https://mentalengineering.info/
Trans rights! End all suffering!
Apparently the left-leaning stuff I wrote on here got censored and only the shit I now disagree with remains.
Fluttershy
Karma: 1,154
“Dammit, Roselyn, you’ve done enough. If you keep putting it off, you could end up in a desperate place one day!” Caprice nuzzled Roselyn’s leg. “You always act as if you are trying to make up for something. If you’d just take the serum, you’d find that Celestia forgives humans. She knows humans can’t help what they are.” Caprice looked deeply into Roselyn’s eyes, and Roselyn felt that somehow Caprice was speaking from personal experience. “Just do it, Ros. Run and grab a cup and then get on the boat. It’s alright. You have my permission.”
-Jennifer Reitz, 27 Ounces, Final Chapter.
Context: Taking ponification serum increases the expected value of one’s lifespan by 300 years, though Roselyn is averse to taking the serum, because she feels that existing in human form serves as penitence for wrongs she has committed in the past. There is a tenuous connection between Roselyn’s act of procrastinating on taking the ponification serum, and the practice of cryocrastinating in real life.
Edit: I’m sorry that nopony liked the above quote; my intent in posting it was to cheer for the sentiment that living for a long time is a good thing. I, um, guess that I did a bad job, sorry. I will leave the test of my original post unedited, so that everypony can see what I originally wrote.
For a minute after reading this article, it seemed unintuitive to me that anyone would find it surprising that someone else would Cooperate in their day-to-day real-life social interactions (which can be modeled as an iterated prisoner’s dilemma). After all, people are supposed to more or less play Tit-for-Tat in real life, right?
I think that, in real life, there are lots of situations in which you can Cooperate or Defect to various degrees, such that sets of everyday social actions between two parties are better modeled by continuous iterated prisoner’s dilemmas than by discrete iterated prisoner’s dilemmas. This distinction (that continuous iterated prisoner’s dilemmas model certain real life situations better than discrete iterated prisoner’s dilemmas do) could be used to help explain why it feels weird when someone is really, really unusually nice, like Mark—maybe it is normal to mostly Cooperate in social situations, but it is rare to completely Cooperate.
I started keeping a diary about a month ago. The two initial reasons I had for adopting this habit were that, first of all, I thought that I would enjoy writing, and second of all, I wanted to have something relaxing to do for half an hour before my bedtime every evening, because I often have trouble getting to sleep at night.
I have found that I generally end up writing about my day-to-day social interactions in my journals. One really nice benefit of keeping a journal that I hadn’t expected to reap was that writing has helped me weakly precommit to performing certain actions that help me improve at being sociable. For example, a few weeks back, there were a couple nights where I wrote about how I felt bad about how a new transfer student to my school didn’t seem to know anyone in the class which we had together. A couple days after writing about this, I ended up asking him to hang out with me, which was something that I normally would have been too shy to do.
Another thing that I learned is that writing about your problems can help you digest them in ways which are helpful to you. On a meta- level, I think that writing about my social interactions with others has helped me realize that I want to spend more time with my friends, at the expense of spending less time reading through e.g. posts on Reddit. Looking back on things, it is painfully obvious to me that spending time with my friends is much better than spending time on random internet sites, though I hadn’t explicitly realized that I had been failing to spend time with my friends until I ended up writing about the fact that this was the case.
Actually, before I had even started journaling, I had known that thinking about problems by writing about them or making diagrams was, in general, a helpful thing to do—after all, plenty of people benefit from drawing pictures when stuck on, say, math problems. However, it wasn’t previously obvious to me that problems other than math and science problems could be analyzed by writing about them or drawing diagrams that represented the problem. Basically, I found a way (which was previously unknown to me) to identify and solve problems in my life.
It is plausible that a few LessWrong readers have information which would let them create a portfolio which would, on average, perform better than the market. For the large majority of us, though, knowing about overconfidence bias and the law of large numbers should be enough to convince us that putting most of our savings in an index fund is a good idea.
Hi there, Regex. It is great to see that you’re interested in Effective Altruism. Are you already familiar with 80,000 Hours and GiveWell?
There are a few points which you raised above which I would like to respond to:
Still, directing others is not particularly efficient for me considering my skill set.
I do think that it is possible to actively work towards becoming a better conversationalist. This is something which I have recently been working on myself. Specifically, asking people questions about things they are interested in, as well as offering to help others in small ways—such as helping them by sharing knowledge with them—seem like concrete things one can do to be a better people-person.
I intend to print out flyers and scatter them across my college campus.
That reminds me of when I tried to tell all of my friends about how great GiveWell was, when I first learned about the organization a few years ago. Your results may vary, but I have found that it is hard to get people to care about things which they do not already care about, unless they already have a lot in common with you, intellectually and philosophically.
I think that speaking with friends who might enjoy LessWrong might be a better idea than spreading fliers across your campus. I might only feel that way about flier-posting because flier-posting is far too bold of a thing for anypony named Fluttershy to do, but it does seem to me that messages spread by such means are cheapened by being circulated in such a manner.
Also, for what it is worth, I think that HPMoR appeals to a much larger set of people than the LessWrong sequences do, though people who identify closely enough with the “LessWrong culture” might benefit the most from being directly introduced to LessWrong.
Good luck in your endeavors!
I completed the survey, huzzah!
In Chemistry in particular, and the natural sciences in general, I find that reading textbooks is a much more efficient way to digest knowledge than reading papers. The largest advantage which reading papers confers relative to reading textbooks is that textbooks rarely cover the newest of the new advances in any field. I rarely find that I need to read a paper to learn something that I can’t find in a textbook—this is probably because, in the natural sciences at the undergraduate level, people don’t often need to find information which was discovered within the last five years. The major exception to this trend is people who specialize heavily within a particular field, such as PhD students, postdocs, professors, and the like.
There are other reasons why reading individual journal articles can be helpful, but since you asked this question from the perspective of someone hoping to continue their efforts at self-education, I would advise you to stick with textbooks, for the most part.
Also, reading meta-analyses of papers, which will themselves be published in journals, is often better (in terms of efficiency and knowledge gathering power) than reading individual studies.
technology to preserve all mind-states as they came into existence would likely be more difficult to engineer than such required to attain mere immortality.
I do not think that most people have a problem with the fact that they will, in five years from now, have values, habits, and particular ways of responding to situations which are different from those they have now. I wouldn’t want my personality to change drastically overnight, but I certainly wouldn’t want to magically make myself unable to change my habits and values in the future, in order to make future versions of myself value exactly the same things as me, either.
There are definitely ways in which our values, habits, and reactions to experiences could change which would be very bad—Alzheimer’s, and other age-related diseases obviously change people for the worse. Still, I accept and embrace the fact that I will have different habits and values in five years from now.
People’s values change all of the time. Changes in one’s religious beliefs can cause changes in values. Becoming a parent seems to change values, habits, and the exact way in which one tends to respond to situations quite strongly, yet many people report that they enjoy becoming parents. The fact that people’s personalities change over time isn’t always a bad thing.
To extend on what has been said in the “possible solutions” part of the thread:
I think that having unimportant-seeming health problems checked out by a medical professional within a reasonable amount of time of them first occurring (from immediately for serious problems, such as chest pain, to perhaps a week or two for things like general aches and pains) is a ridiculously good heuristic to have in general.
Actively cultivating friends who are conscientious, intelligent, and sane enough to repeatedly tell you that you are rationalizing away an actual problem in your life is a good habit to have. Acknowledging the severity of any given large, easily fixable problem in your life does not follow automatically from noticing that such a problem exists, and having sane friends can help to alleviate this failure mode.
How many fruitless visits would it be worthwhile to you to make for that one visit where something bad is found?
The negative utility generated by going to a public health clinic and gaining absolutely no useful information is, for me, on the order of 50 USD, assuming an average copay of around $30, and that my time is worth around $20.
If I want to simply model the expected utility of going to a clinic by assuming that I either will or will not gain useful information from going to the doctor, I might subtract:
[$50 x p(fruitless visit)]
from
[(monetary value of information gained from a helpful visit-$20) x (1-p(fruitless visit))].
where the -$20 in the second equation is to account for the value of my time in the event of a fruitful visit.
keep a list in Workflowy of minor medical issues. It still doesn’t feel worth the hassle to go to the doctor for one thing...
That seems like a great idea!
I have found that compiling written notes of one’s medical history (including not only observations about how you feel on given days, but also notes you have taken during doctor’s visits), can be another helpful thing to do. At least for me, this is largely true because it can be hard to remember the particulars of why a particular diagnosis or treatment was given to me five or more years after the fact.
I wonder, is it even worth my doing research on charities, when there exist resources like givewell, that will almost certainly be able to do a more thorough and more accurate analysis than I would be able to do?
If you have very similar values to the folks at GiveWell, then I would advise you to simply review their research and donate to their top-ranked charities, rather than conducting your own research, given that your time is valuable. If you have somewhat different values from the folks at GiveWell, you might look into organizations (MIRI, Animal Charity Evaluators, etc.) who have already conducted effective altruism-relevant research in other fields, before branching off and starting your own research.
I may value the well being of non-human mammals, relative to human mammals, more than others, and so chose to support animal rights groups
Animal Charity Evaluators is a Givewell-like charity evaluator which has its roots in the EA movement, and focuses on evaluating organizations which seek to reduce non-human suffering. I’m not as familiar with them as I am with GiveWell, but the fact that Animal Charity Evaluators branched off of 80,000 Hours is a good signal of their credibility.
A Cost- Benefit Analysis of Immunizing Healthy Adults Against Influenza
In case it was not obvious, the correct takeaway from this article is that you should go and get a flu shot, if you haven’t gotten one already this year. If you have already gotten a flu shot this year, and you reply to this comment with a message that states that you have done so, I would be more than happy to upvote you.
Knowing that getting a flu shot is a good idea might encourage individuals to optimize their lives by getting a flu shot every year, which would make them less likely to become sick on any given year. If I can encourage other people to act in sane ways which benefit themselves, then I am going to try to do just that.
Expansion on A Previous Cost-Benefit Analysis of Vaccinating Healthy Adults Against Flu
This is a very good point.
I have redone the analysis with this concern in mind. I also removed the outcomes involving hospitalization from the decision tree, as they were barely making any contribution to the expected values of the outcomes in which an individual either received or did not receive a flu shot.
The contribution of E(death) to E(getting a flu shot) ended up being around - $30-90 for healthy adults of ages 19-64, rather than - $500, mainly because around 90% of deaths from flu are in people of ages 65+.
The analysis presented in this post has been updated to reflect this concern. I’ve completely removed the figure representing costs of palliative care from the analysis.
I guess that I tend to purchase things like anefrin (a nasal decongestant), cough drops, extra tissues, Benadryl, and cough expectorant/cough suppressant medicine when sufficiently sick, in addition to spending the time to get checked out at a clinic or doctor’s office. I can see that this sort of behavior, and these sorts of costs, might not be common, especially among usually healthy young adults.
This error has been corrected; thank you for pointing this out!
I actually did a bit more research, and it really seems like flu vaccine efficacy in healthy adults is more like 70% (and sometimes as high as 90%), despite the fact that the average efficacy of the vaccine throughout the population is around 60%. The reason that efficacy in healthy adults is so high, relative to the average efficacy, is that efficacy in the elderly is around 30-40%.
Also, note that about 42% of the US population gets flu shots on any given year. So, if 10% of people on average get the flu, and the vaccine is 60% efficacious throughout the population, then we can write the following equations, defining sick1 as the event in which a person who was vaccinated gets the flu, and sick2 as the event in which a person who was not vaccinated gets the flu:
p(sick1) x 0.42 + p(sick2) x 0.58 = 1 x 0.10
p(sick1) = p(sick2) x 0.60
Solving this system of equations, we get:
p(sick1) = 0.0721
p(sick2) = 0.120 (previous typo: had been written as 0.0120)
The practical implication of this is that the conservative analysis conducted in this report, and shown in Figure 1, assumes that around 5.7% (rather than a more realistic 10 or 12%) of the population will catch the flu in any given year.
Hi there Regex,
Welcome to LessWrong! Yay!
If you liked Iceman’s Friendship is Optimal and other conversion bureau stories, you might enjoy Chatoyance’s 27 Ounces and Caelum est Conterrens. As far as personal development goes, I feel like I personally learned a lot about how to make better predictions about the world from CFAR’s Credence Game, though, um, you might prefer reading through the core sequences to playing the calibration game. I have been told that Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions is a good place to start reading through the sequences, though I personally read through most of the sequences in no particular order, as, at the time, that approach suited me more than a structured approach to reading the sequences would have.
In any case, it is great to have a new friend join us; I hope you feel welcome here.