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.
Will_BC
With all these options, single choice voting is pretty clearly sub-optimal, Approval or Range Voting would be better.
I choreograph my morning routines to a specific playlist. I know what I’m supposed to be doing during each specific song, and I get things done on time without distractions. I started in highschool when I would occasionally miss the bus and I never missed the bus after I started.
- 15 Dec 2014 0:35 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014 by (
Perhaps that connotation is because of the group in question? I dislike playing word games, the words we use should be interchangeable if they refer to the exact same thing. It’s kind of like how we went from Negroes to Black to African Americans in an attempt to combat racism, but the racism was the problem, not bad words, and it only gets confusing when you word police. I was talking to some social justice types before the term was used in a derogatory way online and they described themselves that way, and the first place I saw it online was as a self-description of those groups. Words get loaded with bad affect because people have negative thoughts about the thing being referred to. I think any decision to use a new word that predates changing the thing to which we are referring is premature.
Those posts are 4 years old and 2 years older than CFAR. I do think that LW could and should do better with instrumental rationality.
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.
http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/intergalactic-spreading.pdf
You didn’t actually do the math on that. According to this paper by the Future of Humanity Institute (Nick Bostrom’s group), if life evolved to the point of interstellar travel 3 billion years ago and could travel at 50% of c, then you would expect it to travel not just to this galaxy, but the nearest million. If you go back five billion years and assume travel speeds of 99% of c, it could reach a billion galaxies. 75% of stars in the Milky Way that could support life are older than our Sun. It really is an enigma.
I’m relatively new to the site and I wasn’t aware of any censorship.I suppose I can imagine that it might be useful and even necessary to censor things, but I have an intuitive aversion to the whole business. Plus I’m not sure how practical it is, since after you posted that I googled lesswrong censorship and found out what was being censored. I have to say, if they’re willing to censor stuff that causes nightmares then they ought to censor talk of conspiracies, as I can personally attest that that has caused supreme discomfort. They are a very harmful meme and positing a conspiracy can warp your sense of reality. I have bipolar, and I was taking a medicine that increases the level of dopamine in my brain to help with some of the symptoms of depression. Dopamine (I recently rediscovered) increased your brain’s tendency to see patterns, and I had to stop talking a very helpful medication after reading this site. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but the world of conspiracy theories is very dark and my journey there was triggered by his writings. I guess most of the content on this site is disorienting though, but perhaps some clarification about what he thinks the benefits of conspiracies are and their extent should be would help.
Also, the content on this site is pretty hard hitting in a lot of ways, I find it inconsistent to censor things to protect sensitive people who think about AI but not people who are sensitive to all the other things that are discussed here. I think it’s emblematic of a broader problem with the community, which is that there’s a strong ingroup outgroup barrier, which is a problem when you’re trying to subsist on philanthropy and the ingroup is fairly tiny.
I suggest this be posted to Main. I go long stretches without checking discussion, and just happened to find the survey here, but I subscribe to the Main RSS feed.
Posts 8 and 9 were really beneficial to me. The illusion of transparency is something that has caused me great distress in the past, and it was really nice to have an explanation for why that was. I always valued my intelligence, and I used to think that when people didn’t agree with things that seemed obvious to me it was a sign that they were stupid. I had come across this idea as “people have different experiences”, and when I saw things through that lens it helped me to be kinder and less arrogant. These posts really crystallized that idea and made me go “oh, that’s why that is”.
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.
One could make the argument that anything that harms the mission of lesswrong’s sponsoring organizations is to the detriment of mankind. I’m not opposed to that argument, but googling censorship of lesswrong did not turn up anything I considered to be particularly dangerous. Maybe that just means that the censorship is more effective than I would have predicted, or is indicative or a lack of imagination on my part.
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.
There was an RSA clip about this awhile back. Smile or Die
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.
It’s in the works. I’ve got a few ideas, but right now I’m running them by family and friends. I have some ambitious goals but I’ll probably start small. I would like to see some big changes happen in the world, and I don’t think that working in the most straightforward way towards the Singularity is the only way to bring them about.
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.
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.
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 have taken the survey