User loginSyndicate NavigationWho's online
There are currently 0 users and 3 guests online.
|
lesswrong.orgQuantified Health Prize results announced
Submitted by Zvi 46 comments
I am happy to announce that Scott Siskind, better known on Less Wrong as Yvain, has won the first Quantified Health Prize, and Kevin Fischer has been awarded second place. There were exactly five entries, so the remaining prizes will go to Steven Kaas, Kevin Keith and Michael Buck Shlegeris. The full announcement can be found here until the second contest is announced, and is reproduced below the fold. While we had hoped to receive more than five entries, I feel strongly that we still got our money’s worth and more. Scott Siskind and Kevin Fischer in particular put in a lot of work, and provided largely distinct sets of insight into the question. In general, it is clear that much time was usefully spent, and all five entries had something unique to contribute to the problem. We consider the first contest a success, and intend to announce a second contest in the next few weeks that will feature multiple questions and a much larger prize pool. Discussion of all five entries follows:Place ($500): 5th Place ($500): Full report Steven Kaas makes a well-reasoned argument for selenium supplementation. That obviously wasn't a complete entry. It's very possible this was a strategic decision in the hopes there would be less than five other entries, and if so it was a smart gamble that paid off. I sympathize with his statements on the difficulty of making good decisions in this space. 4th Place ($500):4th Place ($500): Full report Kevin Keeth’s Recommendation List is as follows: “No quantified recommendations were developed. See ‘Report Body’ for excruciating confession of abject failure.” A failure that is admitted to and analyzed with such honesty is valuable, and I’m glad that Kevin submitted an entry rather than giving up, even though he considered his entry invalid and failure is still failure. Many of the concerns raised in his explanation are no doubt valid concerns. I do think it is worth noting that a Bayesian approach is not at a loss when the data is threadbare, and the probabilistic consequences of actions are highly uncertain. Indeed, this is where a Bayesian approach is most vital, as other methods are forced to throw up their hands. Despite the protests, Kevin does provide strong cases against supplementation of a number of trace minerals that were left unconsidered by other entries, which is good confirmation to have. 3rd Place ($500):3rd Place ($500): Full report Michael Buck Shlegeris chose to consider only five minerals, but made reasonable choices of which five to include. None of the recommendations made on those five seem unreasonable, but the reasoning leading to them is unsound. This starts with the decision to exclude studies with less than a thousand participants. While larger sample sizes are obviously better (all else being equal), larger studies also tend to be retrospective, longitudinal monitoring studies and meta-analyses. The conclusions in each section are not justified by the sources cited, and the RDI (while a fine starting point) is leaned on too heavily. There is no cost/benefit analysis, nor are the recommendations quantified. This is a serious entry, but one that falls short. 2nd Place ($1000):2nd Place ($1000): Full report Kevin Fischer provides a treasure trove of information, teasing out many fine details that the other entries missed, and presented advocacy of an alternate approach that treats supplementation as a last resort far inferior to dietary modifications. Many concerns were raised about method of intake, ratios of minerals, absorption, and the various forms of each mineral. This is impressive work. There is much here that we will need to address seriously in the future, and we’re proud to have added Kevin Fischer to our research team; he has already been of great help, and we will no doubt revisit these questions. Unfortunately, this entry falls short in several important ways. An important quote from the paper: "“Eat food high in nutrients” represents something like the null hypothesis on nutrition - human beings were eating food for millions of years before extracting individual constituents was even possible. “Take supplements” is the alternative hypothesis. This is an explicitly frequentist, and also Romantic, approach to the issue. Supplementation can go wrong, but so can whole foods, and there’s no reason to presume that what we did, or are currently doing with them, is ideal. Supplementation is considered only as a last resort, after radical dietary interventions have “failed,” and no numbers or targets for it are given. No cost-benefit analysis is done on either supplementation or on the main recommendations. Winner ($5000): Scott Siskind (Yvain)Winner: Scott Siskind / Yvain ($5000): Full report Scott Siskind’s entry was not perfect, but it did a lot of things right. An explicit cost/benefit analysis was given, which was very important. The explanations of the origins of the RDAs were excellent, and overall the analysis of various minerals was strong, although some factors found by Kevin were missed. Two of the analyses raised concerns worth noting: potassium and sodium. On sodium, the concern was that the analysis treated the case as clear cut when it was not; there have been challenges to salt being bad, as referenced last year by Robin Hanson, and the anti-salt studies are making the two-stage argument that blood pressure causes risks and salt raises blood pressure, rather than looking at mortality. However, the conclusions here are still reasonable, especially for ordinary Americans regularly eating super-stimulus foods loaded with the stuff. Weekly LW Meetups: Melbourne, Atlanta, Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge UK, Ohio (general), Tucson
Submitted by FrankAdamek 0 comments
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:
Also, the Salt Lake City group now has a website! Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun! If you missed the deadline and wish to have your meetup featured, you can reach me on gmail at frank dot c dot adamek. In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up. Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup! If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver. If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know! Hearsay, Double Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates
Submitted by Mass_Driver 98 comments
Application of: How Much Evidence Does It Take? (trigger warning: some description of domestic violence) Summary: I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of one way that the American legal system tries to assess and cope with the unreliability of certain kinds of evidence. After explaining the relevant rules with references to a few recent famous cases and a non-notable case that I'm working on now, I briefly consider whether this part of the evidence code is above or below the sanity waterline, and suggest an incremental improvement. Recently, I got to the point in my legal career where people are trusting me to write evidentiary briefs, i.e., to argue in front of a judge about what kinds of evidence are reliable enough to be safely presented to a jury. There is an odd division of epistemological labor in the American court system: judges are thought [page 90] to be better than juries at resisting passionate or manipulative oratory, and juries are thought to be better than judges at resisting bribery and (pre-existing) personal hatred. As a result, potentially inflammatory or unreliable evidence is presented first to a judge, who (much like one of Eliezer's Confessors) is supposed to sift the exhibit to see if normal people can handle it without losing their tenuous grip on sanity. If and only if the evidence seems safe for ordinary human consumption, the judge will allow the lawyers to argue about that evidence in front of the jury. Otherwise, the evidence sits in a cardboard box in an unheated warehouse, safely away from the eyes of the jury, until it's time for an appeal. The Hearsay Rule By way of a concrete example, one famous recent case featured a recorded 911 call made by a domestic violence victim to the emergency phone operator. The operator asked questions about the location and identity of the person who was accused of beating the caller. The caller answered the questions on tape, explicitly identifying her abuser as Mr. Adrian Martell Davis, and the answers were used first to find and arrest the suspect, and ultimately to convict him. The victim was apparently too intimidated to testify in open court, and so her recorded statement as to the name of her abuser was absolutely necessary to support a conviction -- no recording, no conviction. Under the 400-year-old hearsay rule, recorded testimony typically is not allowed to be presented to a jury -- courts are concerned that the person giving the recorded statement might be pressured by the police in ways that wouldn't show up on tape, and that allowing a witness to testify without showing up in court unfairly deprives the defendant of a chance to (a) cross-examine the witness, and (b) have the jury see any facial tics, body language, etc. that undercut the witness's credibility. In the 911 case, though, the Court faced a straight choice between finding an exception to the hearsay rule and letting an apparent abuser go free. In making this choice, the US Supreme Court managed to ignore a variety of emotionally salient but epistemologically irrelevant distractions, such as the seriousness of the crime, the relative helplessness of the victim, and the respectability of the 911 operator. Instead, the Court focused on the purpose for which the 911 statements were obtained. If the statements were obtained to help gather information needed to safely resolve an ongoing emergency, they could be used at trial. If the statements, however, were obtained to gather information about a past event, they could *not* be used at trial. The theory supporting this distinction seems to have been that the right to cross-examine and the right to have the jury see body language are fungible elements of a more general reliability test. A stranger's assertion, without more, could be true or could be false. It doesn't count as very much evidence. To turn an assertion into enough evidence to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt, you need to show that the assertion comes with "indicia of reliability." Two of these indicia are cross-examination and body language -- if a story checks out despite a vigorous unfriendly interview and the peer pressure of having to tell the story while physically in the room with other people from your community, then that's pretty good evidence. But you might have reasons to believe a story even if you don't get cross-examination or body language. In the case of the 911 call, one might think that the caller had a strong motive to tell the truth, because if she didn't, then the police would go looking for the wrong guy, and her abuser would come find her and continue hurting her. Similarly, one might think that the operators had a strong motive to ask fair, non-leading questions, because of they didn't get the right answer, then the police might show up in the wrong neighborhood or with the wrong expectations, and there could be an unnecessary firefight. Finally, one could argue that a recorded statement made as events were unfolding is inherently more reliable (in some ways) than a narrative given months or years after the event; human memory gets corrupted faster than 8-track tapes. Some combination of these factors convinced the Court to admit the evidence. Other, very similar cases have been decided differently. Whether they got that particular decision right or wrong, though, the framework of "indicia of reliability" is hard-coded into American evidence law, especially for civil cases. If you want to present evidence to a jury based on a statement that was made outside of court, you have to give at least one reason why the statement is nevertheless reliable. Double and Triple Hearsay Here's where things really get interesting: if your out-of-court statement quotes another out-of-court statement, the evidence is called "double hearsay," and you need to independently verify each statement. If any link in the chain breaks, the whole document gets excluded. For example, in the case I'm working on now, the defendants want to show the jury a report filled out by California's Occupational Health and Safety Administration ("OSHA"). The OSHA report is based almost entirely on an accident report form filled out by a private corporation. That report form, in turn, is based almost entirely on an informal interview of the only eyewitness to an accident. So the defendants can use the OSHA report if and only if the OSHA report, the accident report, and the informal interview are all reliable. Use A ↔ (A ∧ B ∧ C) are reliable. To try to qualify the OSHA report, the defendants are arguing that the OSHA report is reliable under the public record exception to the hearsay rule, meaning that the public officials who prepared it had a stronger interest in accurately reporting public information than they did in the outcome of the accident victim's private case. To get the accident report form in, the defendants are arguing that it is reliable under the business record exception to the hearsay rule, meaning that the corporate officials who prepared it had a stronger interest in making sure their company had access to accurate information about safety risks than they did in the outcome of any one customer's lawsuit. As for the informal interview...well, I honestly have no idea how they plan to justify its reliability. But, then again, I'm biased. My professional interest lies in making sure that the whole string of unhelpful quotations stays in a cardboard box in a dank garage, far away from any juries. Do the Rules Work? So far, I've been pleasantly surprised at how well the American legal system handles some of these challenges. The fact that we have a two-tiered system of evaluating evidence at all is a cut above average -- imagine, e.g., the doctor who examines you taking notes on your condition, filtering out any subjective comments you make about how you're sure it's just a cold, and reporting only your objective symptoms to a second doctor, who then renders a diagnosis. Or imagine a team of business consultants who interview a Fortune 500 company's leadership team, and then pass their written notes back to a team at HQ (who has never met the executives) so that HQ can catch any obvious mistakes in reasoning before sending out recommendations. We know, intellectually, that meeting people tends to make us friendlier toward them and more likely to adopt their point of view even if we encounter no Bayesian evidence that increases the plausibility of their opinions, but our institutions rarely take steps to guard against that bias. I think my biggest criticism of the American evidence code is that it doesn't account for uncertainty in the model. For instance, if I read the headline on a piece of science journalism saying that (e.g.) coffee consumption reduces the risk of prostate cancer, or that receiving spankings in childhood is negatively correlated with conscientiousness as an adult, there are least six layers of 'hearsay' -- I might have misunderstood the headline, the headline might have mis-summarized the article, the article might have misquoted the scientist, the scientist might have misinterpreted the recorded data, the recorded data might not faithfully reflect what actually happened during the experiment, and the experiment might not faithfully replicate the real-world conditions that interest us. Even if I can articulate plausible reasons why each step in the transmission of information was "reliable," I should be very skeptical that my *model* of the transmission is accurate. I only have to be wrong about one of the six steps for my estimate of the information's plausibility to be untrustworthy. If the information would only provide a few decibels of evidence even if it were perfectly reliable, then trying to calculate how many points a semi-reliable piece of evidence is worth can fail because of a low signal-to-noise ratio. E.g., suppose I learn that neither the suspect nor the actual criminal were redheads - I might be absolutely certain of this new piece of information, but that's still nowhere near enough evidence to support a conviction. If instead I learn that there is probably something like a 60% chance that neither the suspect nor the criminal had red hair, that datum really doesn't tell me anything at all -- the info shouldn't shift my prior enough for my prior to be noticeably different. Although courts are allowed to consider the extent to which an unduly long chain of inferences makes evidence less "trustworthy," I think that on balance decisions would be more accurate if there were a firm limit -- say, three layers -- beyond which evidence was simply inadmissible as a matter of law. If A says that B says that C says that D shot someone, then no matter how reliable we think A, B, and C are, we should probably keep that evidence away from the jury unless we can haul at least one of B, C, or D into court to answer cross-examination. Avoid misinterpreting your emotions
Submitted by Kaj_Sotala 21 comments
A couple of weeks ago, I was suffering from insomnia. Eventually my inability to fall asleep turned into frustration, which then led to feelings of self-doubt about my life in general. Soon I was wondering about whether I would ever amount to anything, whether any of my various projects would ever end up bearing fruit, and so forth. As usual, I quickly became convinced that my life prospects were dim, and that I should stop being ambitious and settle for some boring but safe path while I still had the chance. Then I realized that there was no reason for me to believe in this, and I stopped thinking that way. I still felt frustrated about not being able to sleep, but I didn't feel miserable about my chances in life. To do otherwise would have been to misinterpret my emotions. Let me explain what I mean by that. There are two common stereotypes about the role of emotions. The first says that emotions are something irrational, and should be completely disregarded when making decisions. The second says that emotions are basically always right, and one should follow their emotions above all. Psychological research on emotions suggests that the correct answer lies in between: we have emotions for a reason, and we should follow their advice, but not unthinkingly. The Information Principle says that emotional feelings provide conscious information from unconscious appraisals of situations1. Your brain is constantly appraising the situation you happen to be in. It notes things like a passerby having slightly threatening body language, or conversation with some person being easy and free of misunderstandings. There are countless of such evaluations going on all the time, and you aren't consciously aware of them because you don't need to. Your subconscious mind can handle them just fine on its own. The end result of all those evaluations is packaged into a brief summary, which is the only thing that your conscious mind sees directly. That "executive summary" is what you experience as a particular emotional state. The passerby makes you feel slightly nervous and you avoid her, or your conversational partner feels pleasant to talk with and you begin to like him, even though you don't know why. To some extent, then, your emotions will guide you to act appropriately in various situations, even when you don't know why you feel the way you do. However, it's important to intepret them correctly. Maybe you meet a new person on a good day and feel good when talking with them. Do you feel good because the person is pleasant to be with, or because the weather is pleasant? In general, emotions are only used as a source of information when their informational value is not called into question2. If you know that you are sad because of something that happened in the morning, and still feel sad when talking to your friend later on, you don't assume that something about your friend is making you feel sad. People also pay more attention to their feelings when they think them relevant for the question at hand. For example, moods have a larger impact when people are making decisions for themselves rather than others, who may experience things differently. But by default, people tend to assume that their feelings and emotions are "about" whatever it is that they're thinking about at that moment. If they're not given a reason to presume that their emotions are caused by something else than the issue at hand, they don't.2 So here was my mistake. I had been feeling frustrated about my inability to sleep, and my thoughts had wandered to other subjects, such as my life in general. And then I had automatically assumed that because I was feeling frustrated while thinking about my life, my life wasn't going well, so I should reconsider my plans. In addition to providing information, moods also affect the way we think: research suggests that sad moods make us more analytical. Or as Schwarz2 summarizes: When things go smoothly and we face no hurdles in the pursuit of our goals, we are likely to rely on our pre-existing knowledge structures and routines, which served us well in the past. Moreover, we may be willing to take some risk in exploring novel solutions. Once things go wrong, we abandon reliance on our usual routines and focus on the specifics at hand to determine what went wrong and what can be done about it. So again: I had been trying to sleep, but failed to do so. My failure at the task triggered feelings of frustration. Frustration is a sign that our current approach isn't working, and we should re-evaluate it. In my situation, the right course of action would probably have been to re-evaluate whether I would be getting any sleep at that moment, and spend some time awake until I'd feel more tired again. But I stayed in bed, so my feelings of frustration persisted, and the impulse to re-evaluate things remained. And when my thoughts wandered to other subjects, it was those subjects that my mind started taking apart to find what was wrong with them. The fact that there wasn't actually anything wrong with them didn't matter. Some part of my mind presumed, quite reasonably, that if I was feeling frustrated then there had to be something wrong with what I was doing, so if I thought otherwise I had to be mistaken. And this line of reasoning would have been correct, had it not been applied to the wrong problem. I am slowly learning when I should be taking my negative moods into account, and when I shouldn't. I've noticed that on days when I haven't had enough sleep, I also feel skeptical about what I'm doing with my life. When I'm more rested and in a neutral mood, those doubts seem overblown. So I try to discount such doubts when they seem to be caused by mere physical fatigue. On the other hand, some negative feelings are such that I've generally come to regret overriding them. Sometimes I've gotten a bad vibe about a person, and when I've decided to trust them anyway, I've afterwards realized that I shouldn't have. Positive emotions, too, can be correct or mistaken. I have a tendency to get quite excited about new projects, and be much more certain of their value than I should be. At such times, I try to make sure that I'm not rushing ahead with the project and making commitments that I shouldn't. Thinking in such a way is an example of taking the outside view. When someone takes the inside view to a problem, such as the task of predicting how long something will take, they focus on the case at hand, consider the plan and the obstacles to its completion, construct scenarios of future progress, and extrapolate current trends3. On the other hand, the outside view essentially ignores the details of the case at hand, and involves no attempt at detailed forecasting of the future history of the project. Instead, it focuses on the statistics of a class of cases chosen to be similar in relevant respects to the present one3. For instance, when considering how long it will take you to write an essay, the inside view might respond by looking at how well you've done so far, and how long it would take if you kept up the pace. The outside view would simply look at previous occasions when you've had to write an essay, and ask how long it took on those occasions. If on several previous occasions you've thought that you'll get the essay written in no time, but then always finished just before the deadline, then it's most likely that you'll again finish right before the deadline. For a long time, I thought that if I was feeling miserable and it was making me think negative thoughts, I only had two options. A, I could get rid of the negative thoughts by distracting myself or finding something that would cheer me up and get me out of that mood. Or B, I would fail to get out of the mood, and thus keep thinking negative thoughts. For whatever reason, I never realized that I also had option C: keep feeling miserable, but stop thinking negative thoughts. Depending on exactly how strong your emotion is, you might not always be capable of getting rid of the thoughts, but at least you can realize that they're not true. So that's what I did. I thought, "I'm feeling miserable because I can't sleep and I'm frustrated, but that has nothing to do with whether my projects and ambitions will be successful or not. My current emotions convey no information about that topic. So it's pointless to doubt myself because of these emotions." (Not in so many words, but that was the general idea.) So I stopped thinking those thoughts. And while I still felt generally miserable, the thoughts stopped making me feel even worse. Possibly the most vivid example of taking the outside view that I've seen comes from Ferrett Steinmetz: I was suicidally down yesterday for no reason except brain chemistry, waking up with the belief that everyone I knew would be much better off if I killed myself. And I did my usual ration-checks to see if what depression was saying was correct – because, like bullies, occasionally the cruel will tell you what the kind will not. So I looked at the evidence. What the evidence told me was that as a polyamorous man, I had several women who loved me deeply, women who had the choice of other partners and yet still cared about me enough to send me texts and emails, and this should be evidence that I was not a worthless human being. At which point my depression started in on me: See? All these women who love you, and you just write them off. That’s how selfish you are, ignoring the adoration of these women. You’re such a self-centered asshole, you should kill yourself. Fortunately, I knew my old adversary well enough to understand where it was leading me. I stepped away from the self-destructive sequence my depression was trying to guide me down, recognizing that when I’m in this mood every path goes straight to off-yourself-ville, and understood that the facts would have to be enough. Depression is a bully in that it’s fundamentally out to destroy you. You can’t quite get away from him, like any good bully; the best you can do is come to an understanding that this is unpleasant, but it’s nothing you should take too personally. And hope, one day, that you’ll become strong enough to walk away. Major depression is the extreme case. If your depression is serious enough, your brain is broken. The mechanisms which would usually kick in when you were doing something wrong will be engaged even when you're doing nothing wrong, and they will be in overdrive, taking apart everything in your life in order to find ways by which you are screwing up. But you don't have to believe them. You can realize that the thoughts that pop up in your mind aren't based on reality, and that you don't have to act on the basis of them. It won't stop you from feeling miserable, but it might stop you from feeling even worse.
References 1: Clore, G.L. & Gasper, K., & Garvin, E. (2001). Affect as information. In J.P. Forgas (Ed.), Handbook of affect and social cognition (pp. 121–144). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. 2: Schwarz, N. (2010) Feelings as information. In Van Lange, P. & Kruglanski, A. & Higgins, E.T. (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology, Sange. 3: Kahneman, D. & Lovallo, D. (1993) Timid Choices and Bold Forecasts: A Cognitive Perspective on Risk Taking. Management Science, vol. 39, no. 1. Weekly LW Meetups: Brussels, Houston, Madison, Melbourne, Moscow, Philadelphia (2), Sydney
Submitted by FrankAdamek 1 comment
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:
Also, the Salt Lake City group now has a website! Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun! If you missed the deadline and wish to have your meetup featured, you can reach me on gmail at frank dot c dot adamek. In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up. Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup! If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver. If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know! My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination
Submitted by lukeprog 105 comments
Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life After three months of practice, I now use a single algorithm to beat procrastination most of the times I face it.1 It probably won't work for you quite like it did for me, but it's the best advice on motivation I've got, and it's a major reason I'm known for having the "gets shit done" property. There are reasons to hope that we can eventually break the chain of akrasia; maybe this post is one baby step in the right direction. How to Beat Procrastination explained our best current general theory of procrastination, called "temporal motivation theory" (TMT). As an exercise in practical advice backed by deep theories, this post explains the process I use to beat procrastination — a process implied by TMT. As a reminder, here's a rough sketch of how motivation works according to TMT:
Or, as Piers Steel summarizes: Decrease the certainty or the size of a task's reward — its expectancy or its value — and you are unlikely to pursue its completion with any vigor. Increase the delay for the task's reward and our susceptibility to delay — impulsiveness — and motivation also dips. Of course, my motivation system is more complex than that. P.J. Eby likens TMT (as a guide for beating procrastination) to the "fuel, air, ignition, and compression" plan for starting your car: it might be true, but a more useful theory would include details and mechanism. That's a fair criticism. Just as an fMRI captures the "big picture" of brain function at low resolution, TMT captures the big picture of motivation. This big picture helps us see where we need to work at the gears-and-circuits level, so we can become the goal-directed consequentialists we'd like to be. So, I'll share my four-step algorithm below, and tackle the gears-and-circuits level in later posts. Step 1: Notice I'm procrastinating. This part's easy. I know I should do the task, but I feel averse to doing it, or I just don't feel motivated enough to care. So I put it off, even though my prefrontal cortex keeps telling me I'll be better off if I do it now. When this happens, I proceed to step 2. Step 2: Guess which unattacked part of the equation is causing me the most trouble. Now I get to play detective. Which part of the equation is causing me trouble, here? Does the task have low value because it's boring or painful or too difficult, or because the reward isn't that great? Do I doubt that completing the task will pay off? Would I have to wait a long time for my reward if I succeeded? Am I particularly impatient or impulsive, either now or in general? Which part of this problem do I need to attack? Actually, I lied. I like to play army sniper. I stare down my telescopic sight at the terms in the equation and interrogate them. "Is it you, Delay? Huh, motherfucker? Is it you? I've shot you before; don't think I won't do it again!" But not everyone was raised on violent videogames. You may prefer a different role-play. Anyway, I try to figure out where the main problem is. Here are some of the signs I look for:
If the task is low value and low expectancy, and the reward is delayed, I run my expected value calculation again. Am I sure I should do the task, after all? Maybe I should drop it or delegate it. If after re-evaluation I still think I should do the task, then I move to step 3. Step 3: Try several methods for attacking that specific problem. Once I've got a plausible suspect in my sights, I fire away with the most suitable ammo I've got for that problem. Here's a quick review of some techniques described in How to Beat Procrastination:
Each of these skills must be learned and practiced first before you can use them. It took me only a few days to learn the mental habit of "mental contrasting," but I spent weeks practicing the skill of getting myself into success spirals. I've spent months trying various methods for having more energy, but I can do a lot better than I'm doing now. I'm not very good at goal-setting yet. Step 4: If I'm still procrastinating, return to step 2. If I've found some successful techniques for attacking the term in the motivation equation I thought was causing me the most trouble, but I'm still procrastinating, I return to step 2 and begin my assault on another term in the equation. When I first began using this algorithm, though, I usually didn't get that far. By the time I had learned mental contrasting or success spirals or whatever tool made the difference, the task was either complete or abandoned. This algorithm only begins to shine, I suspect, once you've come to some level of mastery on most of the subroutines it employs. Then you can quickly employ them and, if you're still procrastinating, immediately employ others, until your procrastination is beaten. Personal examples Let me give you some idea of what it looks like for me to use this algorithm:
Conclusion The key is to be prepared to conquer procrastination by practicing the necessary sub-skills first. Build small skills in the right order. You can't play Philip Glass if you haven't first learned how to play scales, how to work the pedals, how to play arpeggios and ostinatos (lots of arpeggios and ostinatos), etc. And you can't beat procrastination if you don't have any ammo ready when you've caught the right causal factor in your sights. The quest toward becoming a goal-directed consequentialist is long and challenging, much like that of becoming a truth-aiming rationalist. But the rewards are great, and the journey has perks. Remember: true agency is rare but powerful. As Michael Vassar says, "Evidence that people are crazy is evidence that things are easier than you think." Millions of projects fail not because they "can't be done" but because the first 5 people who tried them failed due to boring, pedestrian reasons like procrastination or the planning fallacy. People with just a bit more agency than normal — people like Benjamin Franklin and Tim Ferriss — have incredible power. At the end of Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit notes that non-religious ethics is a young field, and thus we may entertain high hopes for what will be discovered and what is possible. But scientific self-help is even younger. We have only just begun our inquiry into procrastination's causes and cures. We don't yet know what is possible. All we can do is try. If you have something to protect, shut up and do the impossible. Things may not be so impossible as you once thought.
Next post: How to Be Happy Previous post: How to Beat Procrastination
1 The main areas where I still usually succumb to procrastination are diet and exercise. Luckily, my metabolism is holding out pretty well so far. 2 Or, it was something like this. I can't remember the exact game I played, now. 3 My abandoned book Scientific Self Help turned into my ongoing blog post sequence The Science of Winning at Life. My abandoned book Ethics and Superintelligence was broken into chunks that morphed into Singularity FAQ, The Singularity and Machine Ethics, and many posts from No-Nonsense Metaethics and Facing the Singularity. My abandoned book Friendly AI: The Most Important Problem in the World was broken into pieces that resulted in Existential Risk and some posts of Facing the Singularity. Diseased disciplines: the strange case of the inverted chart
Submitted by Morendil 132 comments
Imagine the following situation: you have come across numerous references to a paper purporting to show that the chances of successfully treating a disease contracted at age 10 are substantially lower if the disease is detected later: somewhat lower at age 20 to very poor at age 50. Every author draws more or less the same bar chart to depict this situation: the picture below, showing rising mortality from left to right.
You search for the original paper, which proves a long quest: the conference publisher have lost some of their archives in several moves, several people citing the paper turn out to no longer have a copy, etc. You finally locate a copy of the paper (let's call it G99) thanks to a helpful friend with great scholarly connections. And you find out some interesting things. The most striking is what the author's original chart depicts: the chances of successfully treating the disease detected at age 50 become substantially lower as a function of age when it was contracted; mortality is highest if the disease was contracted at age 10 and lowest if contracted at age 40. The chart showing this is the picture below, showing decreasing mortality from top to bottom, for the same ages on the vertical axis.
Not only is the representation topsy-turvy; the two diagrams can't be about the same thing, since what is constant in the first (age disease detected) is variable in the other, and what is variable in the first (age disease contracted) is constant in the other. Now, as you research the issue a little more, you find out that authors prior to G99 have often used the first diagram to report their findings; reportedly, several different studies on different populations (dating back to the eighties) have yielded similar results. But when citing G99, nobody reproduces the actual diagram in G99, they all reproduce the older diagram (or some variant of it). You are tempted to conclude that the authors citing G99 are citing "from memory"; they are aware of the earlier research, they have a vague recollection that G99 contains results that are not totally at odds with the earlier research. Same difference, they reason, G99 is one more confirmation of the earlier research, which is adequately summarized by the standard diagram. And then you come across a paper by the same author, but from 10 years earlier. Let's call it G89. There is a strong presumption that the study in G99 is the same that is described in G89, for the following reasons: a) the researcher who wrote G99 was by then already retired from the institution where they obtained their results; b) the G99 "paper" isn't in fact a paper, it's a PowerPoint summarizing previous results obtained by the author. And in G89, you read the following: "This study didn't accurately record the mortality rates at various ages after contracting the disease, so we will use average rates summarized from several other studies." So basically everyone who has been citing G99 has been building castles on sand. Suppose that, far from some exotic disease affecting a few individuals each year, the disease in question was one of the world's major killers (say, tuberculosis, the world's leader in infectious disease mortality), and the reason why everyone is citing either G99 or some of the earlier research is to lend support to the standard strategies for fighting the disease. When you look at the earlier research, you find nothing to allay your worries: the earlier studies are described only summarily, in broad overview papers or secondary sources; the numbers don't seem to match up, and so on. In effect you are discovering, about thirty years later, that what was taken for granted as a major finding on one of the principal topics of the discipline in fact has "sloppy academic practice" written all over it. If this story was true, and this was medicine we were talking about, what would you expect (or at least hope for, if you haven't become too cynical), should this story come to light? In a well-functioning discipline, a wave of retractations, public apologies, general embarrassment and a major re-evaluation of public health policies concerning this disease would follow.
The story is substantially true, but the field isn't medicine: it is software engineering. I have transposed the story to medicine, temporarily, as an act of benign deception, to which I now confess. My intention was to bring out the structure of this story, and if, while thinking it was about health, you felt outraged at this miscarriage of academic process, you should still feel outraged upon learning that it is in fact about software. The "disease" isn't some exotic oddity, but the software equivalent of tuberculosis - the cost of fixing defects (a.k.a. bugs). The original claim was that "defects introduced in early phases cost more to fix the later they are detected". The misquoted chart says this instead: "defects detected in the operations phase (once software is in the field) cost more to fix the earlier they were introduced". Any result concerning the "disease" of software bugs counts as a major result, because it affects very large fractions of the population, and accounts for a major fraction of the total "morbidity" (i.e. lack of quality, project failure) in the population (of software programs). The earlier article by the same author contained the following confession: "This study didn't accurately record the engineering times to fix the defects, so we will use average times summarized from several other studies to weight the defect origins". Not only is this one major result suspect, but the same pattern of "citogenesis" turns up investigating several other important claims.
Software engineering is a diseased discipline.
The publication I've labeled "G99" is generally cited as: Robert B. Grady, An Economic Release Decision Model: Insights into Software Project Management, in proceedings of Applications of Software Measurement (1999). The second diagram is from a photograph of a hard copy of the proceedings. Here is one typical publication citing Grady 1999, from which the first diagram is extracted. You can find many more via a Google search. The "this study didn't accurately record" quote is discussed here. A more extensive analysis of the "defect cost increase" claim is available in my book-in-progress, "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering". Here is how the axes were originally labeled; first diagram:
Second diagram:
Weekly LW Meetups: Salt Lake City, Melbourne, Atlanta, NYC, Cambridge
Submitted by FrankAdamek 0 comments
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:
Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun! If you missed the deadline and wish to have your meetup featured, you can reach me on gmail at frank dot c dot adamek. In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up. Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup! If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver. If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know! Rationality Quotes February 2012
Submitted by GabrielDuquette 346 comments
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
The Substitution Principle
Submitted by Kaj_Sotala 60 comments
Partial re-interpretation of: The Curse of Identity What are the best careers for making a lot of money? Maybe you've thought about this question a lot, and have researched it enough to have a well-formed opinion. But the chances are that even if you hadn't, some sort of an answer popped into your mind right away. Doctors make a lot of money, maybe, or lawyers, or bankers. Rock stars, perhaps. You probably realize that this is a difficult question. For one, there's the question of who we're talking about. One person's strengths and weaknesses might make them more suited for a particular career path, while for another person, another career is better. Second, the question is not clearly defined. Is a career with a small chance of making it rich and a large chance of remaining poor a better option than a career with a large chance of becoming wealthy but no chance of becoming rich? Third, whoever is asking this question probably does so because they are thinking about what to do with their lives. So you probably don't want to answer on the basis of what career lets you make a lot of money today, but on the basis of which one will do so in the near future. That requires tricky technological and social forecasting, which is quite difficult. And so on. Yet, despite all of these uncertainties, some sort of an answer probably came to your mind as soon as you heard the question. And if you hadn't considered the question before, your answer probably didn't take any of the above complications into account. It's as if your brain, while generating an answer, never even considered them. The thing is, it probably didn't. Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, extensively discusses what I call the Substitution Principle: If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. (Kahneman, p. 97) System 1, if you recall, is the quick, dirty and parallel part of our brains that renders instant judgements, without thinking about them in too much detail. In this case, the actual question that was asked was ”what are the best careers for making a lot of money”. The question that was actually answered was ”what careers have I come to associate with wealth”. Here are some other examples of substitution that Kahneman gives:
All things considered, this heuristic probably works pretty well most of the time. The easier questions are not meaningless: while not completely accurate, their answers are still generally correlated with the correct answer. And a lot of the time, that's good enough. But I think that the Substitution Principle is also the mechanism by which most of our biases work. In The Curse of Identity, I wrote: In each case, I thought I was working for a particular goal (become capable of doing useful Singularity work, advance the cause of a political party, do useful Singularity work). But as soon as I set that goal, my brain automatically and invisibly re-interpreted it as the goal of doing something that gave the impression of doing prestigious work for a cause (spending all my waking time working, being the spokesman of a political party, writing papers or doing something else few others could do). As Anna correctly pointed out, I resorted to a signaling explanation here, but a signaling explanation may not be necessary. Let me reword that previous generalization: As soon as I set a goal, my brain asked itself how that goal might be achieved, realized that this was a difficult question, and substituted it with an easier one. So ”how could I advance X” became ”what are the kinds of behaviors that are commonly associated with advancing X”. That my brain happened to pick the most prestigious ways of advancing X might be simply because prestige is often correlated with achieving a lot. Does this exclude the signaling explanation? Of course not. My behavior is probably still driven by signaling and status concerns. One of the mechanisms by which this works might be that such considerations get disproportionately taken into account when choosing a heuristic question. And a lot of the examples I gave in The Curse of Identity seem hard to justify without a signaling explanation. But signaling need not to be the sole explanation. Our brains may just resort to poor heuristics a lot. Some other biases and how the Substitution Principle is related to them (many of these are again borrowed from Thinking, Fast and Slow): The Planning Fallacy: ”How much time will this take” becomes something like ”How much time did it take for me to get this far, and many times should that be multiplied to get to completion.” (Doesn't take into account unexpected delays and interruptions, waning interest, etc.) The Availability Heuristic: ”How common is this thing” or ”how frequently does this happen” becomes ”how easily do instances of this come to mind”. Over-estimating your own share of household chores: ”What fraction of chores have I done” becomes ”how many chores do I remember doing, as compared to the amount of chores I remember my partner doing.” (You will naturally remember more of the things that you've done than that somebody else has done, possibly when you weren't even around.) Being in an emotionally ”cool” state and over-estimating your degree of control in an emotionally ”hot” state (angry, hungry, sexually aroused, etc.): ”How well could I resist doing X in that state” becomes ”how easy does resisting X feel like now”. The Conjunction Fallacy: ”What's the probability that Linda is a feminist” becomes ”how representative is Linda of my conception of feminists”. People voting for politicians for seemingly irrelevant reasons: ”How well would this person do his job as a politician” becomes ”how much do I like this person.” (A better heuristic than you might think, considering that we like people who like us, owe us favors, resemble us, etc. - in the ancestral environment, supporting the leader you liked the most was probably a pretty good proxy for supporting the leader who was most likely to aid you in return.) And so on. The important point is to learn to recognize the situations where you're confronting a difficult problem, and your mind gives you an answer right away. If you don't have extensive expertise with the problem – or even if you do – it's likely that the answer you got wasn't actually the answer to the question you asked. So before you act, stop to consider what heuristic question your brain might actually have used, and whether it makes sense given the situation that you're thinking about. This involves three skills: first recognizing a problem as a difficult one, then figuring out what heuristic you might have used, and finally coming up with a better solution. I intend to develop something on how to taskify those skills, but if you have any ideas for how that might be achieved, let's hear them. Weekly LW Meetups: Cambridge, Houston, Melbourne, Pittsburgh, Vancouver, Waterloo
Submitted by FrankAdamek 0 comments
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:
Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and West Los Angeles. If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun! If you missed the deadline and wish to have your meetup featured, you can reach me on gmail at frank dot c dot adamek. In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up. Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup! If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Marin CA, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Waterloo. If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know! Urges vs. Goals: The analogy to anticipation and belief
Submitted by AnnaSalamon 66 comments
Partially in response to: The curse of identity Related to: Humans are not automatically strategic, That other kind of status, Approving reinforces low-effort behaviors. Joe studies long hours, and often prides himself on how driven he is to make something of himself. But in the actual moments of his studying, Joe often looks out the window, doodles, or drags his eyes over the text while his mind wanders. Someone sent him a link to which college majors lead to the greatest lifetime earnings, and he didn't get around to reading that either. Shall we say that Joe doesn't really care about making something of himself? The Inuit may not have 47 words for snow, but Less Wrongers do have at least two words for belief. We find it necessary to distinguish between:
This distinction helps explain how an atheistic rationalist can still get spooked in a haunted house; how someone can “believe” they’re good at chess while avoiding games that might threaten that belief [1]; and why Eliezer had to actually crash a car before he viscerally understood what his physics books tried to tell him about stopping distance going up with the square of driving speed. (I helped Anna revise this - EY.) A lot of our community technique goes into either (1) dealing with "beliefs" being an evolutionarily recent system, such that our "beliefs" often end up far screwier than our actual anticipations; or (2) trying to get our anticipations to align with more evidence-informed beliefs. And analogously - this analogy is arguably obvious, but it's deep, useful, and easy to overlook in its implications - there seem to be two major kinds of wanting:
Implication 1: You can import a lot of technique for "checking for screwy beliefs" into "checking for screwy goals". Urges, like anticipations, are relatively perceptual-level and automatic. They're harder to reshape and they're also harder to completely screw up. In contrast, the flexible, recent "goals" system can easily acquire goals that are wildly detached from what we actually do, wildly detached from any positive consequences, or both. Some techniques you can port straight over from "checking for screwy beliefs" to "checking for screwy goals" include: The fundamental:
The Hansonian:
The satiating:
Implication 2: "Status" / "prestige" / "signaling" / "people don't really care about" is way overused to explain goal-urge delinkages that can be more simply explained by "humans are not agents". This post was written partially in response to The Curse of Identity, wherein Kaj recounts some suboptimal goal-action linkages - wanting to contribute to the Singularity, then teaching himself to feel guilty whenever not working; founding the Finnish Pirate Party, then becoming the spokesperson which involved tasks he wasn't good at; helping Eliezer on writing his book, and feeling demotivated because it seemed like work "anyone could do" (which is just the sort of work that almost nobody is motivated to do). Kaj forms the generalization "as soon as my brain adopted a cause, my subconscious reinterpreted it as the goal of giving the impression of doing prestigious work for the cause". I worry that our community has a tendency to explain as e.g. status signaling or "people really don't care about X", observations that can also be explained by less malice/selfishness and more "our brains have known malfunctions at linking goals to urges". People are as bad at looking into hospitals for their own health as for the sake of their parents' health; Kaj didn't actually gain much prestige from feeling guilty about his relaxation time. We do have a status urge. It does affect a lot of things. People do tend to massively systematically understate it in much the same way that Victorians pretended that sex wasn't everywhere. But that's not the same cognitive problem as "Our brain is pretty bad at linking effective behaviors to goals, and will sometimes reward us for just doing things that seem roughly associated with the goal, instead of actions that cause the consequence of the goal being achieved." And our brains not being coherent agents is something that's even more massive than status. Implication 3: Humans cannot live by urges alone Like beliefs, goals often get much wackier than urges. I've seen a number of people react to this realization by concluding that they should give up on having goals, and lead an authentic life of pure desire. This wouldn't work any more than giving up on having beliefs. To precisely anticipate how long it takes a ball to fall off a tower, you have to manipulate abstract beliefs about gravitational acceleration. I have an urge to drive a car that runs smoothly, but if I didn't also have a goal of having a well-maintained car, I would never get around to having it serviced - I have no innate urge to do that. I really have seen multiple people (some of whom I significantly cared about) malfunctioning as a result of misinterpreting this point. As a stand-alone system for pulling your actions, urges have all kinds of problems. Urges can pull you to stare at an attractive stranger, to walk to the fridge, and even to sprint hard for first base when playing baseball. But unless coupled with goals and far-mode reasoning, urges will not pull you to the component tasks required for any longer-term goods. When I get into my car I have a definite urge for it not to be broken. But absent planning, there would never be a moment when the activity I most desired was to take my car for an oil change. To find and keep a job (let alone a good job), live in a non-pigsty, or learn any skills that are not immediately rewarding, you will probably need goals. Even though human goals can easily turn into fashion statements and wishful thinking. Implication 4: Your agency failures do not imply that your ideals are fake. Obvious but it needs to be said: People are as bad at looking into hospitals for their own health as for the sake of their parents' health. It doesn't mean that they don't really care about their parents, and it doesn't mean that they don't really care about survival. They would probably run away pretty fast from a tiger, where the goal connected to the urge in an ancestrally more reliable way and hence made them more 'agenty'; and they might fight hard to defend their parents from a tiger too. There's a very real sense in which our agency failures imply that human beings don't have goals, but this doesn't mean that our ungoaly ideals are any more ungoaly than anything else. Ideals can be more ungoaly because they're sometimes about faraway things or less ancestral things - it's probably easier to improve your agency on less idealy goals that link more quickly to urges - but as entities which can look over our own urges and goals and try to improve our agentiness, there's no rule which says that we can't try to solve some hard problems in this area as well as some easy ones.[2] Implication 5: You can align urges and goals using the same sort of effort and training that it takes to align anticipations and beliefs. Although I've heard people saying that we discuss willpower-failure too much on Less Wrong, most of the best stuff I've read has been outside Less Wrong and hasn't made contact with us. For a starting guide to many such skills, see Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy [3]. Some basic alignment techniques include:
And much the same way that a lot of craziness stems, not so much from "having a wrong model of the world", as "not bothering to have a model of the world", a lot of personal effectiveness isn't so much about "having the right goals" as "bothering to have goals at all" - where unpacking this somewhat Vassarian statement would lead us to ideas like "bothering to have something that I check my actions' consequences against, never mind whether or not it's the right thing" or "bothering to have some communication-related urge that animates my writing when I write, instead of just sitting down to log a certain number of writing hours during which I feel rewarded from rearranging shiny words". Conclusion: Besides an aspiring rationalist, these days I call myself an "aspiring consequentialist".
[1] IMO the case of somebody who has the belief "I am good at chess", but instinctively knows to avoid strong chess opponents that would potentially test the belief, ought to be a more central example in our literature than the person who believes they have an dragon in their garage (but instinctively knows that they need to specify that it's invisible, inaudible and generates no carbon dioxide, when we show up with the testing equipment). [2] See also Ch. 20 of Methods of Rationality: Professor Quirrell: "Mr. Potter, in the end people all do what they want to do. Sometimes people give names like 'right' to things they want to do, but how could we possibly act on anything but our own desires?" Harry: "Well, obviously I couldn't act on moral considerations if they lacked the power to move me. But that doesn't mean my wanting to hurt those Slytherins has the power to move me more than moral considerations!" [3] Thanks to Patri for recommending this book to me in response to an earlier post. It is perhaps not written in the most LW-friendly language -- but, given the value of these skills, I’d recommend wading in and doing your best to pull useful techniques from the somewhat salesy prose. I found much of value there. How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious
Submitted by Swimmer963 200 comments
I have a confession to make. My life hasn’t changed all that much since I started reading Less Wrong. Hindsight bias makes it hard to tell, I guess, but I feel like pretty much the same person, or at least the person I would have evolved towards anyway, whether or not I spent those years reading about the Art of rationality. But I can’t claim to be upset about it either. I can’t say that rationality has undershot my expectations. I didn’t come to Less Wrong expecting, or even wanting, to become the next Bill Gates; I came because I enjoyed reading it, just like I’ve enjoyed reading hundreds of books and websites. In fact, I can’t claim that I would want my life to be any different. I have goals and I’m meeting them: my grades are good, my social skills are slowly but steadily improving, I get along well with my family, my friends, and my boyfriend. I’m in good shape financially despite making $12 an hour as a lifeguard, and in a year and a half I’ll be making over $50,000 a year as a registered nurse. I write stories, I sing in church, I teach kids how to swim. Compared to many people my age, I'm pretty successful. In general, I’m pretty happy. Yvain suggested akrasia as a major limiting factor for why rationalists fail to have extraordinarily successful lives. Maybe that’s true for some people; maybe they are some readers and posters on LW who have big, exciting, challenging goals that they consistently fail to reach because they lack motivation and procrastinate. But that isn’t true for me. Though I can’t claim to be totally free of akrasia, it hasn’t gotten much in the way of my goals. However, there are some assumptions that go too deep to be accessed by introspection, or even by LW meetup discussions. Sometimes you don't even realize they’re assumptions until you meet someone who assumes the opposite, and try to figure out why they make you so defensive. At the community meetup I described in my last post, a number of people asked me why I wasn’t studying physics, since I was obviously passionate about it. Trust me, I had plenty of good justifications for them–it’s a question I’ve been asked many times–but the question itself shouldn’t have made me feel attacked, and it did. Aside from people in my life, there are some posts on Less Wrong that cause the same reaction of defensiveness. Eliezer’s Mandatory Secret Identities is a good example; my automatic reaction was “well, why do you assume everyone here wants to have a super cool, interesting life? In fact, why do you assume everyone wants to be a rationality instructor? I don’t. I want to be a nurse.” After a bit of thought, I’ve concluded that there’s a simple reason why I’ve achieved all my life goals so far (and why learning about rationality failed to affect my achievements): they’re not hard goals. I’m not ambitious. As far as I can tell, not being ambitious is such a deep part of my identity that I never even noticed it, though I’ve used the underlying assumptions as arguments for why my goals and life decisions were the right ones. But if there’s one thing Less Wrong has taught me, it’s that assumptions are to be questioned. There are plenty of good reasons to choose reasonable goals instead of impossible ones, but doing things on reflex is rarely better than thinking through them, especially for long-term goal making, where I do have time to think it through, Type 2 style. Here is the definition from my desktop dictionary: (1) A strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work: her ambition was to become a model | he achieved his ambition of making a fortune. (2) Desire and determination to achieve success: life offered few opportunities for young people with ambition. The first definition sounds like a good description of me. Since around tenth grade, I’ve had a strong desire to study nursing, and it’s required a moderate amount of determination and hard work, especially the hands-on aspects, which are harder for me than academics has ever been. I want to be the kind of person described in (1). What about the second half? More people than I can count have asked me why I’m not studying medicine. Or physics. Or just about anything aside from nursing, which is apparently kind of low-status. I inevitably get defensive when these conversations occur, and I end up trying to justify why nursing is the morally correct thing for me to do. For some reason, in some deep-down part of me that I don’t normally have conscious access to, I don’t want to be the sort of person described in (2). Introspection isn’t accurate enough for me to automatically find my true rejection of ambitious goals, but I will take the rest of the post to speculate on my own personal reasons. They may or may not be reasons that generalize to anyone else. 1. Idealism versus practicality My mother tells me I would be a good academic, and enjoy it too. She’s usually right about that kind of thing, but I decided around eighth grade that academia wasn’t for me. Why? Well, my mother and father both studied science at the undergraduate level (biology and physical chemistry, respectively) and then both went on to complete PhDs. From the sound of it, those student years were among the happiest in their lives. My father went on to do a postdoc at Cambridge, and then to get a crappy part-time teaching position at a small university in Washington State. He hated it. Eventually he quit and we moved up to Ottawa, Canada, where he worked at Nortel, was laid off during the company’s decline, and eventually found another job at a small company that takes apart computer chips and analyzes them. Meanwhile, my mother spent most of those years as a housewife, and has only recently begun working again, part-time and for a token salary. I’ve asked my father what he thinks of the decisions he made, and he told me that his biggest problem was that he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. He told me that he still doesn’t. His job is boring and stressful, but he can’t quit because he didn’t start saving for retirement until he was 40. As a grad student, he worked with John Polanyi, a well-known academic; much later he told me he “always sort of thought I would end up being well-known and cool like that, but all of a sudden I’m almost 50 and I realize that’s not going to happen.” I remember the year when he developed a sudden passion for career self-help books, of the ‘What Color Is Your Parachute’ and ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ variety. I must have been about thirteen years old. He encouraged me to read them, and warned me that “it’s better to think about what you want to do, not what you want to be.” The lesson my 13-year-old self I took from all this: don’t have hopes and dreams, especially not ambitious ones. You won’t achieve them, and you’ll end up in a mid-life crisis with no retirement savings, full of regrets. Far better to have a practical, achievable life plan, and then go out and damn well achieve it. I read the self-help books, figured that nurses did around the same stuff all day as doctors and didn’t have to spend eight years in school paying tuition, and never looked back. The lesson I didn’t learn from all this: my parents weren’t actually ambitious either. They enjoyed their studies in university, but primarily they had fun: going to the philosophy faculty parties, getting drunk with chemistry students, volunteering on coffee plantations in Nicaragua... Those are the stories they tell me from their studies, not stories of the research they did and the papers they published. I can’t be sure what their true feelings were at the time, but I don’t think they cared especially. They were smart young people who wanted to have a good time and didn’t especially care if they had no money. And I don’t think they have as many regrets as I assumed when I was thirteen. They didn’t exactly make life goals and then fail to achieve them. They just hadn’t made their long-term goals ahead of time. The lesson I should have learned: if you head into adulthood without big goals, don’t be surprised if you don’t achieve them. 2. Fear of failure The second life lesson about ambition happened a few years later, when I was around fourteen. I had been training as a competitive swimmer for a number of years. My parents didn’t sign me up because they wanted me to go to the Olympics someday; they wanted me to stay fit and have opportunities to socialize. It was a good decision; swim team made me happy, to the point that I often forget how unhappy I was up until then. But after a while I started to get good at swimming, and coaches, even kids’ coaches, implicitly want their athletes to win, and keep winning, and maybe someday they’ll be known as the one who coached an Olympic athlete. Training made me happy, but competition emphatically did not; anxiety, stress, and bursting into tears before a race soon became part of my day-to-day life. My coaches told me that if I worked hard and believed in myself, I could do anything. But eventually I hit a point when I was racing kids who were simply more talented than me: taller, slimmer, bigger hands and feet, a genetic predisposition to fast-twitch muscles, whatever. And then I hit my body’s limits, and I stopped getting faster at all, no matter how hard I trained. My coaches accused me of not trying hard enough. Understandably, this made me feel worse, since I certainly felt like I was trying as hard as I could. The lessons my 14-year-old self learned from this: don’t have high expectations for yourself when competing against other people. You’ll just end up feeling worthless and depressed. In fact, don’t compete against other people at all. Do things that are solely based on how good you are, as opposed to how good you are relative to other people who might be more talented. Even better, do things that aren’t that hard in an absolute sense, so that you don’t risk failing. This is kind of a fallacy, of course. Success in anything is measured relative to other people, if only relative to the average. Even grades, because classes and tests and grades are set up for students of average intelligence, so students of relatively higher intelligence will find them easier, and students of lower-than-average intelligence will feel like they’re fighting a losing battle, as I did in swimming competitions. Possessing above average intelligence let me grow up seeing school as non-threatening, but I know that isn’t true for everyone. I’ve known people whose above-average athletic skills led them to be far more confident in sports than at school. Still, fallacy or not, I later applied this idea to a lot of my decision. I was interested in physics all along, but my father’s tales of academia and the competition and pressure involved turned me off it. I also considered studying music theory and composition, but decided not to because, aside from being impractical for finding a job afterwards, I’d heard it was an incredibly competitive field. To a degree, this is why I chose not to make a career as a writer. (A degree in English didn’t seem particularly interesting to me, so I doubt I would have studied it, but even in high school I never really thought about earning money with my writing.) Success or failure was too far beyond my control for comfort. The lesson I didn’t learn from this: find an area where you do have natural talent on your side, and use it for all it’s worth. In fact, I’ve done the opposite of this: one reason I chose nursing was because I felt that I was bad at a whole range of skills; empathy, social skills, fine motor skills and coordination, reacting in emergencies; and I wanted to force myself to improve. As a result, I’m far from the strongest student in my classes, and labs, simulations, and hospital placements bring me to a level of anxiety far above anything I ever experienced during academic tests or exams. The lesson I should have learned from this: you never know what you are and aren’t capable of until you try it. I tried competitive swimming, and found out I didn’t have the raw talent to go to the Olympics. Who knows if this would have been true of physics? My father tells me that in his fourth year of undergraduate studies, he took several physics courses with a level of advanced math that he found almost impossible. He had reached his brain’s natural limit in math, which he might or might not have been able to exceed with hard work and hours of study; still, it was much more advanced than the first-year calculus I took as an elective. I have no reason to think that I’m worse at math than my father, and I suspect my obsessive work ethic would help me exceed any limits I did bump up against. And why not try? 3. The morality of ambition There’s a third aspect of my aversion to ambitious goals, and I can’t say where it comes from. It might be my parents’ attitude of moderation in everything: they consistently disapproved of my involvement in any ‘obsessive’ activities, swim team included. It might be the way my mother always got mad at me for talking about my achievements, even my grades, in front of friends; it’ll make other people feel bad, she said. (For a long time I was incredibly self-conscious about high grades, and wouldn’t tell my friends if they were above 90%.) It might be the meme that ‘money doesn’t buy happiness’ or the idea that it’s greedy to be ambitious, or that power corrupts and wise people choose not to seek it. I can’t trace the roots of this idea completely, but for whatever reason, I spent a long time thinking that being ambitious was in some way immoral. That really good people lived simple, selfless lives and never tried to seek anything more. That doing something solely because you wanted more money or more respect, like going to med school instead of nursing school, was selfish and just bad. It might come from the books I read as a kid, or maybe it’s just a rationalization to cover up my other reasons with a nobler one. But if this is my true reason, then it’s a way to feel superior to people who’ve accomplished cooler things than me, of whom part of me is actually jealous, and that’s not the person I want to be. 4. Laziness I don’t normally think of myself as a lazy person. Other people are constantly telling me that I’m diligent and have an excellent work ethic. But there’s a way in which all this hardworking dedication to my current occupations has prevented me from spending much time thinking or acting about what I’m going to do next. Working a bunch of 12-hour shifts makes me feel productive, brings the direct benefit of a fat paycheck, and leaves me pretty exhausted at the end of the day, too tired to do the (in some ways harder) work of searching for cool job opportunities, looking at online classes to take, and in general breaking the routine. 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. Conclusion I think I was right about some of the conclusions I drew from these various experiences. Practicality is important: ask the English majors working at Starbucks. Thinking about what you want to do all day, as opposed to the title and respect associated with what you want to be, is good life advice and will likely result in a more satisfying career. Trying hard to project an image of success, i.e. “keeping up with the Jones’”, isn’t a good path to happiness. And relative talent is a factor to take into consideration; if my dream career were to be an Olympic swimmer, unfortunately I wouldn’t be likely to succeed. But one of the problems with thinking things through too deeply when you’re young, and think you’re wiser than everyone else, is a tendency to over-generalize. Doing cool, interesting, world-changing things with your life...even if the actual job position are competitive and hard to obtain...well, on reflection, it doesn’t seem be a bad idea. The lesson my current self has learned from this: investigate more. Spend less time on work and more time on actually planning future goals. Seek out interesting things to do, and interesting people to work with. Go for opportunities even if they're inconvenient and I have to break my routine a bit. Set concrete goals, and don’t wiggle out of achieving them because they’re ‘not actually that important.’ They’re probably more important than working at a community centre, and I seem to be able to dedicate 1000 hours a year to that... Try not to worry about sunk costs (although it’s worth finishing nursing school, since an RN certificate is incredibly versatile in Canada and will guarantee me a job if any other prospects fail.) Force myself to step out of my comfort zone once in a while and do something kind of crazy, but awesome. And if I can do that, succeed to the point that I can break my reflex-of-being-average...then I'll know for sure whether rationality, of the Less Wrong variety, will help me to 'win'. The lesson my future self will learn from this: who knows?
Weekly LW Meetups: Melbourne, Austin, Salt Lake City, Wilmington OH, Fort Collins
Submitted by FrankAdamek 0 comments
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup: Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, London, Madison WI, Marin CA (uses the Bay Area List), Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ottawa, Oxford, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and West Los Angeles. If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun! If you missed the deadline and wish to have your meetup featured, you can reach me on gmail at frank dot c dot adamek. In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up. Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup! If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver, Waterloo. If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know! POSITION: Design and Write Rationality Curriculum
Submitted by Eliezer_Yudkowsky 170 comments
Update Feb 2012: We are still accepting and processing applications for this work on an ongoing basis. Imagine trying to learn baseball by reading essays about baseball techniques. [1] We're trying to make the jump to teaching people rationality by, metaphorically speaking, having them throw, catch, and hit baseballs in the company of friends. And as we develop curriculum to do that, we're noticing that we often improve quite a lot ourselves in the course of coming up with 20 examples of the sunk cost fallacy. This suggests that the best of us have a lot to gain from practicing basic skills more systematically. Quoth Anna Salamon: There are huge numbers of basic, obviously useful rationality habits that I do about 10% as often as it would be useful to do them. Like "run cheap experiments/tests often”, and “notice mental flinches, and track down the thought you’re avoiding”. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Anna Salamon, several others paid on an hourly basis, and a few volunteers, have been designing exercises and exercise-sets for a rationality curriculum. Our current working point is on the exercises for "Motivated Cognition". Currently the only completed session is "Sunk Costs", which is still being tested - yes, we're actually testing these things repeatedly as we build them. The main purpose of the sessions is to be performed in person, not read online, but nonetheless the current version of the Sunk Costs material - presentation and exercise booklets - is available as a sample: [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. This is a presentation on sunk costs in which background explanations are interspersed with "do as many of these exercises as you can in 3 minutes", followed by "now pair up with others to do the 'transfer step' parts where you look for instances in your past life and probable future life." We're looking for 1-2 fulltime employees who can help us build more things like that (unless the next round of tests shows that the current format doesn't work), and possibly a number of hourly contractors (who may be local or distant). We will definitely want to try your work on an hourly or monthly basis before making any full-time hires. The complete labor for building a rationality kata - we are not looking for someone who can do all of this work at once, we are looking for anyone who can do one or more steps - looks something like this: Select an important rationality skill and clearly perceive the sort of thinking that goes into executing it. Invent several new exercises which make people's brains execute that type of thinking. Compose many instances of those exercises. Compose any background explanations required for the skills. Figure out three things to tell people to watch out for, or do, over the next week. Turn all of that into a complete 90-minute user experience which includes random cute illustrations for the exercise booklets, designing graphics for any low-level technical points made, building a presentation, testing it in front of a live naive audience, making large changes, and testing it again. We are not looking only for people who can do all of this labor simultaneously. If you think you can help on one or more of those steps, consider applying -- for a full-time job, a part-time hourly gig (perhaps from a distance), or as a volunteer position. We will want anyone hired to try hourly work or a trial month before making any full-time hires. Salary will be SIAI-standard, i.e. $3K/month, but if you do strong work and Rationality-Inst takes off your salary will eventually go much higher. Very strong candidates who can do large amounts of work independently may request higher salaries. You will be working mostly with Anna Salamon and will report to her (although in the short term you may also be working directly with Eliezer on the "isolate a useful skill and invent new exercises to develop it" phase). If you think you have the idea for a complete rationality kata and want to develop the entire thing on your own, send us a short email about your idea - we're open to setting a lump-sum price. Skills needed: We need folks with at least one of the following skills (do not feel you need them all; you'll be part of a team; and repeated experience shows that the people we end up actually hiring, report that they almost didn't contact us because they thought they weren't worthy):
Bonuses:
If this project appeals to you and you think you may have something to add, apply using this short form or just shoot us an email. Please err on the side of applying; so many freaking amazing people have told us that they waited months before applying because they “didn’t want to waste our time”, or didn’t think they were good enough. This project needs many sorts of talents, and volunteers also welcome -- so if you’d like to help launch an awesome curriculum, send us an email. Your email doesn’t have to be super-detailed or polished -- just tell us how you might be able to contribute, and any experience we should know about. [1] If the baseball analogy seems far-fetched, consider algebra. To learn algebra, one typically drills one subskill at a time -- one spends a day on exponent rules, for example, understanding why x^a * x^b = x^(a+b) and then practicing it bunches of times, in bunches of algebra problems, until it is a part of your problem-solving habits and reflexes, a step you can do fluently while attending to larger puzzles. If there were a world in which algebra had been learned only through reading essays, without subskill-by-subskill practice, it would not be surprising if the world’s best algebra practitioners could be outperformed by an ordinary student who worked diligently through the exercises in a standard textbook. We’d like you to help us build that first textbook. The problem with too many rational memes
Submitted by Swimmer963 327 comments
Like so many of my posts, this one starts with a personal anecdote. A few weeks ago, my boyfriend was invited to a community event through Meetup.com. The purpose of the meetup was to watch the movie The Elegant Universe and follow up with a discussion. As it turns out, this particular meetup was run by a man who I’ll call ‘Charlie’, the leader of some local Ottawa group designed to help new immigrants to Canada find a social support net. Which, in my mind, is an excellent goal. Charlie turned out to be a pretty neat guy, too: charismatic, funny, friendly, encouraging everyone to share his or her opinion. Criticizing or shutting out other people’s views was explicitly forbidden. It was a diverse group, as he obviously wanted it to be, and by the end everyone seemed to feel pretty comfortable. My boyfriend, an extremely social being whose main goal in life is networking, was raving by the end about what a neat idea it was to start this kind of group, and how Charlie was a really cool guy. I was the one who should have had fun, since I’m about 100 times more interested in physics than he is, but I was fuming silently. Why? Because, at various points in the evening, Charlie talked about his own interest in the paranormal and the spiritual, and the books he’d written about it. When we were discussing string theory and its extra dimensions, he made a comment, the gist of which was ‘if people’s souls go to other dimensions when they die, Grandma could be communicating with you right now from another dimension by tapping spoons.’ Final straw. I bit my tongue and didn’t say anything and tried not to show how irritated I was. Which is strange, because I’ve always been fairly tolerant, fairly agreeable, and very eager to please others. Which is why, when my brain responded ‘because he’s WRONG and I can’t call him out on it because of the no criticism rule!’ to the query of ‘why are you pissed off?’, I was a bit suspicious of that answer. I do think that Charlie is wrong. I would have thought he was wrong a long time ago. But it wouldn’t have bothered me; I know that because I managed to attend various churches for years, even though I thought a lot of their beliefs were wrong, because it didn’t matter. They had certain goals in common with me, like wanting to make the world a better place, and there were certain things I could get out of being a community member, like incredibly peaceful experiences of bliss that would reset my always-high stress levels to zero and allow me to survive the rest of the week. Some of the sub-goals they had planned to make the world a better place, like converting people in Third World countries to Christianity, were ones that I thought were sub-optimal or even damaging. But overall, there were more goals we had in common than goals we didn’t have in common, and I could, I judged, accomplish those goals we had in common more effectively with them than on my own. And anyway, the church would still be there whether or not I went; if I did go, at least I could talk about stuff like physics with awe and joy (no faking required, thinking about physics does make me feel awe and joy), and increase some of the congregation’s scientific literacy a little bit. Then I stopped going to church, and I started spending more time on Less Wrong, and if I were to try to go back, I’m worried it would be exactly the same as the community meetup. I would sit there fuming because they were wrong and it was socially unacceptable for me to tell them that. I’m worried because I don’t think those feelings are the result of a clearheaded, logical value calculation. Yeah, churches and people who believe in the paranormal waste a lot of money and energy, which could be spent on really useful things otherwise. Yes, that could be a valid reason to reject them, to refuse to be their allies even if some of your goals are the same. But it’s not my true rejection. My true rejection is that them being wrong is too annoying for me to want to cooperate. Why? I haven’t changed my mind, really, about how much damage versus good I think churches do for the world. I’m worried that the same process which normalized religion for me is now operating in the opposite direction. I’m worried that a lot of Less Wrong memes, ideas that show membership to the ‘rationalist’ or ‘skeptic’ cultures, such as atheism itself, or the idea that religion is bad for humanity...I’m worried that they’re sneaking into my head and becoming virulent, that I'm becoming an undiscriminating skeptic. Not because I’ve been presented with way more evidence for them, and updated on my beliefs (although I have updated on some beliefs based on things I read here), but because that agreeable, eager-to-please subset of my brains sees the Less Wrong community and wants to fit in. There’s a part of me that evaluates what I read, or hear people say, or find myself thinking, and imagines Eliezer’s response to it. And if that response is negative...ooh, mine had better be negative too. And that’s not strategic, optimal, or rational. In fact, it’s preventing me from doing something that might otherwise be a goal for me: joining and volunteering and becoming active in a group that does good things for the Ottawa community. And this transformation has managed to happen without me even noticing, which is a bit scary. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who was aware of my own thoughts, but apparently not. Anyone else have the same experience? Weekly LW Meetups: Portland, Berkleley, San Diego, Pittsburgh, Houston, Seattle, Madison, Fort Collins, Sydney, Melbourne
Submitted by FrankAdamek 2 comments
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:
Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, London, Madison, WI, Marin, CA (uses the Bay Area List), Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ottawa, Oxford, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and West Los Angeles. If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun! If you missed the deadline and wish to have your meetup featured, you can reach me on gmail at frank dot c dot adamek. In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up. Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup! If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver. If your meetup has a mailing list that you'd like mentioned here or has become regular and isn't listed as such, let me know! Can the Chain Still Hold You?
Submitted by lukeprog 218 comments
Baboons... literally have been the textbook example of a highly aggressive, male-dominated, hierarchical society. Because these animals hunt, because they live in these aggressive troupes on the Savannah... they have a constant baseline level of aggression which inevitably spills over into their social lives. Scientists have never observed a baboon troupe that wasn't highly aggressive, and they have compelling reasons to think this is simply baboon nature, written into their genes. Inescapable. Or at least, that was true until the 1980s, when Kenya experienced a tourism boom. Sapolsky was a grad student, studying his first baboon troupe. A new tourist lodge was built at the edge of the forest where his baboons lived. The owners of the lodge dug a hole behind the lodge and dumped their trash there every morning, after which the males of several baboon troupes — including Sapolsky's — would fight over this pungent bounty. Before too long, someone noticed the baboons didn't look too good. It turned out they had eaten some infected meat and developed tuberculosis, which kills baboons in weeks. Their hands rotted away, so they hobbled around on their elbows. Half the males in Sapolsky's troupe died. This had a surprising effect. There was now almost no violence in the troupe. Males often reciprocated when females groomed them, and males even groomed other males. To a baboonologist, this was like watching Mike Tyson suddenly stop swinging in a heavyweight fight to start nuzzling Evander Holyfield. It never happened. This was interesting, but Sapolsky moved to the other side of the park and began studying other baboons. His first troupe was "scientifically ruined" by such a non-natural event. But really, he was just heartbroken. He never visited. Six years later, Sapolsky wanted to show his girlfriend where he had studied his first troupe, and found that they were still there, and still surprisingly violence-free. This one troupe had apparently been so transformed by their unusual experience — and the continued availability of easy food — that they were now basically non-violent. And then it hit him. Only one of the males now in the troupe had been through the event. All the rest were new, and hadn't been raised in the tribe. The new males had come from the violent, dog-eat-dog world of normal baboon-land. But instead of coming into the new troupe and roughing everybody up as they always did, the new males had learned, "We don't do stuff like that here." They had unlearned their childhood culture and adapted to the new norms of the first baboon pacifists. As it turned out, violence wasn't an unchanging part of baboon nature. In fact it changed rather quickly, when the right causal factor flipped, and — for this troupe and the new males coming in — it has stayed changed to this day. Somehow, the violence had been largely circumstantial. It was just that the circumstances had always been the same. Until they weren't. We still don't know how much baboon violence to attribute to nature vs. nurture, or exactly how this change happened. But it's worth noting that changes like this can and do happen pretty often. Slavery was ubiquitous for millennia. Until it was outlawed in every country on Earth. Humans had never left the Earth. Until we achieved the first manned orbit and the first manned moon landing in a single decade. Smallpox occasionally decimated human populations for thousands of years. Until it was eradicated. The human species was always too weak to render itself extinct. Until we discovered the nuclear chain reaction and manufactured thousands of atomic bombs. Religion had a grip on 99.5% or more of humanity until 1900, and then the rate of religious adherence plummeted to 85% by the end of the century. Whole nations became mostly atheistic, largely because for the first time the state provided people some basic stability and security. (Some nations became atheistic because of atheistic dictators, others because they provided security and stability to their citizens.) I would never have imagined I could have the kinds of conversations I now regularly have at the Singularity Institute, where people change their degrees of belief several times in a single conversation as new evidence and argument is presented, where everyone at the table knows and applies a broad and deep scientific understanding, where people disagree strongly and say harsh-sounding things (due to Crocker's rules) but end up coming to agreement after 10 minutes of argument and carry on as if this is friendship and business as usual — because it is. But then, never before has humanity had the combined benefits of an overwhelming case for one correct probability theory, a systematic understanding of human biases and how they work, free access to most scientific knowledge, and a large community of people dedicated to the daily practice of CogSci-informed rationality exercises and to helping each other improve. This is part of what gives me a sense that more is possible. Compared to situational effects, we tend to overestimate the effects of lasting dispositions on people's behavior — the fundamental attribution error. But I, for one, was only taught to watch out for this error in explaining the behavior of individual humans, even though the bias also appears when explaining the behavior of humans as a species. I suspect this is partly due to the common misunderstanding that heritability measures the degree to which a trait is due to genetic factors. Another reason may be that for obvious reasons scientists rarely try very hard to measure the effects of exposing human subjects to radically different environments like an artificial prison or total human isolation.
Much has changed in the past few decades, and much will change in the coming years. Sometimes it's good to check if the chain can still hold you. Do not be tamed by the tug of history. Maybe with a few new tools and techniques you can just get up and walk away — to a place you've never seen before. Weekly LW Meetups: Melbourne, Austin, Atlanta, Seattle, Philadelphia, Fort Collins
Submitted by FrankAdamek 2 comments
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:
Cities with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, London, Madison, WI, Marin, CA (uses the Bay Area List), Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ottawa, Oxford, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington, DC, and West Los Angeles. If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, and have fun! If you missed the deadline and wish to have your meetup featured, you can reach me on gmail at frank dot c dot adamek. In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview will continue to be posted on the front page every Friday. These will be an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in the next weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll now also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts will be moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up. Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup! If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be notified when an irregular meetup is happening: Atlanta, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Pittsburgh, Southern California (Los Angeles/Orange County area), St. Louis, Vancouver. Rationality quotes January 2012
Submitted by Thomas 456 comments
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
|
When taming a baby elephant, its trainer will chain one of its legs to a post. When the elephant tries to run away, the chain and the post are strong enough to keep it in place. But when the elephant grows up, it is strong enough to break the chain or uproot the post. Yet the owner can still secure the elephant with the same chain and post, because the elephant has been conditioned to believe it cannot break free. It feels the tug of the chain and gives up — a kind of