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I too am a member of the Ohio Less Wrong group. I was quite surprised to see this topic come up in Discussion, but I approve wholeheartedly.
My thoughts on the subject are leaning heavily towards the current equivalent of an 'elevator pitch' we have already: the Welcome to Less Wrong piece on the front page.
I particularly like the portion right at the beginning, because it grabs onto the central reason for wanting to be rational in the first place. Start with the absolute basics for something like an elevator pitch, if you ask me.
Thinking and deciding are central to our daily lives. The Less Wrong community aims to gain expertise in how human brains think and decide, so that we can do so more successfully.
I might cut out the part about 'human brains' though. Talk like that tends to encourage folks to peg you as a nerd right away, and 'nerd' has baggage you don't want if you're introducing an average person.
Ok, I read through the Wikipedia entry, and yes. It has proven to be very helpful. Thanks.
At the Ohio meetup I speculated that marijuana may be useful for getting a higher score on creativity tests such as Guilford’s Alternative Uses Task.
I have not tested this idea, just speculated about it. For all I know, the experiment has been performed already.
Thinkbest is an evil cybernetics corporation from D20 Modern's Cyberscape sourcebook.
How about 'The Decision Tree'?
Upvoted for bringing up the intelligence community's viewpoint on trust. I would say we could find some very interesting research on trust from that area. I think that because the intelligence community seems to be adversarial to a large degree. The problem of the double agent or mole, for example, would very likely lead intelligence agencies to invest heavily in metrics of trust.
The last job fair I went to I looked into a career with the CIA. I found they have extremely strict rules on who they hire, up to and including personality traits like patriotism.
I hate breaking my routine. It makes me anxious, and I have to spend more energy motivating myself, and in general it’s hard. I tend to only depart from that routine when forced.
One of the most important things I consider myself to have ever done is break out of my routine. It is scarring in a serious and personal way, but it's necessary if you want to excel at anything you put your mind to.
Besides, what can guarantee that some catastrophe might break your routine against your will? Pre-empting the break is a way of ensuring that you've got a thick skin in case catastrophe strikes.
Would you consider yourself naturally rational, shminux? I am curious where you stand on the nature vs. nurture divide, particularly regarding rationality.
I think this would be great. I don't live in Columbus anymore, I live in Springfield, so Brookville is very close to me. I could show up very regularly!
Feynman is a good one to try to imitate. Sagan seems like a good choice as well.
'rysade' is just 6 characters I strung together one day. It is always a lower case 'r' on the front. I've used this name for so long, I basically consider it to be another way of giving my full name on the internet. To my chagrin, it looks like my old Xanga account is the first result from a Google search . . . that is very old.
The name has no particular pronunciation. I think of it as being similar to 'xkcd' in that Randall once explained that 'xkcd' is "a treasured and carefully guarded point in the space of four-character strings."
You'll find googling 'rysade' to usually return me, and also some very obscure pages in what I think is Russian if you go back far enough. If it is, or ever was, a word in any language, it is certainly not a common one.
Sometimes I'll add an 'h' on the end. Echoing many other posters ITT, I use that version for roleplay characters on occasion. 'Rysadeh' has a pronunciation: rye-SAW-deh, with an emphasis on the 'eh' at the end as well, giving it an abrupt end.
Would it be appropriate to say that I laughed out loud when I read this comment?
That's great. I have a cat named Walter (after the PTSD afflicted character from The Big Lebowski). I regularly accuse him of being a know-it-all because he got a PhD and I didn't. It's quite ridiculous.
Walter is also known as 'The Fat Baby,' 'The Bat Faby,' and 'Koshka Belaey' (White Cat in Russian)
Oh, and I have dreadlocks. They're getting pretty long now as I've had them about 2 1/2 years. My sister inspired me to get them and I hear they look pretty good.
Well, D&D wasn't where all the best roleplay happened at, but I did have some characters that I was quite proud of.
Just as an example, we played a 'Drow' campaign that was set in a heavily modified version of Faerun. For the first half of the game we were underground in the primarily matriarchal Drow empire below the Silver Marches. We took some care to not only flip the politics of the Drow, but also their gender roles as well. This led to some very fun interactions that provided some deep insight into gender roles in modern industrial society.
My character was Hecat, the beautified son of a noble Cleric of Lolth. He was groomed from birth to be the perfect sacrifice to their dark god. He was very proud of his fate, but circumstances conspired to eject him from that life and into a life of adventure. He had Helsinki Syndrome pretty bad at first, but eventually went through stages of denial, regret, anger and eventual acceptance that perhaps it was quite a bad thing to be sacrificed to an evil deity. This acceptance did not prevent him from feeling as though his life was without meaning, however.
He found a purpose in the second half of the campaign, where the party leaves the underworld and proves themselves to be good people to the city of Silverymoon. The characters all became heavily involved in the happenings of the new country, and eventually settled down as a feature of the place. Following campaigns set in Faerun would often have a side-trip to Silverymoon where the characters would be introduced to the characters from a previous campaign. It was all very fun.
In D20 Modern I guess I haven't had characters as fun as in D&D, but I was GM for a game that was pretty much the best one I've ever seen, to date. The game was set in New York, 2015. Fox Thompson is an insightful and caring beat cop with an artistic streak who's moving up in the force. Michelle Kasher was an author and journalist for several music magazines. Michelle was having trouble with her boyfriend. They had, by all accounts, the perfect relationship up until the new year. More recently, he had been acting off, and she was worried there might be someone else. Fox was occasionally tackling odd calls in to the PD concerning a drug called (and I swear I didn't steal this from Dungeons and Discourse) Alethia. Fox and Michelle eventually meet and realize the vividness of each other. Compared to Fox, Michelle can see, others are dim and muted. They interpret these observations as a kind of love at first sight thing, though neither one goes so far as to mention it to the other. The news catches wind of a startling discovery: the speed of light is fluctuating! Dr. Archer (whom I based off of Richard Dawkins) is a physicist from Oxford that came to the USA to use a specialized piece of equipment that was available at NYU. Upon running tests for an extended period of time, he finds that the fluctuations in his data are not going away, and are not likely to go away. He makes a public call for help.
The campaign really picks up when Fox goes to a routine investigation (having been promoted to investigator earlier) and has a startling insight. The site he is investigating seems fairly normal, but the people are . . . wrong. He realizes that it's not himself that is odd or unusual, but the people of New York that are acting funny. They give canned responses, react the same as another unrelated person in comparable circumstances, even going so far as to mimic body language. Disturbed, Fox tells Michelle. They both begin to suspect that something very scary is going on in the world.
Shortly afterward, my favorite D20 Modern character is introduced: Jude. Jude is a tortured high school kid that finds everyone around him impossible to communicate with. He is alone. His social role as far as he can tell is to be stepped on, and as desperation mounts, he slowly hatches a plan for revenge.
The day Jude launches his revenge, Fox Thompson gets a call about a shooting at a local high school. He walks in on a hellish scene of violence, clearly premeditated as the intercom system is blaring some kind of heavy metal. Fox eventually confronts Jude and realizes they are very much alike. Jude breaks down and explains he feels alone and desperate, but Fox, horrified, does his job and Jude is sent away.
Eventually things in New York get very bad. Alethia has a monstrous effect on the 'normal' people of the city, turning them into more or less rabid animals in a desperate search for more. Dr Archer meets the two player characters Fox and Michelle and they discuss what could possibly be going on. Archer settles on the conclusion that the world they live in is a simulation. The hypothesis explains the slowly degrading behavior of the populace easily, and also the bizarre readings he got with his equipment at the university.
The story goes on from there, but I'm not sure I should be posting the outline in this thread! I suppose I could write up the whole thing on my blog, if anyone wants to read it.
Actually, I think I may have to do that anyway, as I plan on doing this story for next year's NaNoWriMo. I could gauge reactions to the story to see if anybody takes interest.
Oh, as far as jobs go... I just work in a plastics factory. Middling pay for unskilled manual labor.
Ok. I don't think I've actually done a regular LW style intro yet, so I'll roll them both into one intro.
I'm 27 years old, from Springfield Ohio. Areas of interest are mathematics and computer science. I hope to turn my wide angle focus on those topics into a narrow beam focused on either AI or neurology, depending on what I discover while I'm still exploring. I have a personal vow to follow path of Tetlock's Fox until I discover the 'best' thing to do with my life. I went to ITT Tech and got an Associate in software development, not much of the degree has been useful, post college. I toyed with the idea of getting a bachelor's, even going so far as to move to Columbus for a while in an attempt to get into OSU but found the area I was in too hostile, and my job was terrible. I met a guy named Max there who is very much a Less Wrong type, but I don't think he gets on much. He was going to go back to school as well but ultimately decided self-education was the better option. I eventually came to same conclusion, and moved out of the area. I've been trying to take Stanford Online classes and work full time since moving, but it's not going well. I hope the next round of classes in January go better. I'll only be taking PGM so hopefully I'll have time for both schooling and working.
On a personal level, I have several geeky hobbies. I play D&D or D20 Modern as often as time allows with a group of particularly talented roleplayers. Our group has been coalescing for years now. We have got enough players with enough talent to produce some of the best roleplay sessions I've ever seen or even heard of.
The group includes my friend and roommate Roux (pseudonym) who is very much the yin to my yang, or what have you. We are very complimentary to each other, and have been assisting each other in every imaginable endeavor for a very long time now. He and his girlfriend have one of the most stable and beneficial relationships I've ever seen. We all three live in a rental house in downtown Springfield.
Roux and I play lots of action games, primarily FPS. If we can, we play cooperative storyline games. We are quite good. For example, Roux was the #1 player in the US in Halo: Reach Team Deathmatch for a couple months according to the site Halocharts.com.
Not a lot more springs to mind that would make good intro material. I spend a lot of time these days thinking about how to get stable financially. It's very hard to do. About a year and a half ago my finances went into a tailspin and I've been desperate for money ever since. I hope my new job can clear up the problems, but I'm really trying to figure out a good way to get on my feet and stay there on my terms. I don't like the idea of selling my time and labor. I'd prefer to keep my labor for myself.
This is where meetups could be useful. Roux and I have to depend on being as specific as possible. However, at a meetup, you could poll the group for their honest opinion.
Just an outline of what I'm pondering:
It would be like a silent auction, where everyone submits a 'what do you think about me' question.
A question is drawn, the group answers the question, everyone is embarrassed, next question.
Sounds like fun, actually. It seems a bit like 'truth or dare.'
I can personally attest to the usefulness of exactly that kind of feedback. I truly feel lucky to have a friend as close to me as my roommate, we'll call him Roux.
Back in high school, I was awkward and constantly scheming up ways to become socially savvy but failing in ways that were not charming in the least. Roux was a battered kitten just out of the 'nut house.' He wore a black outfit with black baggy jeans that were painted all over with white fabric paint and accentuated with white handprints all up the front. On the back was a patchy paint job concealing the words 'I made this shirt in the nut house' with '46 + 2' written over it.
Over the years we've been friends I have learned more from him than I would in two of my lifetimes without him, I believe. Our minds are so closely synched that conversation can be deep and informative with a very reliable regularity. We ask each other questions like the example above regularly. To ask a question like that, one of us need only outline a concept to fully form it in the other's mind and then ask the question, just as directly in the example above.
That said, I suppose I should put in that I feel Roux and I get a lot of benefit from this kind of 'QA Session' because we are so familiar with each other's minds. I can't see anything wrong with setting up a site or subsection (my vote is for separate site) as an area for these "Crocker's Questions," but it seems likely to miss the mark often.
Perhaps you could include some verification during the early stages and find out if the offered advice is useful.
This is very clear. Others should refer back to this for a refresher if the topic becomes confusing. I know it's set my head spinning around sometimes.
I agree that this is a very major problem for all of humanity. This single issue is the source of the majority of my akrasia. I stop in my tracks when I detect that I might soon be guilty of this kind of hypocrisy.
Finding a way to nail this issue down and give it a solid definition is pretty important. I'd love to contribute more on the subject, but I have SO little time right now...
Maybe later this week?
I agree that phlogiston was not likely thought of as a mysterious answer at the time. I think that what justifies calling it a mysterious answer today is that we could justifiably notice that we are confused.
Whether it's confusing quality is a good reason to categorize it as a mysterious answer is a different issue, however.
I have to say this discussion has me intrigued. Feel free to post the results of the discussion here. I am interested in hearing how it all turns out.
Sorry, that was a bit of a dense quip on my part. Let me deconstruct it.
I got the impression SithMasterSean was deriving his idea of Nietzsche's writings from other people's interpretations of Nietzsche's writings. Typically those ideas seem to be flat wrong. From what I understand, the Nazis seem to be the most famous misinterpreters Nietzsche, so I thought I'd make a bit of a joke about that, and also try to make a bit of comedic use out of argumentum ad hitlerum while I was at it.
Really, I was just joking around.
What really seems to pay off on LW is clarity, clarity, clarity. I kick myself every time something like this happens. Sorry.
I might be stepping in over my head here, and I want to make it clear I am taking NO ONE'S side. But this seems like a legitimate concern to me. Are we really here for the community, or are we really here for the truth? Which configuration of power best serves the community, and which best serves truth?
EDIT: Given the vast amount of very clear thinking I'm seeing in these comments, I want to say I don't really see this thread as the most appropriate place to pose a question like mine anymore. If I see a real Truth vs.Community controversy, you can expect this comment to appear there.
I can agree with this. There was a time when I considered 'a conversation with a random person' to be more or less a dangerous situation. It took a lot of brain hacking to get myself out of THAT.
Okay. I think that perhaps you could benefit from reading R. J. Hollingdale's biography, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy
Nietzsche's language may be controversial, but his points are quite benign. Take Will to Power for example. As I'm interpreting Will to Power right now with my limited exposure to his writings, Will to Power is just his explanation for why living beings don't just stop at mere survival. Think about it: Evolution does not favor those who do the mere minimum for survival, it favors those who excel. Will to Power is therefore the foundation, basis, and cause of all life in an ultimate sense. You could say Richard Dawkins restated Nietzsche's point when Dawkins coined the term 'The Selfish Gene' and elaborated on how life really works at a basic level.
The following is running the risk of stepping into mere speculation because, like I said, I haven't read all his works yet:
Since we are 'gene machines,' and we are programmed by them in countless ways, it follows that we are inherently selfish; that we have a Will to Power of our own. Sit down and watch people sometime and you'll find this plays out fairly nicely. It's not perfect of course, but who are we to say that the deviant behavior of selflessness is 'good' if the true cause of life is selfishness? This plays into his arguments concerning 'good' and 'evil' and how transient they both are. All cultures, Nietzsche says, have had different values and the cultures of the future will have values different from us. Perhaps what we should be doing is exercising some of our power to 'revalue all values,' something that he admitted he was not up to the task of. To be honest, I think he was mostly thinking in the same direction the transhumanist community of today largely thinks in. We DO need to revalue all values. We need someone SMARTER than us to do it...
Though I probably should have said this at the beginning, I still highly doubt Nietzsche's methods. He does not seem to have followed the rationalist's path. He was a classical philologist by education and an artistic biographer for much of his writing career. What I'm saying is, maybe he didn't have rigor at the heart of his philosophy. It's easy to get the impression from his writing style that this is all just stuff he 'made up.' But I don't know. I plan on finding out.
P.S. SithMasterSean, Nietzsche's writing has been praised by Nazis. You wouldn't want to be a Nazi, would you?!
I'm working on coming up with my own advice for you, chimera. First, I would like to ask some questions.
What prompted this post? Have these concerns always been with you, but have recently found a voice? Alternatively, did you realize that you had these problems as a result of something you read on Less Wrong or some other recent event?
I get the impression that you posted this after realizing that you were in a funk and had no idea how to get out. How long have you felt the way that you felt when you posted this, or if you feel that way still, the way you feel now?
What about the time leading up to this funk? Did you feel that were accomplished, progressing in your life, accomplishing your goals? Do you feel that you recently lost an important part of yourself, as if a bit of your self image was dissolved?
In the last year or so, has anything changed in your physical surroundings or routine? These will be keys to discovering why you feel the way you do.
I'm a fan of moving forward, just like everyone on Less Wrong, but it's likely the proximate cause of your situation will give us a hint at it's ultimate cause, and may point us in the direction of a solution.
Ouch. Halfway through that list I started wincing. A lot of what chimera has said resonates with me, and plenty of your observations fit me as well!
Chimera, I can say that lots of the advice so far on this topic are things I tried and they worked like charms. I mean 'charm' quite literally. It was like magic.
That's interesting. I'm reading Thus Spake Zarathustra right now and noticing a couple things that don't exactly jive too well with our rationalist paradigm here. Still, I didn't expect a comment like this to be downvoted this much based on what I've read from Nietzsche so far.
Is it mostly because of the antisocial tone of this comment, or is it Nietzsche himself that caused the downvotes?
I can say that the 'reward system' is laughably easy to defeat as long as you are aware of it's existence. Hint: the winning move is not to play.
Your typical game based on a reward system will cater to those who are playing the game for the lever, while other games will cater to other other audiences. They are pretty easy to spot.
I consider the primary use of video games to be a kind of virtual sport, with rules for victory, guidelines for possible and impossible actions, etc. Other wonderful uses are as a storytelling medium, a virtual world to explore or exploit, or three dimensional puzzles.
Seconded. As someone who plays a fair amount of First Person Shooter games, I can tell you that there are all types of games and all types of players. The popular Call of Duty games are pretty good examples of life-wasting time sinks. They require little skill and less strategy. However, the recently released Halo: Reach is a deep game with satisfying multiplayer combat that continues to surprise me as I progress in skill. Anyone who is interested in competition and outside the box thinking should definitely take up playing games online. They require speed, accuracy, strategy, teamwork and most of all creativity.
I agree. I think this will be changing my writing style subtly.
While I understand that this risks making the site more complicated, I suppose it's at least worth suggesting that we move the links to a separate section of the site altogether. It could be "Main, Discussion, Links" for example. Or maybe the Discussion menu could expand to "Posts, Comments, Links."
Would the bump happen because of a comment, because of karma, or because of both?
I would like to avoid the diseased Facebook sorting algorithm at all costs here. Some arbitrary assessment of posts and karma should not be used to bring topics to the top.
Perhaps we could make it possible to select from a list sorted by most recent comment, most recent karma and most recent post?
I'm interested in analyzing a Google spreadsheet like this one is linked to. I use a form like this for a daily self-survey. Are there any tricks you know of to analyze the data on these things bit more effectively than just reading through them? The charts feature on Google Docs seems a little weak.
BTW, filled out the survey. It's nice but the last 'blank field' type question is a duplicate.
I concur.
The beginning of games typically have next to no worthwhile activities.
Wired's article on the making of Halo 3 describes the process of leading the player along a set path using 'no return' strategies exactly like the one displayed here. The motive for doing so in Bungie's case was to make it so the player did not get confused and wander around endlessly. In this case, the no return strategy is supposed to be symbolic of something, of an irrecoverable loss. However, if nothing is being lost, then it fails to symbolize in any meaningful way.
I would say in order to get the ledge to symbolize that loss meaningfully, you'll have to fill the beginning of the game with worthwhile and engaging activities. Mini-games if you will. That way, falling down the ledge will be a kind of 'Ender burrowing through the Giant's eye' sort of moment. It will move the game past the time-wasting distractions of the beginning and it can start to take on real meaning.
Now, I definitely don't want to introduce any elements of scope creep into your development, but I do think that if you want to tell the story you are trying to tell, then there has to be something for the player to give up.
Alright. That makes sense.
Sort of like changing your name through common usage.
I hate to comment before reading the body of your post, but the title of the post quite literally says "Friendly Artificial Intelligence Frequently Asked Questions Questions."
I'm just pointing it out to get it out of the way, though... It doesn't really bug me that much.
The main thing I think folks are objecting to here is the idea of 'swallowing the NLP pill.'
You'll see plenty of self hacks and hacks that work on others (dark arts, etc) but none of it will be labeled NLP. I imagine plenty of the techniques we have here were even inspired in one way or another by NLP.
But here's my main point. We have kept our ideas' scope down for a reason. We DO NOT WANT lukeprog's How To Be Happy to sound authoritative. The reason for that is if it turns out to be 'more wrong' it will be that much easier to let go of.
Introducing the label NLP to our discussions will lend (for some of us) a certain amount of Argument from Authority to the supporters of whoever takes the NLP side, and we really do not want that.
Hmm. What are the tenets of Placebomancy? Could we outline the practice in some way? What can it affect and what can it not? What are the limits of it's power?
And furthermore, does NLP fit neatly into the category?
I cannot like this enough. Thank you for showing me this book. This is a big piece of western philosophy and history that I did not know I was missing.
Looks like a Google Books review has not been written yet, Vlad...
In the interest of seeing what strategies like U and C1 could do regarding experimenting with the opponent's behavior, I would be interested if there were a prisoner's dilemma variant that had a second score that is worth less points but can still add up, enabling a strategy to come out on top if it comes down to neck-and-neck. Real life kind of operates like that: there are ways to win little victories over others, but those strategies are often telling about your character.
Oh, you're beautiful! Why is this not a top level post!?
EDIT: Strength. Once again . . . the dump stat.
The form seems to be broken at the City field. There is an open parenthesis, but nothing inside it and no closing parenthesis.
Thank you both, that's some pretty clear advice. I do think that there are benefits to avoiding the topic in public, but there are very tangible benefits to deciding, finally, for yourself, that one or the other is true.
It also makes it clear to me that there are an awful lot of claims that come along with Christianity. It doesn't all just follow from god as theorems in mathematics follow from axioms. I guess what I was trying to ask is if there was a case for reevaluating 'god.' You needn't answer, however, as I think I've got a handle on this.
I agree, but it feels like I owe them, rather than the other way around.
I'll read this over. Thank you.
[edit] Looks like I have a long way to go before I can use that phrase again...
I think this really does get right to the heart of it. Thanking for updating does sound particularly conceited in retrospect.