I don’t know if this is what you meant, but here goes:
This is less a single piece of advice from someone than an attitude I’ve tried to adopt from places like LessWrong and CollegeInfoGeek.
Everything in your life is optimizable.
Doing better is less a matter of changing yourself than it is of implementing systems to help yourself overcome your failings.
Being able to “feel” electric/magnetic fields with your hands would be great. Not dissimilar to wifi sensing, but enough to be able to intuit what a circuit is doing just by observing/feeling it.
I also don’t think that anyone’s mentioned having a true internal clock. Some people can already wake up at a specific time of day just by wanting to—that’d be useful. Also for the ability to time things.
Lastly, while being able to detect neurotransmitter levels in your own brain would be great, being able to detect them in the brains of others would be even better. Kind of a toned-down empathic ability—you could tell who was stressed, who was happy, and so on by the amount of cortisol or dopamine in their brain.
Hello, my name is Daniel.
I’ve wanted to join the rationality community for a little while now, and I finally worked up the courage after a brief but informative discussion with Anna Salamon, CFAR’s executive director (who was as kind as I was nervous).
I’m working on finishing up a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, and I plan on continuing to a doctorate in some branch of decision or control theory. I also study philosophy, fiction writing, and computer science.
Since becoming aware of rationality in general, and Eliezer Yudkowsky’s way of making everything make sense, I’ve gotten pretty heavily into cognitive psychology and metacognition.
To be frank, I understand that I’m a rank amateur in the field of rationality in general, but I’m looking forward to trying to get better. So if you’re downvoting me, or even upvoting me, explaining why in a comment or message would be extremely helpful, so I can take the time to reinforce my positive cognitive pathways, and prune my negative ones.
See you in the threads!
My two cents as someone who burned out with a full depressive episode in their junior year of an electrical engineering degree and managed to limp all the way to graduation:
Don’t underestimate the magnitude of what can go wrong in your head. I’ve got some genetic factors and some childhood stuff that likely contributed, but anxiety and depression can and will cripple you for years if you let them.
Get a blood test at your earliest convenience; make sure that you’re not low on vitamin B12 or D, or have anything else obviously wrong. I’ve heard enough stories about things like this (and had deficiencies myself) that indicate this is high-value. It’s also not hard to do or expensive (just ask your family doctor or the University Health Center; make sure to specify that you’re curious about those deficiencies in particular).
Don’t fall for false dichotomies. You’re clearly smart enough to get creative.
One suggestion I’ve seen in this thread is taking a semester/year off to go work, which your University should be fine with.
Another suggestion, if you believe there is inherent value in a degree, is to Goodhart the degree itself. Read this—you can consciously engage in half-assing your degree with everything you’ve got. In other words, diplomas don’t include grades. In other other words, Cs get degrees. Feel free to put in the absolute minimum that has you passing, take the easiest electives, etc., and spend the time you get back on other things.
Once you’ve had your first job, no one cares where you got your degree from. Spending 55k per year is absurd—transfer to a cheaper college, or take a look at your local community college. Most community colleges will have an agreement with four-year colleges for credits to transfer. Drop out and enroll there, get the freshman/sophomore/core credits over with, then transition to a cheaper/online college for the degree. You can also take this slowly—one community college class a semester can be done simultaneously with a full-time job, if you’re so inclined, and most four-year colleges will have something for people with jobs.
Reframe the question: if you’ve got three years left, each costing 55k, then would you willingly take 165k right now to walk away? Would that 165k be worth more to you than an additional three years of education at college?
I honestly don’t believe that student loan debt is ever worth it, especially not for programmers. Doctors maybe, but that’s about it. Whatever you do, plan out how you’re going to wind up debt-free at the end. Scholarships are great. So is working. Debt isn’t.
Isn’t MIT’s entire curriculum online? Is there anything you can realistically gain from your current university that you can’t get yourself in other ways? Is the alumni network super valuable? Is there an incubator you could take advantage of?
And a couple of general decision-helpers I like to use:
It’s twenty years later, and you’re looking back on your life. What will you regret not having done more, finishing your degree or striking out on your own?
Take out a fair coin. Heads you get the degree, tails you walk away. Flip the coin, and pay attention to how you feel. Are you hoping for a specific result? Will you be disappointed with a different result? The face the coin lands on is irrelevant. In the moment it was in the air, spinning, what did you want it to land on?
You are considering Deviating from The Path. Deviating from The Path invites risk, not only of failure, but of scorn. Look at the dropout, they’ll whisper as you pass. I guess he didn’t know better than us after all. Too bad, really. He had a good thing and lost it. Can you endure that? Do you care? Does it matter to you, if that’s what people think? Remember that dissent feels like wearing a clown suit.
Humans are loss-averse. Tip the scales slightly in favor of the riskier option, knowing that you’re in a profession where the worst you’ll do is still better than most of the people who have ever lived.
Do a pre-mortem: you drop out, do your startup, and fail. You apply to the company you mentioned and are rejected. You’ve left college and you’ve got no job, no startup, no hope. What went wrong? What can you do now to lower the probability that it will go wrong, or to soften the blow when it does?
Sleep on it.
Sleep on it again.
Read better advice than mine.
Good luck.
Excellent gears-level account of what’s going on, thank you.
This seems to suggest several alternative models for college education I’ve never considered before:
Have colleges with very specific, limited curricula as independent institutions and a set professor/student ratio, with several credits per semester assigned to some sort of self-directed learning, where the student takes an online course or pursues some other educational activity, and perhaps meets up with a mentor/student group/professor once a week to discuss it.
Break up the four-year college paradigm into two separate institutions, much like community colleges currently function. We can imagine an explore/exploit dichotomy here, where there are two-year institutions dedicated to providing an incredibly broad array of classes that students attend first, after which they matriculate to a second two-year school for a specific major. The first institution is basically a broader community college, which can already keep costs low. The second avoids the pitfall of breadth you outline above.
Legislation requiring better price disclosure? That gap between nominal and actual tuition seems particularly insidious to me, as I suspect something similar is going on with medicine.
Oddly enough, better housing/zoning policy, because (especially for undergraduates) housing costs are usually a large part of the bill. Do the tuition price increases account for the entirety of college price increases? How have college housing/food costs changed over time?
Once again, great work.
Out of curiosity: because rationalists are supposed to win, are we (on average) below our respective national averages for things which are obviously bad (the low hanging fruits)?
In other words, are there statistics somewhere on rationalist or LessWrong fitness/weight, smoking/drinking, credit car debt, etc.?
I’d be curious to know how well the higher-level training effects these common failure modes.
I’ve personally gotten a lot out of viewing myself as a 4D worm (a 3-Dimensional being stretched out across the fourth dimension of Time can be thought of as a sort of 4D worm), when I remember to do so.
A concrete benefit is that it renders procrastination moot—the task, if completed at all, is in the worm somewhere, so the specific location in time it finds itself is not particularly important. Which means it might as well be now.
There’s also an emotional component—if I think of myself as some kind of weighted average of myself in the moment, I can be destabilized by emotion or trauma or just life throwing crap at me. If I think of myself as the average of the entire 4D worm, on the other hand, that’s far harder to destabilize.
Your conception of every day being a microcosm of one’s life is another way of looking at the same concept, where individual slices of the worm can be thought of as basically an MRI image of the life in question. Brushing one’s teeth in each slice equates to healthy teeth for the entirety of the worm, and so on. Since we live in the individual slices, this is useful to think about, as we’re really trying to shape the entire worm.
From the paper you linked to:
For all values of the social cost of carbon, emissions of CO2 have the largest percent impact on the damages from natural gas–fired power plants (40 percent to 90 percent). This is because natural gas–fired power plants generate very small amounts of the local pollutants. In contrast, the CO2 share of GED* for both coalfired and oil-fired power generators is between 5 percent and 40 percent. Although coal-fired plants generate a great deal of CO2, they generate greater damages due to other pollutants
So it does go into CO2.
As for the Value Added, they seem to be using the straightforward economic value of the industries in question, which omit positive externalities just as much as they omit negative externalities.
Thanks for the feedback!
I agree that the two conversations naturally want to coincide: any discussion of a distant equilibrium as compared to the current one seems likely to include, by default, an evaluation of the costs of the change, which is Mountaineering. Likewise, wondering if a given equilibrium is a worthwhile goal (Summit-Seeking) seems to happen (at least to me) a lot in the middle of thinking about how to get there.
The two conversations are necessarily intertwined—but without the ability to distinguish clearly between them, I worry about people talking past one another, where one person thinks they’re still Summit-Seeking while the other believes the conversation has moved to Mountaineering.
I guess I kind of think of it like dye in water—once properly dissolved, the two are indistinguishable, but it’s still valuable to be able to talk about water-without-dye and dye-without-water.
While a focus on the exterior may very well contribute to the high rate of mental health problems in the community, I’ve always thought it had more to do with selection effects.
A large portion of the thought in the community revolves around how to think, which is something most people never study (and likely never feel the need to). But those who are thinking badly—that is, those who realize that they have patterns of thought that don’t correlate well with reality—have a reason to seek out a better way of thinking.
There’s also some evidence to suggest that higher intelligence by itself correlates with mental illness:
Other than that, great post and thank you for assembling that list of resources.
I was reading your comment, and when I thought about always betting a dollar, my brain went, “That’s a good idea!”
So I asked my brain, “What memory are you accessing that makes you think that’s a good idea?”
And my brain replied, “Remember that CFAR reading list you’re going through? Yeah, that one.”
So I went to my bookshelf, got out Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, and started paging through it.
Professor Ariely had several insights that helped me understand why actually using money seemed like such a good idea:
Interacting within market norms makes you do a cost-benefit analysis. Professor Ariely discusses the difference between social norms and market norms in chapter 4. Social norms govern interactions that don’t involve money (favors for a friend), and market norms govern interactions that do (costs and benefits). The professor did an experiment in which he had people drag circles into a square on a computer screen (judging their productivity by how many times they did this in a set period of time). He gave one group of such participants an explicitly stated “50-cent snickers bar” and the other a “five-dollar box of Godiva chocolates.” As it turns out, the results were identical to a previous experiment in which the same amounts of direct cash were used. Professor Ariely concludes, “These results show that for market norms to emerge, it is sufficient to mention money.” In other words, Professor Ariely’s research supports your first (4.) - “A dollar feels more important than it actually is...” This is the case because as soon as money enters the picture, so do market norms.
Money makes us honest. In chapter 14, aptly titled “Why Dealing With Cash Makes Us More Honest,” Professor Ariely explains an experiment he conducted in the MIT cafeteria. Students were given a sheet of 20 math problems to solve in five minutes. The control group was to have their solutions checked, and then were given 50 cents per correct answer. A second group was instructed to tear their paper apart, and then tell the experimenter how many questions they got correct (allowing them to cheat). They were then paid 50 cents for every correct answer they claimed. Lastly, a third group was allowed to cheat similarly to the second group, except that when they gave one experimenter their score, they were given tokens, which were traded in immediately thereafter for cash through a second experimenter. The results: A) The control group solved an average of 3.5 questions correctly. B) The second group, who cheated for cash, claimed an average of 6.2 correct solutions. C) The third group, who cheated for tokens, claimed an average of 9.4 correct solutions. Simply put, when actual, physical money was removed from the subjects’ thought process by a token and a few seconds, the amount of cheating more than doubled, from 2.7 to 5.9.
In short, using money to back a prediction a) forces us to think analytically, and b) keeps us honest.
Thank you for the idea. Now I just need to find an ATM to get some ones...
I think this functions well as an introduction to Charter Cities. It doesn’t grapple with any of the real-world difficulties, but it shouldn’t need to as an introduction.
It might be beneficial to mention the benefits of agglomeration effects as a justification of why cities are so often the engines of economic growth, and another point in favor of Charter Cities as opposed to Charter Villages, Charter Towns, or Charter Countries.
I’m definitely grateful for the update—it really makes me want to do a deep dive into how conflicts end, at the very least to better contextualize current events.
It also makes me wonder just how much history I “know” is the result of successful propaganda. Or how much culture is the result of successful marketing.
Yikes.
I’m relatively new here, so I have trouble seeing the same kinds of problems you do.
However, I can say that LessWrong does help me remember to apply the principles of rationality I’ve been trying to learn.
I’d also like to add that—much like writing a novel—the first draft rarely addresses all of the possible faults. LessWrong is one of (if not the first) community blogs devoted to “refining the art of human rationality.” Of course we’re going to get some things wrong.
What I really admire about this site, though, is that contrarian viewpoints end up being some of the most highly upvoted—people admire and discourse with dissenters here. So if you truly believe that LessWrong isn’t the best use of your time, then I wish you the best with whatever efforts you pursue. But I think if you wrote a bit more on this subject and found a way to add it to the sequences, everyone would only thank you.
Nostalgia can be a funny thing. I’ve been nostalgic for experiences that I would in no way want to repeat. Sometimes things are better as memories than they are to live through.
A theme of Zvi’s pandemic coverage has been that people’s (especially those with authority) reactions to the pandemic have been largely counterproductive (e.g. school masking, mandatory boosters, vaccine approvals, etc.).
So if authorities are incapable of acting with regards to the pandemic in helpful ways, it’s lucky that their priorities are not in acting with regards to the pandemic.
This is excellent. Thank you.
This is more of a practical suggestion than a theoretical one, but what if we had an instant message feature? Some kind of chat box like google hangouts, where we could talk in a more immediate sense to people rather than through comment and reply.
As an addendum, and as a way of helping newer members, maybe we could have some kind of Big/Little program? Nothing fancy, just a list of people who have volunteered to be ‘Bigs,’ who are willing to jump in and discuss things with newer members.
A ‘little’ could ask their big questions as they make their way through the literature, and both Bigs and Littles would gain a chance to practice rationality skills pertaining to discussion (controlling one’s emotions, being willing to change one’s mind, etc.) in real time. I think this would help reinforce these habits.
The LessWrong study hall on Complice is nice, but it’s a place to get work done, not to chat or debate or teach.
My understanding of #3 is that it comes from a place of insecurity. Someone secure in their own intelligence, or at least of their own self-worth, will either ignore the unknown word/phrase/idea, ask about it, or look it up.
So from the inside, #3 feels something like: “Look, I know you’re smart, but you don’t have to rub it in, okay? I mean, just ‘cause I don’t know what ‘selective pressures in tribal mechanics’ are doesn’t make me stupid.”
My guess is that it feels as though the other person is using a higher level vocabulary on purpose, rather than incidentally; kind of the like the opposite of the fundamental attribution error. Instead of generalizing situation-specific behavior to personality (i.e. “Oh, he’s not trying to make me feel stupid, that’s just how he talks”), people assume that personality-specific behavior is situational (i.e. “he’s talking like that just to confuse me”).
Also, I think a lot of the reaction you’re going to get out of someone when using a word or idea they don’t know is going to depend upon your nonverbal signals. Are you saying it like you assume that they know it? I’ve had professors who talk about really complex subjects I didn’t fully understand as though they were obvious, and that tended to make me feel dumb. I doubt they were doing it on purpose—to them it was obvious—but by paying a little bit more attention to the inferential distance between the two of us, they could have moderated their tones and body language a bit to convey something a little less disdainful, even if the disdain itself was accidental.
Lastly, when it comes to communication I tend to favor the direct approach. If at any point I think the other person doesn’t understand what I’m saying, I try to back up and explain it better. Sometimes I just flat-out ask if they understood, and if not, try to explain it, all while emphasizing that it isn’t a word/phrase/idea that I (or anyone) would expect them to know.
True or not, the above strategy has been effective for me in reducing confrontation when the scenario you’re describing happens.
Addressing 1) “Learning when you’re wrong” (in a more general sense):
Absolutely a good thing to do, but the problem is that you’re still losing time making the mistakes. We’re rationalists; we can do better.
I can’t remember what book I read it in, but I read about a practice used in projects called a “pre-mortem.” In contrast to a post-mortem, in which the cause of death is found after the death, a pre-mortem assumes that the project/effort/whatever has already failed, and forces the people involved to think about why.
Taking it as a given that the project has failed forces people to be realistic about the possible causes of failures. I think.
In any case, this struck me as a really good idea.
Overwatch example: If you know the enemy team is running a Mcree, stay away from him to begin with. That flashbang is dangerous.
Real life example: Assume that you haven’t met your goal of writing x pages or amassing y wealth or reaching z people with your message. Why didn’t you?