Easy way out: Flip a coin for each answer.
Obviously the author of the test cannot possibly know how your coin falls, so you get a true probabilistic chance for each answer.
This is basically the same idea as for randomized quicksort: To guard against malicious data, make your algorithm unpredictable.
You are not living as much on the edge as you should optimally.
I estimate that most LW Readers are relatively young (i.e. < 40y old). The repair mechanism of your bodies can deal with a lot more than they currently have to handle. To increase your effectiveness multiple routes exist:
move faster, run instead of walk
employ polyphasic sleep
take more stimulants
If some talk includes obvious rhetoric tricks, flip the bozo bit on the whole talk
The speaker probably prepared for maximum effect on human brains. Thus the arguments in the talk are likely one-sided and omit essential data.
Also, by ignoring the talk you are likely to counterbalance the unduly influence over most of the rest of the audience.
No, you should not believe what others believe unless they presented serious arguments.
Otherwise
information cascades
memes
gain strength.
Doing is different here, as it is more costly than believing.
Decisions with an utility equivalent of less than 0.50$ should be made after at most 10 seconds, by coin flip if necessary.
The time is more valuable.
The physical universe seems to optimize for low-energy / high-entropy states, via some kind of local decision process.
So I think your two options actually coincide.
So, are we going to get this experiment running or not?
Do you have a better proposal?
No, but a setup which does not try to understand more deeply which parts of which theory contribute to its success still gives pretty useful results about which approach has the highest expected utility.
Or intelligent people are just better at getting wealthy.
A next step in setting up a decent experiment would be to select 4 groups (1, 2, 3 + Control) of people randomly. To give findings most applicable to rational people, we can just as well select within LW.
Another step: Select a common task the utility of which is perceived as high by most people on LW, yet which is seldomly performed.
Proposal: During two weeks, run for (at least) 10 Minutes on three of each four consecutive days.
Ideally, the experiment would then continue with another task, but switching group members. This improves the experiment via control for different motivation between participants. Also trying a different task gives us a chance to see if there is a general method or whether the method must be selected specific to the task.
If anybody is willing to participate in this experiment, I am willing to coordinate. If somebody else is willing (and more qualified) to coordinate, I hereby enlist as participant.
Qualification: I am a computer scientist, I have one contact to a psychology researcher, I feel competent in statistics. Then again I lost 20$ (of 100$) over 3 month in prediction markets.
Apparently, the brain also burns lactate.
Lactate fuels the human brain during exercise Bjørn Quistorff, Niels H. Secher, and Johannes J. Van Lieshout Abstract
OP’s paper gives at least some (but not many) examples where manipulations in glucose levels modified cognitive performance. However they mostly just observed that attention leads to lower glucose levels, which would also be observed if glucose would be one among many energy sources.
Also, before eating all that candy, note (from OP’s paper)
One study administered glucose drinks to participants and found that poor glucose tolerance (indicated by glucose levels remaining high after the person consumed the drink) was associated with poorer performance on a dichotic listening task, which is another classic attention- control task and requires participants to ignore infor- mation presented in one earphone in order to track and process the information coming in the other ear (Allen, Gross, Aloia, & Billingsley, 1996).
I.e. high glucose levels lead to lower cognitive performance.
I was actually thinking more about looking it up later, i.e. extending your long term memory via paper and pencil.
Although I can also report that I remember stuff better if I wrote it down.
I can only urge everybody who believes that training improves perfomance to visit that “online implementation” site.
Regarding recall from long-term memory: Write it down!
I know a person who actually does that. That recall and precision is greatly improved should be obvious. The problem lies more in acquiring the habit of actually writing everything down if it looks important.
I envision to build something electronic for me, because I hate handwriting. Also that would add search capability.
Technological advance is strongly dependent on “mass production for the planetary civilization”, because otherwise most people are busy doing agriculture and don’t have time to become PhDs.
Unfortunately, the term is already taken. And I claim by people with too much confirmation bias.
I feel some people here are trying to define their utility functions via linear combinations of sub-functions which only depend on small parts of the world state.
Example: If I own X, that’ll give me a utility of 5, if I own Y that’ll give me a utility of 3, if I own Z, that’ll give me a utility of 1.
Problem: Choose any two of {X, Y, Z}
Apparent Solution: {X, Y} for a total utility of 8.
But human utility functions are not a linear combination of such sub-functions, but functions from global World states into the real numbers. Think about the above example with X = Car, Y = Bike, Z = Car keys.
It seems obvious now, but the interdependencies are much more complicated. Like money utility being dependent on the market situation, food utility being dependent on the stuff you ate recently, material (as in building) utility being dependent on available tools and vice versa, internet availability utility being dependent on available computer, power, and time.
Although, just talking about “emotional reaction” and political orientation might be a bit misleading. “Emotional reaction” sounds (to me) like something arbitrary, but aren’t we talking about utility functions here?
Which is to say, if somebody experiences positive value (directly) upon seeing loyalty held up, respect to authority held up, whatever, than maybe the choice of political orientation is indeed the optimal action he/she could take.
I claim that it is, as it is averse to killing people as a side effect. If your solution does not require killing people it would not.
Two additional Dimensions:
Discounting Rate/Function—how much the effects of your actions after ten years affect your choice.
Sliding Window Size/Function—how fast you discard old data, after all the world might have changed