My immediate thought was that there is a third variable controlling both experience in rationality and willingness to pay for cryonics, such as ‘living or hanging out in the bay area’.
zslastman
I feel like Hanson’s admittedly insightful “signaling” hammer has him treating everything as a nail.
The single biggest influence on this I can isolate is social. When my brain expects thought to be rewarded by social status it’s happy to pour calories into thought. When I feel like I’m stupid, or that no one will listen, thinking becomes tremendously difficult. I’m convinced this is the major difference separating intellectuals from normal people—intellectuals are people who were socially rewarded for thinking. School does a great job of punishing people for thinking, unless they’re near the top of their class. Normal people drop the habit for the same reason I dropped team sports. Not to say it’s necessarily illogical—comparative advantage and all that..
Much sympathy. Your chosen career is a risky one and there probably isn’t a way to make it safe—otherwise there would be even more writers than there are now. The way to avoid years of dread seems to me to have a good side job, one that leaves you with some energy to write. Some thoughts:
1) You may want to think about how you can overcome your disgust with all things economic—your parents poisoned that aspect of intellectual life, but economics is fairly well regarded here abouts—maybe you can salvage it for yourself by making it your own? Coming at it form a more LW perspective?
2) Can you just pull out from professional life? Start writing now, arrange to come in later, deliberately, so it doesn’t become a guilt trip for you? Live cheaply and just start writing? It sounds like you’ve got plenty of frustrations and stuff to write about—why not just write it, as therapy if nothing else?
3) Do you need to prepare for the fact that you may simply not be able to be a writer? Everyone starts down that road without knowing if they can do it—it’s a lottery. If I were you I’d try to confront that reality head on, and try to be process rather than results oriented.
4) Are you taking care of your life generally? Food, excersize, sleep? Generalized misery, for me, is usually about these things, rather than the causes—career, family etc., which my brain outputs when I ask it what’s wrong.
Single anecdata point—I quit smoking by deliberately causing myself to gag and think of vomiting whenever I saw or thought about cigarettes. It was very effective.
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Request for Advice : A.I. - can I make myself useful?
The solution space is large enough that even proteins sampling it’s points at a rate of trillions per second couldn’t really fold if they were just searching randomly through all possible configurations, that would be NP complete. They don’t actually do this of course. Instead they fold piece by piece as they are produced, with local interactions forming domains which tend to retain their approximate structure once they come together to form a whole protein. They don’t enter the lowest possible energy state therefore. Prion diseases are an example of what can happen when proteins enter a normally inaccessible local energy minimum, which in that case happens to have a snowballing effect on other proteins.
The result is that they follow grooves in the energy landscape towards an energy well which is robust enough to withstand all sorts of variation, including the horrific inaccuracies of our attempts at modeling. Our energy functions are just very crude approximations to the real one, which is dependent on quantum level effects and therefore intractable. Another issue is that proteins don’t fold in isolation—they interact with chaperone proteins and all sorts of other crap. So simulating their folding might require one to simulate a LOT of other things besides just the protein in question.
Even our ridiculously poor attempts at in silico folding are not completely useless though. They can even be improved with the help of the human brain (see Foldit). I think an A.I. should make good progress on the proteins that exist. Even if it can’t design arbitrary new ones from scratch, intelligent modification of existing ones would likely be enough to get almost anything done. Note also that an A.I. with that much power wouldn’t be limited to what already exists, technology is already in the works to produce arbitrary non-protein polymers using ribosome like systems, stuff like that would open up an unimaginably large space of solutions that existing biology doesn’t have access to.
I’m a year from completing a PhD in genomic science. I am now completely disillusioned with my field, and indeed professional life in general. I entered with ambition, and have been cleansed of it. I didn’t quit early on because I lost all my self esteem and assumed the problem lay with me, and that I would be equally unhappy elsewhere. I’m now almost sure this is wrong, but I only have about a year to go, and no idea what to do next, and am fairly well paid, so quitting seems imprudent.
I have basic statistical and coding skills (whose usefullness in the real world I cannot assess) and honestly no idea what i want to do with my life. I cannot imagine enjoying a job anymore, but intellectually, I’m aware this is probably just a result of my present, rather toxic environment. I would like something socially valuable and/or lucrative, but will settle for something which has normal work hours and doesn’t drain all the life out of me. My definition of socially valuable aligns well with that of the LW community, though I place much lower credence on a near term Singularity than most here, I think.
I imagine this is a common ish situation, and advice to me would be generally relevant.
1) Tell me if this is the wrong place for this kind of moaning 2) Advice? Sources thereof? Finding a job? Overcoming apathy? 3) How to assess the usefullness of ones skills? Low hanging ways of improving them?
One key meta mistake you see a LOT in computational biology is people not seeking out the proper expertise they need. I and countless other people have wasted months re inventing existing tools because I had no idea they existed, which is turn was because there were no experienced researchers around me with the relevant expertise to tell me.
Not stepping back and thinking strategically about where to go and why before beginning a PhD program.
Because of a deteriorating relationship and problems in my current lab, I felt completely overwhelmed by the prospect of choosing a PhD. I was being told by my superiors that I had loads of potential and therefore had to get into the most prestigious institute possible. I therefore copped out of the difficult task of doing a PhD and essentially allowed my supervisor (who I knew was incompetent) to choose one for me. I never asked myself if I really wanted to do the research I was being pushed towards, if labwork was a rational choice for someone with my skillsets, or, more importantly, if I wanted to do a PhD at all.
Imagine my embarrassment when I start reading lesswrong and discover that stories like this about grad school are a stock example of irrational behavior...
Agree. the road from creation of life to creation of any nervous system at all is an extremely long and fraught one.
Life on our planet has a very specific chemistry. It’s possible that almost all possible chemistries limit complexity more than ours—leading to many planets of very simple organisms. Very large number of phyla on earth reach evolutionary dead ends both archae and bacteria are stuck as single cellular organisms, (or very simple aggregrates) - Plants cannot develop movement because of their cell walls, while insects cannot grow bigger because their lungs and exoskeletons do not scale upwards.
Genetics is an entire optimization layer underlying our own, neural one. I think the fact that it had to throw up an entire new, viable optimization layer represents a filter.
From hanging out with humanities people and technical people, I’m heavily inclined to put this down to straight-up Hansonian status competition. Humanities people and technical people tend to downplay the value of each other’s fields. It provides a gratifying, group-unifying status boost, and brings few consequences because the victims are on the other side of campus. In general this is fueled by subtle misunderstandings between groups.
In this case, humanities people will be overestimating the degree to which the techie’s studying literature are simplifying things—for instance they might think that the tech people are actually saying their algorithms can capture the complexity of human reaction to literature, instead of just providing useful approximations. Thus, it feels like an insult to them, and a chance to pounce on the hated enemy, and in the process affirm their allegiance to the ingroup, who after all are the people who really matter. Artificial intelligence, neuropsychology and economics all get similiar reactions.
Microwaves are almost certainly safe, but just FYI, the point about there being ‘no plausible mechanism’ is wrong, and a common misconception. Photons don’t need to have enough energy to directly cause DNA breakage, in order to be dangerous. Microwaves seem have effects on proteins beyond that caused by thermal excitation, which means they could plausibly be carcinogenic, e.g. if they interfere with DNA repair enzymes. There’s some evidence that pumping enough microwaves at cells in culture can turn them cancerous.
The epidemiological evidence though, is that they don’t cause cancer.
The Ape That Thought it was a Peacock is a very good article on evolutionary psychology and gender differences, and should be read as a vaccine against the nastier elements of PUA etc… It argues for the position that gender differences between humans, though present, have been greatly exaggerated by evolutionary psychology. It makes several points which were, to me at least, novel:
1)Human children are costly to rear and our females are often pregnant—high cost of childrearing tends to result in more equal parental contributions and monomorphism (sexes being similar)
2)Human females as well as males show morphological indicators of mate choice selection—e.g. enlarged breasts. This again resembles monomorphic species (compare peacocks where females are drab, because males don’t help raise kids, and therefore do not need to choose). Intelligence maybe be a sexually selected trait in both sexes.
3)Distributions in effectively all traits overlap heavily, and the ones which are very different generally concern the tails of the distribution. E.g. we expect murderers to be the very right tail of the aggression distribution, where the slight average difference in the two populations could translate to a large proportional difference.
4)We expect human mating behavior to be facultative, and respond to relevant conditions, such as gender imbalances. This is what we observe anthropologically (Tooby and Cosmides made this point as well I think, in pointing out that variance does not imply the absence of behavioral adaptions).
There’s one example of the Bruce Effect that immediately jumps at me because it
a)Has been incredibly active in my life
b)Squares so well with the adaptionist explanation of the Bruce Effect
My chief form of self sabotage has always been with the opposite sex. Someone will hit on me, or my own advances will begin to go somewhere, and I’ll do something to bring things to a halt. On present reflection it feels very much like I’m afraid of the challenges that would follow—that flirting with someone I find really attractive feels like embarking on some terrifying balancing act, and the failure is a return to the natural order of things—reassuring and predictable. The kind of thinking that might lead someone to avoid seeking higher status within a peer group which he didn’t feel capable of maintaining.
Biology is ridden with this right now—terms in immediate danger of inflating into their own universe include:
“sytems biology” “High throughput” “Integrative”
As well of course as the old favourites—“complexity” and “emergence”. I’m reminded of Steven Pinkers “euphemistic treadmill”. In both cases we have words losing their information content through use—losing meaning in terms of information, and in the latter sense at least gaining in in terms of emotional weight. Maybe there’s a general tendency for words to melt out into smears across meaning-space because of the way we learn them by association? After all the process if unbounded should lead you to associate words with everything right?
Jayman is correct that adoption studies typically show negligible parental effects. But remember the studies can only talk about the environmental variation present in their data, and are generally done on normal, western, middle class cohorts. In studies where they include stronger environmental variation—e.g. Turkheimer et al 2003, you find that it matters.
So basically, the kind of parenting choices that people typically worry about are probably meaningless, but severe trauma, poverty, abuse etc. do matter. That being said, You can’t just say “X is difficult to encapsulate” with studies. This is a fully general counter argument to any evidence you don’t like.
Assassination.
Are you serious?
Of course he isn’t. Nobody makes money in assassination these days, the market is oversold.
Agreed. Also helpful is if the parts of you with close access to e.g. your posture and voice tone have an unshakable belief in your dominance within the tribe, and your irresistible sex appeal. In fact social interaction in general is the best example of somewhere that dark side rationality is helpful.
This is the best article on lesswrong in some time. I think it should at least be considered for entry into the sequences. it raises some extremely important challenges to the general ethos around here.
It’s also worth noting that the social environment in school is artificially horrific. That many young people should not be left to socialize amongst each other without older peers to decrease the jostling for status, and enforce humane behavior. A large percentage of people will emerge from school with mild trauma and a set of learned social behaviors that are severely maladaptive in a more normal environment.