In that case, I notice that I find myself confused.
thelittledoctor
Oh, I see. I’ve been confusing happiness as a state of present bliss with happiness as a positive feeling regarding a situation, which are not quite the same thing. Excellent reply, thank you.
On the subject of body dysmorphic disorder (WARNING: Some gooey personal details ahead, and notes on how I more-or-less fixed mine):
I am male, and have been told that I have it (and by my psychiatrist, even!). To me, therefore, this is a particularly good example of the discrepancy between automatic self-evaluation and abstract self-evaluation; I could abstractly note that people seemed to find me attractive, and that I was in many ways on the right side of the physical appearance bell curve, but looking in the mirror inspired nothing but revulsion.
So, of course, this became the first subject at which I attempted mindhacking. I started with the typical self-help-book advice: Look in the mirror every morning, and tell yourself you’re attractive. This was, somewhat surprisingly to me, partway successful—but only partway. The result was that my subjective evaluation eventually transformed to “I could be so good-looking, if it weren’t for X, Y, and Z!” (although really the list I made had a lot more than 3 items). The primary feature to which the fixation reduced at this stage was my nose—rather than go into the specifics, allow me simply to say that I disliked it very much. So, I thought, this halfway worked—why not meet it from the other direction? I’ll get a nose job.
So I got a nose job. And I didn’t tell anyone I was getting one, figuring I could see if there was a change in their reactions (Results: some people figured it out, some did not. Of those who did not, the most common comment was “Did you get your teeth whitened?”.) The change to my subjective self-evaluations, after a settling-in phase, was quite the opposite of the usual “plastic surgery will never make you happy/satisfied” advice we hear—my perception of my own attractiveness rose substantially. The other items on the list did not go away, but with the primary one gone, I self-evaluated much more positively.
So, I thought, I’ll give the self-help method some more time. I started playing with lighting around and above my bathroom mirror, which made for an interesting effect—using more flattering lighting improved my self-evaluation and feelings of attractiveness for that day, even though I abstractly know it doesn’t make a difference outside, but having the ability to switch lightings around in general also helped me grok that one’s toothsomeness is not a fixed value; it very much changes based on the situation.
Grokking that particular fact produced another increase in my self-evaluation of my appearance, albeit a smaller one, and also put me on another track—what other circumstantial things that I’ve been neglecting could help? This post grows long, but basically: I fixed my posture and started dressing nicer (where “nicer” simply meant anything that I self-evaluated positively when looking in the mirror) and tried various new things with my hair (which had been very long and shaggy). Both helped notably. I also opted to try more elective procedures—first Lasik (which went swimmingly—worthwhile even if you don’t think your glasses make you look ugly; having 20⁄15 vision is AWESOME) then electrolysis. Both of these also seemed successful, although nothing produced the dramatic change in my self-evaluation that rhinoplasty did.
In sum, it does seem to be possible, at least in my case (and n=1 so p >>>.05, obviously) to remove physical attractiveness as a major daily concern for someone with BDD. I still think about my appearance, and sometimes contemplate things to change/improve, but no longer have angst or pervasive worries about it. Since my self-evaluation is no longer so overpoweringly negative, I seem to be able to just take people at their word (or body language) about my appearance these days. This is not quite the same as perfecting my ability to self-evaluate, but I’ve manually pushed and prodded my self-evaluation close enough to the outside consensus that outside evaluations are now responsible for much of the daily/weekly/monthly variation.
I should clarify—though a lot of people didn’t figure out that it was specifically my nose that had changed, most people with whom I had any semi-regular interaction noticed that something was different about me, and commented to that effect (and of course there were certain groups—flatmates, lovers, my anatomy teacher—who immediately realized it was a nose job). The lesson I took away from that was that while people do evaluate your attractiveness when they see you, mostly they don’t cache much more than a general positive or negative impression of your appearance. Thus when something changes for the better, they think “Ey looks better” but can’t quite place why. I should have realized this before—the number of times I’ve thought someone looked different but not been able to place why defies counting.
In light of that, I would say it was definitely partly due to the reactions of others (positive without knowing why) and partly due to being able to observe a material change myself, but as to their proportions I have only speculation. As a hunch, I would guess that the latter was a larger factor—my self-evaluations after the settling-in period were pretty close to what I imagined they’d be, when I was visualizing myself with a new nose before the operation.
Porn doesn’t seem like a bad thing necessarily. Just as increasing hunger makes one more likely to snap and eat an overpriced, unhealthy burger from a street vendor, increasing intervals without some kind of sexual release make one more likely to dial up exes and/or tumble into bed with other ill-advised partners.
...Or so I heard.
The chances of survival are the same, but the chances of observing one’s own survival are hugely different (1 vs epsilon), so it’d be pretty strong evidence in favor of many-worlds.
There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can’t teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically—she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. And then, when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living—not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She no longer hopes to live by seeking the truth—if women ever do hope this—but continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one—knowledge of the world.
The slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy—this discovery is not a matter for triumph. The baby, perhaps, cries out triumphantly: I have balance! But the seventh sense is recognized without a cry. We only carry on with our famous knowledge of the world, riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a stage of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do.
And at this stage we begin to forget that there ever was a time when we lacked the seventh sense. We begin to forget, as we go stolidly balancing along, that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with the impetus of life. It is hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens in our minds.
But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. Obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live her present one, because her manner of living it must hinge on the problem. There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads.
Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.
All these problems and feelings fade away when we get the seventh sense. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty. The seventh sense, indeed, slowly kills all the other ones, so that at last there is no trouble about the commandments. We cannot see any more, or feel, or hear about them. The bodies which we loved, the truths which we sought, the Gods whom we questioned: we are deaf and blind to them now, safely and automatically balancing along toward the inevitable grave, under the protection of our last sense. “Thank God for the aged”, sings the poet:
Thank God for the aged And for age itself, and illness and the grave. When we are old and ill, and particularly in the coffin, It is no trouble to behave.
-T.H. White, in The Once And Future King (book III, Le Chevalier Mal Fet)
Of course. What he’s describing isn’t rationality, it’s dysrationalia—and especially the ability to compartmentalize. The rational ones in this passage are the young, who are “intimately and passionately concerned” with the existence of God, Free Love versus Catholic Morality, and so on. More than anything I see this quote as a caution against losing the fire in your belly.
Akrasia, pure and simple. Procrastination is my fiercest foe.
Absolutely delightful.
Extra points for the s in “utilised”.
Again, the intuition here is to deny the premise. Why should this delay result in scrapping the project? Why not just hoist the section back up, nip in, grab the worker, and lower it back down? Since it hasn’t been lowered all the way, presumably it’s still attached to the crane.
That said, if one accepts the premise, and accepts that it’s really necessary to construct the tunnel for whatever reason, and worth the certain loss of lives, then yes, it’s most practical to crush the guy and move on with the project.
As for the button—having read some short story or other about a case like this where the person killed turns out to be the button-pusher’s wife, I would hesitate to push the button unless I knew it was a truly random process. Moral considerations aside, if it’s going to kill my mother or something I would certainly not press it, not even if it saves five other lives.
While akrasia is still an enormous problem for me (as it always has been), it is oh-so-slowly becoming less of one. I have always been a fairly devil-may-care person regarding responsibilities and schoolwork, possibly due to early encouragement about being “smart” and “talented”, which led me to think that I didn’t HAVE to work hard -an idea that was unfortunately born out in many ways by the evidence throughout my adolescence. I had the impression that I had some kind of supernatural power of avoiding consequences, that I was in some way vastly better and more intelligent than my peers, and so on. This in spite of being an avowed materialist and agnostic; my beliefs weren’t propagating properly. LessWrong opened my eyes: The world is allowed to kill me, my innate talents are not enough to get through life (I have to work hard!), and there are right and wrong decisions based on the evidence. Since then (it’s been about a year) I’ve been trying to turn myself into the kind of person who Gets Shit Done. I still haven’t finished the Sequences (I’m apparently too akratic even to sit down and plow through something I enjoy reading), so I’m sure there’s a great deal more for me to learn… But if nothing else, x-rationality has given me the clarity to know what needs to be done.
Risk aversion as a terminal value follows pretty naturally from decreasing marginal utility. For example imagine we have a paperclip-loving agent whose utility function is equal to sqrt(x), where x is the number of paperclips in the universe. Now imagine a lottery which either creates 9 or 25 paperclips, each with 50% probability—an expected net gain of 17 paperclips. Now give the agent a choice between 16.5 paperclips or a run of this lottery. Which choice maximizes the agent’s expected utility?
- 31 Jan 2012 1:05 UTC; 14 points) 's comment on Terminal Bias by (
- Risk aversion vs. concave utility function by 31 Jan 2012 6:25 UTC; 3 points) (
I’m not sure I understand why. The lottery has an expected utility of (sqrt(9)+sqrt(25))/2=4, so shouldn’t the agent express indifference between the lottery and 16 guaranteed paperclips? This behavior alone seems risk-averse to me, given that the lottery produces an expected (9+25)/2=17 paperclips.
Sidenote, is there a way to use LaTeX on here?
This is also my understanding of the distinction.
Upvoted. This makes your comment on the other thread much clearer to me, and I appreciate it.
This is off the top of my head, so I apologize if it ends up being ill-conceived:
Imagine we take a lottery with 50% odds of winning (W) or losing (L), where W gives us lots of utility and L gives us very little or none (or negative!). But we don’t find out for a couple weeks whether we won or not, so until we find out all of our decisions become more complex—we have to plan for both case W and case L. Since we have two possible cases with equal probability, this (at maximum) doubles the amount of planning we have to do—it adds one bit to the computational complexity of our plans. If we have ten million free bits of capacity, that’s no big deal, but if we only have five bits, that’s a pretty big chunk—it substantially decreases our ability to optimize. So then we should be able to plot the marginal utility of gaining or losing one bit of computational capacity and plug it in as a term in our overall utility function.
Did that make any sense, or have I just gone crazy?
Unfortunately the second link will not load for me, but I’m assuming it’s this article. Here’s a pdf download of the full text.
I would like to see more info on this, especially which specific gene sequences the transposons were found in—but that will probably have to wait until whole-genome sequencing is cheaper.
I am not sure if it is prudent to speculate on such little evidence, but I would suspect that any useful effect these retransposons have on learning has to do with regulating the growth of dendritic spines.
And it is also possible that these are a deleterious element that we’ve just managed to mostly suppress the effects of, like P elements in fruit flies.
Still, the benefits and detriments of transposable elements in biology remains very much an open question, at least as far as I know.
I can’t help but wonder why the humans in this story did not simply say “We long ago invented chemical means for individual humans to achieve perfect, undifferentiated happiness, but most individuals seem to consider themselves happier without their constant usage.” This is perfectly true, and, if it perhaps would not have completely satisfied the Super-Happies (no doubt they would want immature humans anesthetized until they were old enough to choose) it might at least have served as a significant piece of evidence. I can hardly imagine a society that has legalized rape retaining a taboo against the use of Ecstasy or some future derivative thereof.