Any advice on how to increase the amount I read without increasing the time I spend reading? I’m concerned that just trying to up the pace will lower my comprehension.
Will_BC
Well, I’m open to increasing the rate, but I’m looking for information on how people do that without harming comprehension.
Where did you learn these speed reading techniques?
Thanks for answering, I did some googling and found a website called spreeder.com that seems to be helping. So far I’ve been able to gradually increase the wpm from where I was comfortable starting, and it seems like it could be an effective tool.
I have been mostly lurking for a couple of months, but organizing people is one of my main areas of interest, and I have some practical experience in doing it. I have had thoughts along these lines, and right now I’m having a biweekly Google hangout with some friends and family to discuss the issue and get feedback on my ideas. I’d like to very gradually introduce the topics to the rationalist community. But the core idea that I’m working on right now is that rationality is not interesting to the general public because rationality is too abstract. I would like to form a community where the main outreach is “Success Clubs” or something like that, basically a support group for improving your life designed by rationalists. I would also like to create a currency that people earned by attending the meetings and participating in the broader organization. I think the success of cryptocurrencies, video games, and karma systems is evidence that this could be a very useful motivator.
There was an RSA clip about this awhile back. Smile or Die
I intend to make a discussion post, once my ideas are more polished and I have sufficient karma. Right now, I’m having a biweekly Google Hangout with a few people and trying to set up a Simple Machine Forum, so if anyone is interested in either of those send me a PM and I’ll let you know how they’re progressing.
I lost 10 pounds in the last 30 days, and I would like to credit part of that to the LW community for introducing me to Beeminder.
I read a very interesting book on election systems by William Poundstone called Gaming the Vote. His conclusion was that Score (aka Range) Voting was the best system on offer. A brief explanation can be found at rangvoting.org; it’s a rather simple and intuitive system. As to idea number 2, I had a similar idea a while back, I called it fractal hierarchy, and a few thoughts occurred to me. First, it need not be democratic at all levels. I was thinking that if you wanted to select for rationality then the entry levels might not be very good at this. This led me to realize that this was rather similar to how the US military is structured, and they are generally positively regarded and considered quite meritocratic, so it might be a good way to do things.
Another idea for legislative systems that I came across that is a merger between direct and representative democracy is called delegable proxy. The idea is that every member can vote on every issue, but they can choose to delegate their vote to a proxy voter, who can then choose to delegate all their votes to another voter, and so on, until you get a number of people with large chunks of votes. But for any issue, an individual can retract their vote(s) and vote how they wish. I think this system would allow for a lot of legislation to get passed, and would most strongly represent the popular will, but that is also it’s greatest weakness, in that you get the issue of tyranny of the majority and ignorance of the masses playing a greater role.
I am working on a project right now to put these and other ideas into practice, and will make a discussion post about it at some point in the future. If anyone is interested in helping me to better articulate my ideas before I post them, please let me know.
There is some incentive to vote strategically, but depending on the range and the other candidate on offer you might be better off voting honestly. If there’s a candidate you dislike strongly, and a major candidate you only mildly dislike, you might give your favorite a 10, the mild dislike a 3, and the major dislike a 0, just to reduce the major dislike’s chances. The worst case scenario, which you describe, is called bullet voting, and is basically identical to our current system, but if even a small proportion vote honestly it can improve the results. The researcher who made the graph at the bottom of rangevoting.org ran computer simulations of voter preferences compared with candidate values, and found that something like 10% of voters given their honest preference can improve results. I do recommend the book if you want to know more.
I am very interested in delegable proxy, although it seems potentially dangerous and I think if it were implemented it would need to be tempered with some less democratic devices, but it could certainly make for some interesting drama.
Well, highly regarded as far as US politics is concerned. A lot of people here like to see military service in a politician, and it’s considered to be somewhat above partisan politics. And doing what you’re told is a meritorious characteristic to have in the military, although I suppose it’s far less meritocratic than some other organizations, it’s ideal is that it is. Although you’re certainly right, I should have said my statements were framed in the context of the US politics.
That’s probably a more sophisticated view, but I think popular opinion is with the military.
And the original topic was
methods for selecting important public officials from large populations that are arguably much better than the current standards as practiced in various modern democracies
And I think the military is similar in many ways to option two, sans the election part, which is why I brought it up.
Yes, Jesus is popular than the military, and more highly regarded in US politics by a majority of people. The opinions of the majority being of significant importance in a democratic political system. And certainly, there are differences. The direction of authority, which is what elections provide, is one. And there are others I’m sure I’m not mentioning, but those related to elections and authority are the biggest. But if you can’t see how it’s similar at all then you aren’t being very charitable and aren’t trying very hard. Both systems are hierarchical, both involve the promotion of a small number from a small group to another small group which then promotes a small number and so on until there is a small number of people or a single person at the top.
Well, the reasons to try hard are to be kind to others and to learn something yourself. Again, I never said it was an example of a voting system, what was asked for was a system of selecting public officials, and militaries are often public officials and it is not uncommon for them to change domains. The value is in taking a hypothetical system whose merits and weaknesses are difficult to evaluate, and comparing it to its closest analog in reality, which was my goal. I had come up with a system quite similar to the original query’s idea, and the thought that it might be more effective in a top down fashion occurred to me, so it was even less different from the military than his idea, and both ideas fit the criteria of
methods for selecting important public officials from large populations that are arguably much better than the current standards as practiced in various modern democracies
What I had in mind was more a hybrid between feudalism and the democratic process originally described. Democratic, bottom up above a certain level, top down below a certain level. But the idea was promoting a single person from a small group to a small group of similarly promoted people and so on ad infinitum, concentrating power by either process. I’m thinking of a system that could be implemented in practice.
That’s a good point, I knew they elected the pope but I wasn’t sure about the middle positions, I was thinking more about the size of the groups being an important factor when I compared the other system to the military.. And the Catholic Church is another example of an effective real world analog to a system I was thinking about hypothetically.
I’ve had some success in the past, but I haven’t been able to keep with my program long enough to achieve the results I want and I lost motivation. I don’t really have a great deal of disposable income right now, so if I derailed a lot I probably would stop using it. I really like the graphs, and by themselves they are a good motivator, so the thought of losing them is a further motivator. Basically I’ve had a better diet I’ve been meaning to stick to and an exercise routine that I sometimes did, but this kept me on track and focused on results.
With all these options, single choice voting is pretty clearly sub-optimal, Approval or Range Voting would be better.
I’m taking this course, I bought the recommended textbook as well.
Hello all! My name is Will. I’m 21 and currently live in upstate New York. A bit about myself:
At an early age, I remember I was thinking in my head, and I caught myself in a lie. I already knew that it was wrong to lie to other people, though I did it sometimes, but I could not think of any good reason to lie to myself. It was some time before I really started to apply this idea.
My parents divorced when I was ten, and my mother discovered that she had a brain tumor around the same time. In the face of this uncertainty and unpleasantness, my mother turned to religion. She reached the other side of these events without great harm, and in her gratitude began bringing her children (my younger brother and me) to church with her. I had not considered religion much before, and had been somewhat skeptical, but since I was aware of no one personally who shared my skepticism, I suppressed my instincts and became involved with youth groups and church camps. However, my doubts persisted over time as attempted to become a faithful and devout Christian. I knew that I hadn’t accepted the claims they made completely, and that caused a great deal of stress. If I had doubts, surely an all knowing God would see them and punish me.
A turning point came when I learned that a couple of my close friends didn’t believe in God, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I lost the faith I never really had. Considering the existence of God to be someone likely had caused me a great deal of stress, and I felt a great sense of relief by accepting what I deep down believed to be true, an extremely cathartic dissipation of cognitive dissonance. By the time I got to college, I had watched many atheist debates on YouTube and read several atheist books, and became even more confident in my position.
Once I arrived at my university, I joined a club that was mostly populated by atheists ( the Secular Student Alliance and found that I was happiest surrounded by like-minded people. I would Eventually be elected the groups President. Also while I was at university, I took and was a TA for a philosophy class on Plato and Aristotle. Having read some books by Steven Pinker, I realized the science behind why Plato had come up with his theory of Forms. It bothered me considerably that this was not being taught to students along with the historical material, and it also bothered me to discover that there were people who still identified as Platonists. Not all, but too many of the people in the philosophy department struck me as being more concerned with arguing and showing off their intelligence than in actually understanding the world. They matched almost exactly the Sophists that had plagued Socrates.
In 2011, I became involved in the Occupy Movement. I thought that the world was sufficiently bad that it needed changing, and that even if it was a long shot trying was better than doing nothing, I learned a lot about what happens when you forbid anyone to take a leadership position, and also how to organize people who don’t want anyone to tell them what to do (between that and running a group of atheists, the meaning behind the phrase “herding cats” has become quite clear to me). I’m interesting to see if some of these ideas might be useful to a rationalist community.
In December of 2012, I an idea struck me that I thought would change the world. It was about organizing people using fractals, and I thought I would immediately start a revolution. I then came to the more general realization that “fractals” were the source of everything in the universe, explaining how complexity arose from simplicity. My friends didn’t seem as impressed as I thought they should be. I became increasingly distressed and brought myself to a hospital. They recommended I be admitted to a mental hospital, and with an amount of good sense surprising for one in my condition, I agreed, thinking I either was insane or would be proven sane and therefore right about having solved the mysteries of the universe. I was diagnosed with bipolar type 1. My erratic behavior had been the result of my only truly manic episode, with all the associated grandiose delusions.
After my release from the hospital, I entered a deep depression (which often follows mania in those with bipolar). I lost my sense of self. I didn’t know to what extent the new psychoactive medications I was taking were suppressing my intelligence and creativity, I was unsure of my future, and it seemed to me that I had to drastically lower my expectations from what they were in the past in order to prevent a return to mania. I thought that my depression was the price of stability and sanity. I entered a regimen of treatment that was quite difficult and did not produce results very quickly, including what I thought of as a last ditch effort, elctro-convulsive therapy.
In March of this year, I was put on a new medication. This medication improved my mood considerably, and around the same time I started taking it I decided to give lesswrong a closer look. I had seen posts from it elsewhere on the internet, but I had never really given it thorough consideration. Once I began to go through it systematically, starting with Benito’s guide. I found that much of it corresponded with ideas that had appealed to me elsewhere, and I found the new ideas to be stimulating as well. Finding lesswrong correlated with a turning point in my life. I have found useful advice and inspiration on this website, I hope to be able to contribute in the future, but right now I’m primarily focusing on finishing the sequences before I get into much posting. I decided to join the study hall to help with akrasia and enjoyed my time there so I wanted to introduce myself to the community more thoroughly.