their distinguishing quality from the ones I perceive from others.

There is often an accompanying "spreading-out" of "my" location in time- the round-trip time of ideas through a group is often slower than just through my own head. I will get the sense that my "current moment" spans back to a thought that originated in my friend's head one minute ago!

I can invoke this sensation pretty reliably. It can be fun. I get worried when people talk about experiencing this type of thing as some kind of higher truth than normal, because it seems like a sign of mental illness that may not end well.

As a single data point, this is totally bizarre to me... I've never in my life felt a "sense of self" anywhere myself, but I find the idea intriguing.

How do you locate yourself? Do you have to meditate or something, or are "you" just always there?

I commented in that thread myself and what you've said seems a worthy addition even without a disclaimer; it adds at least as much to the discussion as this post which nobody has downvoted. (of course, it might seem easy for me to say your comment should be posted if I'm not the once risking the karma punishment for doing so, so note that I'd be willing to copy/paste what you've said and take any punishment/reward for myself if you'd like)

Try closing your eyes and navigating your home with a cane at the same time and see if it persists? Try checking if it persists when you're playing video-games? Does your sense of self go into the character? What about if you watch another person really closely?

I have a shifting spatial attention that changes according to the task at hand. The only sense in which "self" is located in my "head" is that to me the world "self" partially means things like "face" and "brain" to me and so recalling the word "self" directs my spatial attention there, in the same way that "door' directs spatial attention to the door.

But as I go through the day I don't think there is anything mentally privileged about the space right behind my eyes unless I specifically start thinking about "self" and what it means. I suspect spatial attention and the nature of how verbal concepts direct it is most of what is going on here.

I find this really interesting because I have never had such an experience myself; I'm always "in my head", so to speak--more precisely, I feel as though "I" am located specifically at a point slightly behind my eyes.

As a single data point, this exactly corresponds to me. I identify with the locus of my vision. I wonder how blind, or blind-deaf people identify.

Maybe the head is the most vulnerable region to injury, and the locating of the self in the head reflects the need to protect the brain and other inputs (mouth, eyes, ears).

If you practice mindfulness meditation, you'll realize that your sense of self is an illusion. It's probably true that most people believe that their "self" is located in their head, but if you investigate it yourself, you'll find that there's actually no "self" at all.

I would interpret that claim as: "we may be practically useless, but we are still fucking high-status!" :D

Physics lawyers definitely need to exist. I would strongly like to get an injunction against the laws of thermodynamics.

Seems to me that "teaches you how to think" does not necessarily imply instilling habits of thought. I would interpret that (say, in the context of Art History) as:

• Supplying you with some maps of unknown to you territory
• Giving you some tools to explore and map the territory further
• Pointing you towards some well-worn tracks as "default" ways of thinking about the issues involved

The habits of thought are not involved in all of this -- it's more of a broadening-your-horizons exercise.

"[subject] isn't just about [subject matter]: it teaches you how to think"

Most (~70%) of the times it is a euphemism for "it's useless, but we like it so we still want to use taxpayers' money to teach it".

(If people really cared about teaching people how to think, they'd teach cognitive psychology, probability and statistics, game theory, and the like, not stuff like Latin.)

I suspect that with "mastery of a skill" comes an ability to understand "mastery", in that - on a variation of man-with-a-hammer syndrome; holding the mastery of one area will help you better understand the direction to head in when mastering other areas, and learning in other areas.

to me the line now reads; "mastery of [subject] isn't just about [subject matter]: mastery teaches you how to think"

where can vary; the significance of what people are trying to convey is maybe not in the but in the experience of learning.

On that note, I've heard a lot about how addressing sleep apnea is great but how do you check if you have it in the first place (or, at least, to the extent that would warrant seeing a doctor about it)? 'Being tired during the day' doesn't seem like a strong self-diagnostic criterion.

PZ Myers weighs in. I guess he got bored with inflicting damage on communion wafers and accusing Michael Shermer of sexually assaulting women, and now he wants to pick on cryonicists:

I am oscillating between "calm down, politics is the mindkiller" and "if the iron is hot, I want to believe it is hot".

Is there any hope that if we bite our collective tongues and not feed the trolls, they will get bored and find a new victim? I am afraid that when the troll has sufficient power and allies in online media, the old advice of not feeding it is just not available anymore; whatever you do, someone else on the planet will feed the troll anyway.

It almost makes me think these guys are maximizing evil, but then I realize they are simply maximizing money, and the laws of the universe say that you generate most screaming when you poke in the place it hurts. It is nothing personal; it's just that your tears are an important component in paperclip production. The Clippy does not hate you, it just calmly explores the places where your density of sensory receptors is highest. It could just as well try to make you laugh, but that is a less productive thing to do with humans.

Well, hats off to /u/DataPacRat for fighting the good fight in that comment section. I suspect most of the thread is people who just came in to post their little dig at the weird meat-popsicle cultists and then move on, so I'm not sure if he's achieving much, but if nothing else he's stopped me from feeling I need to go in there and join the fray to say what he ended up saying, except less well.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/04/16/how-to-live-forever/

Lots of people employing the weirdness heuristic, as expected. Oh, and of course David Gerard's over there too.

sigh

PZ Myers:

I also wonder what a future civilization would do if they inherited tanks of liquid nitrogen containing extracted blobs of diseased brains and decapitated heads. Does anyone really believe that they’d feel any obligation to resurrect them, even if they could?

Here's a fun topic of conversation - if I happen across PZ Myers, and he's having a heart attack, should I feel any obligation to perform CPR?

Is it wrong that I'm most saddened that they tore apart her brain for a year chasing that tumor, before they did the sensible thing and let her be cryopreserved?

Not that this is an open and shut case at all, but we need laws on the books regarding elective cryopreservation in the case of brain degenerative disease.

You know what he does for a living don't you?

PZ Myers weighs in. I guess he got bored with inflicting damage on communion wafers and accusing Michael Shermer of sexually assaulting women, and now he wants to pick on cryonicists:

How is he picking on cryonicists? On the contrary, he is "picking on" (ie pointing out the flaws in) cryonics. There is a world of difference. The bulk of the article is a compare and contrast between lengthy quotes of mummification and cryopreservation.

Yes, Myers is engaged more in mockery than detailed argumentation. If a view cannot stand up to mockery, it doesn't deserve defenders.

It reminds me of a thought experiment I have read somewhere. Imagine that there are many people in the world who are dying from starvation. They would happily agree to be your slaves, if you feed them. There is too many of them and they are not qualified for modern economy; if you would give them more than a minimum, there wouldn't be enough for you to have a decent life. Imagine you only have the following three options:

A) Share everything with them. Everyone will live, but everyone will be rather poor.
B) Accept them as your slaves, in exchange for food and shelter. Everyone will live, you will keep your quality of life, but there will be a huge inequality.
C) Refuse to interact with them. You will keep your quality of life, but they will die from starvation.

If we order these options by altruism, which is how those poor people would see them, we get A > B > C. It would be best to make those poor people our equals, but even helping them survive as slaves is better than letting them die.

If we order these options by pure egoism, we get B > C > A. Having slaves would be a cool improvement, keeping status quo is acceptable.

But in the typical decision process, we refuse B to signal that we are not complete egoists, and refuse A because we are not really that much altruistic. Thus what remains is the option C... which paradoxically both altruists and egoists consider to be worse than B (and the altruists also worse than A).

I don't think policy is a result of incoherent moral standards. I think it is a result of different people having different moral ideas that they consider important. So some subset of people are concerned enough to be active in discouraging strangers from showing up, and some other subset of people are concerned with rescuing people who are close to death, and the political/legislative system cobbles these things together into something which can pass a vote.

I suspect CEV is unlikely. That is, if one were to extrapolate volition from bunches of different people, the result would not be coherent, it would be incoherent. Because people have different and inconsistent volitions.

I'd say inconsistent rather than incoherent moral standards, or different moral standards at tension.

Honestly, this seems like a "well, duh" sort of thing. One just needs to read the rhetoric from say both sides of the US immigration debate, or both sides of the discussions in Europe about refugees from North Africa to see this pretty clearly.

Probably but I'm not sure why that should be surprising; most moral standards we hold are inconsistent. So what would distinguish policy towards illegal immigration from other policies?

In a previous open thread, I brought up the theory of right-wing authoritarianism, which purports that conservative attitudes may be partially a defensive response to perception of threat. That offers one way of looking at policy towards illegal immigration: Maybe some people really do view immigrants as a threat to their way of living. So from that perspective they would not view them as harmless.

It may be simpler than that, though. Maybe 'rescue harmless people who are close to death' is not a strong value (or a value at all) for some. Certainly we know that psychopaths do not hold this as a value, and may even consider it an anti-value -- they would enjoy increasing the number of harmless people who are close to death. I'm sure this is not true for the majority of human beings, however.

I wouldn't pay. Let's convert it to a mundane psychological experiment, by replacing precognition with precommitment (which is the right approach according to UDT):

1) Ten participants sign up for the experiment.

2) One participant is randomly chosen to be the "loser". We know who the "loser" is, but don't tell the participants.

3) Also, each participant tells us in private whether they are a "payer" or "non-payer".

4) Each "payer" who is not a "loser" pays $10 (this corresponds to paying the oracle and staying alive). The "loser" pays $100 (this corresponds to dying). Everyone else pays nothing.

It seems obvious that you should choose to be a "non-payer", right?

In terms of the original problem, if you're the kind of person who would pay the oracle if you were approached, you're causing the oracle to approach you, so you're paying for nothing.

So, as in most such problems, there's an important difference between the epistemological question ("should I pay, given what I know?") and the more fundamental question ("should I pay, supposing this description is accurate?"). Between expected value and actual value, in other words.

It's easy to get those confused, and my intuitions about one muddy my thinking about the other, so I like to think about them separately.

WRT the epistemological question, that's hard to answer without a lot of information about how likely I consider accurate oracular ability, how confident I am that the examples of accurate prediction I'm aware of are a representative sample, etc. etc. etc., all of which I think is both uncontroversial and uninteresting. Vaguely approximating all of that stuff I conclude that I shouldn't pay the oracle, because I'm not justified in being more confident that the situation really is as the oracle describes it, than that the oracle is misrepresenting the situation in some important way. My expected value of this deal in the real world is negative.

WRT the fundamental question... of course, you leave a lot of details unspecified, but I don't want to fight the hypothetical here, so I'm assuming that the "overall jist" of your description applies: I'm paying $1K for QALYs I would not have had access to without the oracle's offer. That's a good deal for me; I'm inclined to take it. (Though I might try to negotiate the price down.)

The knock-on effect is that I encourage the oracle to keep making this offer... but that's good too; I want the oracle to keep making the offer. QALYs for everyone!

So, yes, I should pay the oracle, though I should also implement decision procedures that will lead me to not pay the oracle.

Clearly you give them money, since otherwise you are almost certain to die. It's just one-boxing in disguise.

It's just a version of the Newcomb's problem with negative outcomes instead of positive.

Presumably the oracle makes its offer only to people from two classes: (1) Those who will die next week AND will not pay $1000; and (2) Those who will pay $1000 AND not die next week. Since it's the oracle it can identify these people and make its offer only to them. If you got this offer, you are in one of the above classes but you "don't know" in which.

This is essentially just another version of the smoking lesion problem, in that there is no connection, causal or otherwise, beween the thing you care about and the action you take. Your decision theory has no specific effect on your likelyhood of dying, that being determined entirely by environmental factors that do not even attempt to predict you. All you are paying for is to determine whether or not you get a visit from the oracle.

ETA: Here's a UDT game tree (see here for an explanation of the format) of this problem, under the assumption that oracle visits everyone meeting his criteria, and uses exclusive-or:

ETA2: More explanation: the colours are states of knowledge. Blue = oracle asks for money, Orange = they leave you alone. Let's say the odds of being healthy are α. If you Pay the expected reward is α(-1000) + (1-α) DEATH; if you Don't Pay the expected reward is α 0 + (1-α) DEATH. Clearly (under UDT) paying is worse by a term of -1000α.

Variation on this:

An oracle comes up to you and tells you that you will give it a thousand dollars. This oracle has done this many times and every time it has told people this the people have given the oracle a thousand dollars. This oracle, like the other one, isn''t threatening you. It just goes around finding people who will give it money. Should you give the oracle money?

I really want to say that you should pay. Obviously you should precommit to not paying if you can, and then the oracle will never visit you to begin with unless you are about to die anyway. But if you can't do that, and the oracle shows up at your door, you have a choice to pay and live or not pay and die.

Again, obviously it's better to not pay and then you never end up in this situation in the first place. But when it actually happens and you have to sit down and choose between paying it to go away or dying, I would choose to pay it.

It's all well and good to say that some decision theory results in optimal outcomes. It's another to actually implement it in yourself. To make sure every counter factual version of yourself makes the globally optimal choice, even if there is a huge cost to some of them.

Pay iff you would pay $1000 to avoid learning of your death the last week of your life. If you don't pay the oracle only shows up when you are about to die anyway.

Give them the thousand dollars under eyes of police who then imprison the oracle for blackmail so that you get your 1000 dollars back.

Plan A: Change your environment; spend three hours a day preparing a proposal for management/ownership to work as a contractor paid by entry opposed to an employee paid by the hour. Find the relevant tax and overhead savings to make this a mutually beneficial arrangement. Find out who in management/ownership can approve your proposal and who it just creates headaches for, buy beer for both.

I understand that goes against the spirit of your question, that your work environment may be to rigid, management that could approve the proposal are out of reach of the data entry staff, or one of many other arguments, but 60 hours a month is a large amount of time, it is shocking what could be done.

Plan B: Now on to things I've actually done in that situation; spend 60 hours preparing a bulletproof argument/presentation for a raise, spend 60 hours learning how to create better resumes, spend 60 hours learning how to job hunt without a resume (handshakes and recommendations), spend 60 hours job hunting, and last on the list spend the time on entertainment so that you are mentally recharged to make the most of your personal time.

I can't concentrate if the words I'm hearing are not the ones I'm typing. Ebooks would be a terrible distraction for me during data entry. Music without lyrics would be better.

During blank minutes at a call center I used to work at, I made slow progress at writing a novel. It was made more enjoyable by the quirk that my writing flows better with pen and paper.

Post to lesswrong.com.

Tried something like that. Was unable to do anything productive after 5 hours without a real deadline.

I would start programming mobile games, and would hope to make money from them. If I don't succeed, at least I had a hobby, and maybe can use the experience to get a more interesting job later. If I do succeed, then I do not have to solve the problem of boring job anymore.

That would require sufficient freedom to spend those 3 hours not just programming, but also painting pictures, editing 3D models, editing levels, and testing the game on the phone. Okay, hypothetically that is not necessary; there can be some parts that I have to do at home. But it would be much more convenient if I could do whatever is necessary for the game immediately when I need it.

Or, if I wouldn't have a specific plan, I would just learn random stuff from online universities. I enjoy learning, so I wouldn't necessarily care about how useful are those lessons. I would imagine that some part of that would be useful somehow later, if nothing else, then for impressing people.

Someone who is a buddhist could use those three hours to meditate daily, and achieve nirvana in a few years, while keeping a well-paying job. Also, being a buddhist could help with the feelings of boredom from the job. ;)

Renegotiate work time to 5 hours.

There are studies that compared performance of couples with randomly assigned pairs (from the same group) and found that couples perform better than random assignment. This suggests that couple specialize and at the same time rely on the specialization of the other part ("I knew you'd make the appointment").

The other side of the coin this breaking-up: You feel like a part of your brain has been ripped off - namely the part you outsourced to your partner.

Yes, it is difficult to maintain balance when the other person is pushing in some direction. You feel the instinct to push the other way, as if to provide a balance on average. The problem is, balance on the average means imbalance in your head, if the other person is unbalanced.

It's like when we have a debate about how much is 2+2, and the other person insists that it is 3, then when I say 4, there is a risk that in the future we will achieve a compromise value of 3.5, which I already perceive as wrong. So people have the social instinct to say at least 5, so that the future compromise value may be 4. Even if they originally did not really believe it was 5.

One possible solution would be to make everyone write their opinion before hearing the opinions of others. But that can be done in artificial settings, not in real life -- we usually already heard the opinions of some people. Also, if we have iterated debates about the same topic (e.g. the vacations), we can already predict what our partner will say.

To me it simply means that to have a rational debate, it is better to exclude the people who are strongly mindkilled about something. (Obviously, deciding who they are, is a problem on a higher level.) Maintaining balance is difficult on its own, and almost impossible when someone keeps pushing you on one side: you either fall on the side you are pushed, or you tilt to the opposite direction and fall down later when you are alone. We should not overestimate our own ability to be reasonable in difficult situations.

I could totally see how it would make sense in groups that some members adopt some low probability beliefs, and that it would benefit the group overall.

I can imagine a debate where you flip a coin and you either present your true opinion, or you role-play a selected opinion. Problem is, how would you create the set of the role-played opinions?

What if you forget to include something important? What if most of the supposedly "random" opinions are actually variants of one side (which is already overrepresented in the sincere part of debate), and the other side is underrepresented (and some third side is completely absent). That would be quite likely if people who prepare the "random" options are from the same population as the sincerely debating ones: they would add many minor variants of their own opinion, because those would sound meaningful; and then a few obvious strawmen of their enemies, to create a feeling of a fulfilled duty.

Mercier & Sperber made a similar argument, commenting that e.g. things that seem like biases in the context of a single individual (such as confirmation bias) are actually beneficial for the decision-making of a group. An excerpt:

... the idea that the confirmation bias is a normal feature of reasoning that plays a role in the production of arguments may seem surprising in light of the poor outcomes it has been claimed to cause. Conservatism in science is one example (see Nickerson 1998 and references therein). Another is the related phenomenon of groupthink, which has been held responsible for many disasters, from the Bay of Pigs fiasco (Janis 1982) to the tragedy of the Challenger shuttle (Esser & Lindoerfer 1989; Moorhead et al. 1991) (for review, see Esser 1998). In such cases, reasoning tends not to be used in its normal context: that is, the resolution of a disagreement through discussion. When one is alone or with people who hold similar views, one’s arguments will not be critically evaluated. This is when the confirmation bias is most likely to lead to poor outcomes. However, when reasoning is used in a more felicitous context – that is, in arguments among people who disagree but have a common interest in the truth – the confirmation bias contributes to an effi- cient form of division of cognitive labor.

When a group has to solve a problem, it is much more efficient if each individual looks mostly for arguments supporting a given solution. They can then present these arguments to the group, to be tested by the other members. This method will work as long as people can be swayed by good arguments, and the results reviewed in section 2 show that this is generally the case. This joint dialogic approach is much more efficient than one where each individual on his or her own has to examine all possible solutions carefully.8 The advantages of the confirmation bias are even more obvious given that each participant in a discussion is often in a better position to look for arguments in favor of his or her favored solution (situations of asymmetrical information). So group discussions provide a much more effi- cient way of holding the confirmation bias in check. By contrast, the teaching of critical thinking skills, which is supposed to help us overcome the bias on a purely individual basis, does not seem to yield very good results (Ritchart & Perkins 2005; Willingham 2008).

For the confirmation bias to play an optimal role in discussions and group performance, it should be active only in the production of arguments and not in their evaluation. Of course, in the back-and-forth of a discussion, the production of one’s own arguments and the evaluation of those of the interlocutor may interfere with each other, making it hard to properly assess the two processes independently. Still, the evidence reviewed in section 2.1 on the understanding of arguments strongly suggests that people tend to be more objective in evaluation than in production. If this were not the case, the success of group reasoning reviewed in section 2.3 would be very hard to explain.

That's a powerful idea and it actually goes deeper than you may think. We are divided even internally inside ourselves. There is reason to think that your internal rational decision-making processes consist of multiple sub-processes that combine and compare various points of view. Each sub-process has the same level of interaction with other sub-processes as you would have when speaking to another person. Your mental sub-processes may not even distinguish between thoughts and ideas coming from another part of your brain and coming from another person.

People have been complaining about academia for a very long time. Then again, every other human organization has burned-out/disillusioned people writing similar complaints.

As for me, I definitely don't have what it takes to stick around in academia and plan to leave as soon as I get my degree.

That's very interesting. I'd be interested to see if this actually leads to an uptick of interest in Southeast Asia.

I can offer no help; but feel like "life pro tips for living happy with schizoid spectrum disorders" would be a really good piece of knowledge to create.

There are not enough people with great ideas to produce new products starting companies that don't take away the market of existing companies.

Two guesses:

• There is a lot of capital and a lot of labor, but in different areas where they don't complement each other. For example, maybe there is a lot of car factories and equipment, but not enough skilled workers to operate the equipment.

• There is just more economic power than people actually want. For example, there is a lot of car manufacturing capacity and a lot of skilled auto workers, but people don't feel the need to buy more cars.

As a side note, I strongly believe that the conceptual tools of "modern" economics are increasingly ill-suited to describe the modern world. Economic concepts like supply/demand and labor/capital were developed in an era where most economic activity was centered around the production and distribution of goods - either agricultural or industrial. In the modern world, physical goods are becoming less and less important. Agriculture is down to 1% of GDP in the US, and industry is down to 20% (even this number seems high). The economy is now dominated by sectors like health care, education, technology, and government. These sectors cannot be described well by traditional economic concepts. What does it mean to talk about the "demand" for health care or education? How can one apply concepts like marginal cost and comparative advantage to the technology sector, where the marginal cost is zero and there is usually a free version of every product available?

A shortage of land?

I am really confused by economics.

I can't see this article, what kind of labor did they have in mind? There is a chronic shortage of skilled/creative labor, so I am assuming they mean the kind of labor that's vulnerable to being automated away. Perhaps the key shortage that explains this situation is education and training. In a modern economy people and money isn't enough anymore.

Paywall.

According to Marx, in capitalism, improvements in technology and rising levels of productivity increase the amount of material wealth (or use values) in society while simultaneously diminishing the economic value of this wealth, thereby lowering the rate of profit—a tendency that leads to the paradox, characteristic of crises in capitalism, of "reserve army of labour" and of “poverty in the midst of plenty”, or more precisely, crises of overproduction in the midst of underconsumption.

— Wikipedia, "Overproduction"

With a 1,000 square kilometer industrial complex for the manufacture of slinkys and a million trained botanists.

I have no direct experience with this myself, but have heard good things about http://zhealth.net. A quick search turns up Will Eden once recommending it here on LW and apparently a practitioner was brought in for a lecture at one of the first rationality camps so perhaps CFAR staff or one of the alums listed at http://rationalitybootcamp.blogspot.com could say more about it.

Is your keyboard / workstation set up correctly to minimise strain or whatever on your shoulder? I think an optimally positioned desk, keyboard, chair, screen etc should avoid much (any?) shoulder movement at all. You don't say whether typing exacerbates the shoulder pain or if it's just a background level of pain that's bothering you while writing, though.

Write by hand on your bed. Write on your phone during bus rides. Write by dancing to sign language. Write in a new medium humanity hasn't dreamt of. The keyboard is just one of many possible tools.

Maybe speech-to-text software can make writing less painful?

The "wealth" part of the equation is the total amount you're willing to gamble with. If you have money set aside for frivolities like food, then that wouldn't be part of your wealth as far as the Kelly Criterion is concerned.

The general principle with gambling is never to bet more than you're willing to lose. Kelly betting is optimal in the sense that over the long run, no other system will outperform it. In the short run, it's quite volatile and you can get very low.

In practice, in the real world, what's the right number to plug into the "wealth" part of the equation?

The amount which you can afford to lose.

Not so much in response to your specific question, but when trying to figure out what I can afford, I actually take a pretty simple approach: my liquid assets (mostly in the bank) plus things I could easily liquidate (stocks, etc.) minus a "rainy day fund" (this has varied in size over the years, but tends to sit at between 2 and 10 thousand USD, based on how hard I think it would be to get a job or find housing in the event that I lost one or both). Things like 401K and HSA are omitted; they're already earmarked for specific things and mean I don't have to worry about keeping other funds back for those purposes. Assets that are technically resalable but either not worth the effort or of high utility to my daily life (my computer, my car, etc.) are also omitted, though in a pinch I would of course sell them too.

The result is the money I can afford to spend. I can use it on video games, or vacations, or gifts for people, or a new car (at which point I would sell the old one), or fighting malaria. I can trickle it away on living expenses if I decide to quit my job and pursue hobbies or whatever (I would start looking for a new one once I got within "expected job hunt time * cash outflow rate" distance of the bottom of this wealth, though I could dip into the rainy day fund if needed).

I can also invest it into riskier things than a savings account, like stocks... or into any other kind of betting.

The answer probably depends on what your utility is nearest to being proportional to the logarithm of.

Most likely your utility (so far as you have one) looks like other_stuff + f(wealth) where wealth = g(annual_income, liquid_assets, other_assets) or something of the kind, where f and g are functions about which we don't know very much. It's probably OK to assume that g is just a linear combination of its inputs. So it seems like there are two things to do.

• Figure out what g looks like by imagining various possible states-of-wealth and ordering them by preference. E.g., would you rather an income of £50k/year and assets of £500k of which £100k are easily accessible, or an income of £200k/year and no assets, or no income and assets of £1M of which £200k are easily accessible? Etc.
• Figure out what f looks like by imagining various gambles. E.g., suppose you have no assets; would you prefer a salary of £30k or of (£25k or £40k, equiprobably)?

And then you can try plugging the result into the Kelly formula, seeing how over-risky it feels, and (if you are so inclined) correcting for excess risk aversion not already factored into f.

The same thing that you want to maximize in the long run.

If utility is logarithmic in wealth, the Kelly Criterion tells me the right size of stake to put on a given bet

This is true, but incomplete. If utility is monotonically increasing with wealth, the Kelly Criterion tells you how to size your bets.

Not sure what you mean.

BUGS maybe?

One way to approach it would be to organize the data around the questions "What seems to have an effect on the system? What makes things better, what makes things worse, even if the effect is very small (but reproducible)?" Then, investigate those things.

Doctors are kind of terrible at doing that. They tend to have a tool box of "these are the things I know how to do" and any information that doesn't fit their specific specialty is discarded as irrelevant.

I'm not sure how useful it would be to weight things by evidence if part of the problem is that some things haven't been investigated enough, or are simply not well-enough understood by modern medicine and science.

I have a friend with an undiagnosed disease and am thinking about doing the same thing. One thing I've thought about is using a Bayesian Network as a tool, but then again, I'd have to be really careful about how I plug in data, and it would be good to know if there are other approaches to this as well. PM me if you find a good way to go about this.

I'd give ADHD meds a try. In fact, I did.

I had a doctor who said they were like a light switch and you'd know quickly if they were helping (he had ADHD as well).

I didn't feel any improvement and stopped.

Consider experimenting with supplements. If you are a U.S. student look into getting exam accommodations. You might also consider neurofeedback and meditation.

What problems are your trying to solve? Knowing you have ADHD is useful because it offers insight into what solutions will work well. For example, it might offer suggestions as to what medications might produce useful results.

In environments where you can, allow yourself to fidget, or even better, keep moving more actively (stationary bike, exercise ball, treadmill, etc.). I have borderline ADHD and have found that to be much more effective than meds. YMMV.

consider the effects that caffeine has on kids with ADHD. (there is some research out) and then evaluate if that is similar to caffeine'e effect on you.

After that consider other alternatives; but coffee seems like the most "secretly be normal" advice I have.

<I don't drink coffee>

Eliezer said it in http://lesswrong.com/lw/ul/my_bayesian_enlightenment : "That scream of horror and embarrassment is the sound that rationalists make when they level up."

There's also "Pain is weakness leaving the body", which is less specific but probably pre-dates Eliezer's quote.

Off the top of my head, wherever the marginal returns from an an increase in ecficacy are very large, either because the outcome is very sensitive to some factor or the prize is just very big. So places with strong feedback loops where you can consolidate the gains, and you know others are doing so as well. Thus, probably just about any technology that is suddenly in demand due to an unexpected event, for one. Another may be any sort of strong truly defensive (protective, not deterrent) capability. Obvious yet profitable applications of new technology fall into the event category above, if first to market wins most of market share.

May also be worth thinking of anti-moloch factors, resulting in underinvestment relative to gains. Market share will be split many ways, first mover has little advantage, and perhaps greater costs. So maybe lack of strong IP protection. What else?

What sort of consequences are you thinking of? The idea that ethics can consider two options equally preferable and not care which one you take follows from the idea of an ethical utility function (even a complicated function that only exists in an abstract mathematical sense). We don't need to assume it directly, we can go with the Archimedean property (roughly, that crossing the street can be worth a small chance of death).

Aha - at http://www.pnas.org/content/109/26/10409.full.pdf , zero-determinant strategies are defined by two factors, chi and phi, and at least when chi is 1, maximum phi results in the strategy of Tit-for-Tat, which is exactly what I was looking for.

Hm... is there a mathematical notation for the maximum of a variable, like |x| indicates the absolute value of x?

Any comforting guesses as to when we will reach the point of being able to routinely cure it?

Do we "routinely cure" depression? People do stop being depressed but I'm not sure that I would use the word "routinely cure".

It might be more productive to think of the suffering person as a subject than as an object. Feeling pleasure is only possible if you actually see yourself as a subject.

I only know it from SSRIs. I also know general anhedonia or perhaps hypothymia from depression.

Suicide is a reliable cure at least for the experience of it (unfortunately the best suicide options are also legally limited, plus of course it costs one's life).

Other cures, to my best knowledge, are not reliable, except for invasive stuff like literal wireheading. Related to depression, this piece by Yvain is good.

It signals wealth and security. Obvious signals of power also signal some level of insecurity. The one going around instilling fear is himself afraid. Criminals know how precarious their own positions are. The boss realizes that a lot of his underlings are just waiting for a moment of weakness so they can stab him in the back. In one sense, appearing not to care can send a signal that you're powerful enough that others don't even register as threats.

I don't understand this actually lost at conscpicuous leisure. The point of status games is to signal power that could destroy a potential opponent.

If you think status signalling reduces to a threat of force, you are missing out on the most important parts. Cooperative signalling and in-group/out-group signaling are extremely important.

Wearing a heavy gold necklace does it (it could pay for hit men).

Gold chains are a lousy symbol as they are easy to fake and actually pretty cheap by first world signalling standards. Hence they are currently only used by underclass people or those not long removed from the underclass.

What am I missing? Why didn't all those conspicuous leisure guys (or later contrarians or authentics) just walk around with gold jewelry for example?

In the past, leisure demonstrated ownership of capital (i.e. I don't have to constantly be working because my money makes money.) Leisure activities can also demonstrate social group membership (going to a yacht regatta vs. going to an avant-garde fashion show.)

If the people with the highest social popularity are "authentic" then being "authentic" is a signal for other people that you have high social popularity.

Outside of the ghetto popular men don't wear gold chains, so it's not a signal of high social popularity.

The point of status games is to signal power that could destroy a potential opponent

I can also simply that you can help your friends and family. A medical doctor doesn't have his social status only because he's rich. He's also a go to person to ask for medical advice.

Popularity means that you can get help. We aren't in the early environment any more, and I don't think we have quite the same reflexes.

Also note that if violence is a possibility, older men get safety and dominance by their ability to recruit younger men, not by their ability to do their own fighting.

Have another angle-- in civilization, winning means coming out ahead while cooperating.

Comment moved elsewhere.

Dinosaurs had bigger heads than humans. Even bears can have bigger heads than humans. It seems unlikely that head size is the limiting factor for a Great filter. There seems also no reason why a brain has to be located in the head and not in the torso.

Simple proposal for Great Filter

This is not a possible explanation for the Great Filter.

Hence human intelligence directly caused high maternal risk and high maternal investment, and could it be the cause of the runaway intelligence arms race inside the species?

more chance of intelligent genes spreading

perhaps without intelligence having drawbacks i.e. without having to push that big infant brain through a vagina, there is no runaway arms race of intelligence.

You have this exactly backwards. If intelligence has negative side effects, this means you would expect less intelligence, for basic differential equation reasons. If large-headed women are more likely to give birth to large-headed babies (which die or kill them because of birthing difficulties), then small-headed babies are evolutionarily favored over large-headed babies. (This is why human babies are born so prematurely; that's the trick that lets you have a big adult head and still survive childbirth. If this trick were not possible, we probably would not be as intelligent as we are.) The selective advantage of intelligence goes down--instead of producing 1.05 times as many children, a smarter person might produce only 1.02 times as many children. In the first case, we obviously get intelligent life faster.

A possible explanation for the Great Filter is that there are planets where smarter animals only produce 0.98 as many children--and thus there are no animals smart enough to significantly alter their environment or make it to space.

But that would need to be a geographic / environmental claim about the planet, and it would need to hold everywhere. On Earth, it seems like one narrow location produced intelligent enough animals. From the unique geographical features of that location, one might suspect that the Cognitive Revolution was a significant filter--but, as with most filter-related things, this is hard to estimate. Was that location only slightly better than other locations, such that other places would have allowed evolution of civilization-creating animals a bit later in geological time (which is immensely later in historical time)? Are locations like that rare on random planets, or could Earth actually have surprisingly few locations that allow the evolution of civilization-creating animals, and that doesn't matter because you only need one?

"more intelligence means ... means more competition means more use for intelligence"

Seems to me there is always enough competition in the nature. It's not like without difficult childbirth our species would have become completely lazy and its evolution would stop.

Sorry, this is how I parsed your argument. I am not sure what exactly are you saying is the bad thing that could happen to species that would be similar to humans, only would have no problem giving childbirth to children with huge heads.

Interesting. 1 compared to what animals? 2 what does your theory predict regarding infanticide/cannibalism in intelligent species? 3 at what level of reproduction effort would childbearing remain viable, given a lifespan of twenty max and high children mortality? 4 ...genes effectively - in what way? Polygamy?