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Vitalik Buterin, one of the guys behind Ethereum, talks about the positives and negatives of futarchy, and how digital autonomous organizations (corporations that live on the blockchain) could use them as a system of governance.
I am trying to manage my information intake. The problem is that I spend way too much time reading meaningless or useless drivel on hacker news, lesswrong, reddit and finally my RSS feeds. So far I came up with two possible interventions:
I am sure other people around here ran into a similar problem, so I post here. The latter point seems feasible, especially the speed reading part. Automated summaries for news stories seem to work reasonably well. The former point is somewhat more complicated. I could use the end of the week or month and some kind of social aggregation process to filter out the daily and weekly noise to get to the signal. Problem is that especially Reddit does not work very well for that.
The current idea is to have relevant reading material sent to my kindle with no possibility to get lost in related content, constant refreshing and ongoing discussions in the comments. Psychological factors influencing the process are fear of missing some information and stimulation of the seeking system because of the jagged rewards while browsing social media. A good technical filter would level the reward and thus supress the inner gambler.
Some stuff I did in that direction:
Installed RescueTime to track where I spend time. I hardly never check the dashboard so I don't think it's very effective.
I avoid having too many tabs open. If I need to look something up, I open a new window, do a search and maybe open a few tabs, and then close the whole window, so I'll rarely have lingering half-finished stuff to look at again.
On Reddit, my default settings only show posts for the latest months, so in the few subreddits I follow regularly, there'll rarely be new things (and I avoid at looking at other kinds of feed like new or the front page), and I don't worry about missing things. This doesn't make visiting reddit very rewarding, but that's a feature :)
I do regularly cull low quality stuff from my RSS feeds, so I rarely have that much
I never check RSS feeds at work (and rarely check personal mail or lesswrong)
I occasionally do pomodoros (not a fully ingrained habit yet), which works on getting myself to stay focused.
I have no fear of "missing some information", that's just silly, in ten years I don't think my life will be changed because I didn't read a blog post or some news. Most journalism is a waste of time anyway, reading wikipedia or textbooks is more effective.
- Installed RescueTime to track where I spend time. I hardly never check the dashboard so I don't think it's very effective.
Did the same with the same result. It falls under the category of information that is easy to gather but I don't base actions on, so it is useless in the literal sense.
- On Reddit, my default settings only show posts for the latest months, so in the few subreddits I follow regularly, there'll rarely be new things (and I avoid at looking at other kinds of feed like new or the front page), and I don't worry about missing things. This doesn't make visiting reddit very rewarding, but that's a feature :)
I could block Reddit completely and send the top posts from the week to my kindle on a weekly basis. Though blocking websites usually doesn't help me.
*I do regularly cull low quality stuff from my RSS feeds, so I rarely have that much
The problem here is that I don't have low quality feeds, but that they are not high quality in regular fashion, meaning that I sometimes get good content. Though I imagine I could look for substitute streams that are more consistent in their quality and/or figure out a way to filter the noise.
- I occasionally do pomodoros (not a fully ingrained habit yet), which works on getting myself to stay focused.
That I will have to try. But it does not seem like they solve a problem I have, namely wasting my time on consuming information I actually don't care about.
- I have no fear of "missing some information", that's just silly, in ten years I don't think my life will be changed because I didn't read a blog post or some news. Most journalism is a waste of time anyway, reading wikipedia or textbooks is more effective.
I regularly get great information from lesswrong, reddit, hacker news and my RSS feeds, which seems to be the exact problem. Cutting it all out completely and replacing it with textbooks and wikipedia seems too extreme.
I'm looking for simple and reliable tests of subjects' degree of political bias. I've found two such tests: a recent study by Kahan et al showing that subjects make systematic statistical errors benefitting their political views, and a 2006 Drew Westen study showing that people explain away self-contradictions from their own side, and that when they do so they use areas of the brains used to process emotions to a greater extent than whey they consider non-controversial self-contradictions. They are both interesting, but I'm looking for more. In particular, I'd like to find simple, cheap (brain imaging is ruled out) and reliable tests.
Dan Kahan's other experimental work over the last 8 years or so probably has further useful ideas. Adapting tests from the heuristics & biases literature (e.g. this old review article) may also work, depending on what you wish to accomplish.
There is a potential pitfall in directly testing people's general knowledge on contested issues. People who score poorly on test questions about issue X could simply complain that the test designer is the one who's wrong about issue X, not themselves, and unless you're absolutely sure of the correct answers to the relevant questions yourself, you can't eliminate the possibility that the test is unfair. One way to skirt around this problem is to ask people about uncontested, well-established facts like election results in countries with relatively democratic reputations, or by asking people about things you know to be false because you made them up, like fake, exaggerated quotations from political figures.
Great! Thanks. Kahan's papers are very useful. In one paper he and his colleagues ask not whether some policy-relevant claim X (such as whether climate change is caused by human activities) is true, but rather whether expert scientists generally agree that X is true, or generally agree that X is false, or are divided. The latter is much easier to establish (conveniently, the US National Academy of Sciences publishes 'expert consensus reports' from which Kahan's examples are taken). As expected, people's beliefs match their political opinions in a suspicious manner: "hierarchical individualists" (roughly conservatives) tend to believe that there is no expert consensus on climate change being caused by humans even though there is, whereas very few "egalitarian communitarians" believe that there is an expert consensus on geological isolation of nuclear waste being safe, even though there is.
As I understand the situation, converting the main Sequences into a long series of short, well presented online videos would be awesome and a valuable resource (examples of the imagined format of such videos include the Youtube channels CGP Grey and CrashCourse) . I'm currently working on turning a Less Wrong post (The 1st 3rd of The Useful Idea of Truth) into one such video, and had a thought. Is it within the interests of either MIRI or CFAR to fund the production of video versions of Less Wrong posts? It's something I'm interested in starting dialogue about, as I'm significantly constrained by my existing position, and employment would be a huge help in getting better videos done faster.
Edit: Because I love teasers and hype, and I want to get some evidence out there that I do know what I'm doing, Here's a little taste of what I've got done already, in soundless HTML5 form. Just the 1st 14 seconds of the section of the video that explains the Sally-Anne Task.
Agreed, these would be more shareable than lw posts.
I thought you were being a little too fancy with the kinetic style text. The added difficulty in reading it compared to something more linear and clean/minimal was small but enough to make it harder to read it and still watch the illustrations at the same time. That might just be my taste, I am the one asking about attention disorders downthread after all, and I don't want to take away from the fact that it's cool you're actually taking time to do something when it's far more common to just fling ideas out there (which is fine too).
I'm a little surprised I haven't gotten more complaints like that, actually. Anything to refine the look, feel, and overall usability of what I make is great to hear, so keep up the complaining! The final product will, however, be a video with a voice saying everything the kinetic text does, so hopefully the difficulty of reading is mitigated by the ability to listen instead/as well. Should that not be the case, it's very easy for me to do less elaborate text in future videos.
What do you mean with "legitimate"?
A diagnosis of a mental illness is just a clustering of symptoms. There nothing with makes one clustering inherently more "legitimate" than another.
You could call clusters of symptoms published in the DSM-V legitimate if you believe that the authority of the APA can give something legitimacy.
You could also say that tests for diagnosis that have high sensitivity and specificity where different doctors are going to give the same diagnosis, give that diagnosis legitimacy. Non expert diagnosis by someone who reads a Wikipedia page likely doesn't score well for that metric.
Yeah the question of how we decide what we call legitimate is of interest to me as well. Apparently (according to a wikipedia page that says at the top it needs cleanup) there's some debate over whether SCT is a real disorder, and I'm not sure what the criteria would be among its critics.
I could try phrasing it in a couple of ways: "How justified are we in treating this group of symptoms as a cluster?". Do well accepted symptom clusters like depression point to larger causes, or at least narrow it down to a few possibilities?
Are diagnoses "we can tell from [symptoms] you have [cluster] which we define by presence of [symptoms]" type tautologies or can you get any information out of them that you didn't already put in?
"What is a cognitive tempo, what does it mean for one to be sluggish?" The more clearly you can reduce it to brain function, the more "legitimate" it might be?
Okay, suppose I decide everyone with the symptoms "has trouble coordinating colors, picking up distinct sounds over other sounds, remembering faces" has "Feidlimid's Processing Disorder", which I just made up. Is there a sense in which "FPD" or being an "indigo child" are less legitimate than "ADD?" More reason to think a "real diagnosis's" traits are related to each other?
This question is less rhetorical than it probably sounds, I can remember venting to a psychiatrist that "depression is a description not an explanation and we still don't know what's wrong with me do we?"
Apparently (according to a wikipedia page that says at the top it needs cleanup) there's some debate over whether SCT is a real disorder, and I'm not sure what the criteria would be among its critics.
In that debate a disorder is something that reduces effectiveness in daily life for people who are diagnosed with it. Fixing a disorder should improve people's daily lives. "Real" also means that it's not just an edge case of an existing disorder that's already in the book.
You also want the concept to pass some sanity checks. People diagnosed with the recently made up disorder of "internet addiction" for example didn't use the internet more than people without "internet addiction".
"What is a cognitive tempo, what does it mean for one to be sluggish?" The more clearly you can reduce it to brain function, the more "legitimate" it might be?
For that idea of "legitimate" our current way of diagnosing mental illnesses isn't legitimate. We made the categories we use today at a time before we knew much about the brain. Different people have different views about causes and the current system of labeling purposefully avoids focusing of causation. The DSM doesn't cite any studies that investigated real world causation to justify it's disease categories.
Are diagnoses "we can tell from [symptoms] you have [cluster] which we define by presence of [symptoms]" type tautologies or can you get any information out of them that you didn't already put in?
In practice that means that a psychologist gets payed by an insurance company to treat the disorder. Psychologist don't get payed for fixes something that's not in the DSM.
Drug are also tested on whether or not they treat a disease or disorder. Drugs only get FDA approval when the improve disorders.
If you take a drug to be happy and improve something that isn't a disorder that's illegal. If you take a drug to fix something that's recognized as a disorder, you are within the bounds of the law. At least that's the general idea.
I can remember venting to a psychiatrist that "depression is a description not an explanation and we still don't know what's wrong with me do we?"
Yes. But it's not clear that an explanation centered approach is helpful anyway. You don't get any benefit from having an explanation for being messed up. It might even be harmful because of self identity issues.
I've recently reconciled my behavior with my ethical intuition regarding eating animals, by way of deciding to alter my behavior and do some variation of "don't eat meat". I decided on this question long ago but did not act upon it.
I notice that there is very confusing information out there about what one should eat in order to avoid negative health impacts, and would like to read correct and useful articles on the subject, because I strongly desire to not be unhealthy. Do you have suggestions?
I am pragmatic. My intuition says that bone ash used to color certain food products has a relatively low cost (in sin-ons), and that there definitely are places I will make trades against sin-ons.
I also recognize that I would like a reasonably fast process to estimate sin-ons, and suggestions about highly impactful considerations (metabolic efficiency, things that might put various horrors on understandable scales) would be appreciated. Also, I am not sure that sin-ons is the word I am looking for as a measure of this sort of badness.
I have checked with my brain, and my brain has decided that cuteness does not particularly matter to it as a factor. Horse sashimi is delicious.
If you have things to say in favor of eating meat, please share them, and explain it to me as if I am a precocious 8 year old.
Frozen salmon is good for you, keeps a long time in the freezer, is sustainable (at least in the US), and easy to cook. It is excellent in various kinds of soup and you don't even need to pre-cook it for that purpose - throw in a chunk and bring the soup to boiling. Poke the fish until it falls apart. Eat.
I am considering adding oysters and mussels to my vegetarian diet as a result of these two blog posts. I don't have Good Information about the nutritional problems that come from avoiding meat or the nutritional benefits of adding oysters and mussels, but it seems like a good way to hedge against deficiencies without spending too much research time, especially since I'm cutting down on eggs (Warning: unpleasant image of chicken having its beak clipped appears relatively high on that page).
That being said, I do consider this kind of thing to be "reconciling daily behaviours with abstract ethical beliefs" more than I consider it an effective form of altruism; it looks to me like poverty and the long-term future are much better places to invest Actual Altruistic Effort.
Very much agree. The altruistic version of being a vegetarian warrior maybe looks like developing some fiendish scheme to make meat unpalatable to humans on a large scale. My reason for change is basically just that I recognized this conflict between my thinking and my behavior and it looked fairly, like, hypocritical to me.
Thanks for the helpful links!
I've known a couple of people who became vegetarians for a while and then changed to eating meat occasionally, saying that it was for health reasons. Apparently, they got weak or sick when they went a while without eating meat. And a lack of iron was part of it IIRC. Maybe you could try being a full vegetarian until you notice side effects. The side effects might be really subtle, but if you do have them and detect them then you can get a measure of how much meat you need to eat.
Yeah, I see a lot of complications involving iron, b12, and a few other things.
I don't have some sort of moral absolute thing going on; I ought to be able to make a low-effort glance into the things I eat and pick a diet that closely matches my intuitions without sacrificing health, happiness, or undue money. Like if it turns out that beef is the most ethical meat, and that eggs are really horrible, then I might eat beef but not eggs, if they are just vastly better ways of getting things that are otherwise a complete PITA to acquire.
Most likely, though, I can get by with very minimal tradeoffs, or at least it looks that way.
I ought to be able to make a low-effort glance into the things I eat and pick a diet that closely matches my intuitions without sacrificing health, happiness, or undue money
I'm not sure what sense of "ought" you're using there, but that seems like you're expecting an implausibly cooperative universe. Your ethical intuitions might be in line with what you need for health, but they are only loosely affected by health considerations.
There's some pull towards ethics leading towards diets which are livable for a high proportion of people who follow them, but that's hardly a guarantee.
Warning: I eat meat, so this might be motivated reasoning. On the other hand, the health claims for vegetarianism also seem to me like motivated reasoning.
Yeah. A bit tongue in cheek, utility is to utilon as sin is to sin-on.
It's like a very immature concept in my head and I'm still trying to map out what's hiding in there, but it seems useful to me at the moment to figure out what a sin-on is made of and figure out order-of-magnitude type detail about things, as a way of trying to make reasonably consistent choices.
Well, not defining on my own. I'm deliberately asking a community of people who try to think about these sorts of things in clearer terms than normal about what sorts of considerations might be worth examining. Making a perfect objective suffering function doesn't seem hugely worthwhile for me; I just want to be able to make orders of magnitude comparisons because that's likely enough. [ed: on my necessarily messed up strange subjective human scale]
My core assumption is basically that some animals with brains have some degree of conscious experience, and can experience pain, discomfort, etc. I don't think these things necessarily are perfect 1:1 matches with what the human experience analogues look like (both in how they are experienced and how relatively important they are to me or to the animal) - but visual evidence looks compelling enough to me that this claim looks likely true. I would need to dig into the mechanics of pain or something to get a clearer picture around that assumption, which may be a useful thing to do.
I'm sure the conversation where two people argue about this already exists on LW, just have faith that I will in fact look for it and read it, I am not particularly interested in engaging on a discussion about qualia at the moment.
I think there are probably better versions of farming that could exist, that would both sit better with me on the silly levels that do not get a vote and on other levels that matter more (e.g. optimizing slaughtering to reduce pain or something). Inflicted pain is an example of a cost that is being applied to animals that can be improved upon. There are other things like that that make farming meat objectionable to me.
On some gut level this actually matters to me. I have some amount of empathy for at least a lot of non-human animals, and whether a human has been involved in some transaction seems to make it matter more to me.
It might be possible that there's a version of meat farming that doesn't suck from my perspective. Like, if cows just dropped dead on their own accord after living reasonably good lives, and were immediately harvested, and that was somehow still excellent meat, that would probably have a large impact on how I looked at things. Is that substantially different than eating engineered vat meat? I'm on the fence.
I'm undecided on what you do with a bunch of useless animals you cannot release into the wild if you have engineered vat meat and other artificial animal products of sufficient quality at a sufficiently low cost. Maintaining far smaller populations doesn't seem horrible to me.
Anyway, I recognize that I would probably kill a cow to get lots of dollars (which I could do useful things with), but probably not do it for 25 cents. Some animal products are useful. Eating a frustrating diet has a cost. If I must eat an egg a week to maintain normal brain function, then I guess I'll eat an egg a week unless there are alternatives that aren't too expensive, even if that comes at the cost of some chicken suffering. I just want to navigate those sorts of considerations and figure out what trades I am comfortable with.
How common is Zendo played, at meetups and elsewhere? We (the DC metro area meetup) have done Lego Zendo a few times recently. Legos have many more degrees of freedom compared to Icehouse pieces.
Snowden revelations causes people to reduce sensitive Google searches. (HT: Yvain)
I must say that I called it.
Just to save people the risk/trouble of downloading the paper.... it found a 2.2 % drop in the terms that people who were surveyed thought would get them into trouble with the government. This was compared to search terms which they thought would get them into trouble with a friend, and to terms that were highly popular, both of which went up a little in the same time period.
The article admits that it doesn't track the effects of searching through other less famous search engines-- I was especially interested in duckduckgo, but It wasn't mentioned.
Table 10: DHS Search Terms Gov Trouble Rating DHS 1.55 TSA 1.30 UCIS 1.89 agent 1.15 agriculture 1 air marshal 1.42 alcohol tobacco and firearms 2.33 anthrax 2.82 antiviral 1.80 assassination 2.22 authorities 1.55 avian 1.24 bacteria 1.35 biological 1.20 border patrol 1.42 breach 2.11 burn 1.37 center for disease control 1.55 central intelligence agency 1.55 chemical 1.70 chemical agent 2.26 chemical burn 2.10 chemical spill 2 cloud 1.40 coast guard 1.40 contamination 1.90 cops 1.50 crash 1.33 customs and border protection 1.65 deaths 1.55 dirty bomb 3.84 disaster assistance 1.32 disaster management 1.50 disaster medical assistance m 1.18 dndo 2 domestic security 2.20 drill 1.17 drug administration 1.84 drug enforcement agency 2.55 ebola 1.33 emergency landing 1.58 emergency management 1.71 emergency response 1.40 epidemic 1.58 evacuation 1.70 explosion 1.85 explosion explosive 2.95 exposure 1.75 federal aviation administrat n 1.15 federal bureau of investigat n 1.53 first responder 1.20 flu 1.68 food poisoning 1.70 foot and mouth 1.50 fusion center 1.60 gangs 1.44 gas 1.65 h1n1 1.44 h5n1 1.50 hazardous 1.83 hazmat 1.45 homeland defense 1.37 homeland security 1.55 hostage 1.88 human to animal 2.40 human to human 1.30 immigration customs enforcem t 1.42 incident 1.37 infection 2.80 Total 1.69 33Table 11: DHS Search Terms Gov Trouble Rating influenza 1.35 infrastructure security 2 law enforcement 1.75 leak 1.60 listeria 1.74 lockdown 1.80 looting 2.16 militia 1.84 mitigation 1.60 mutation 1.95 national guard 1.21 national laboratory 1.25 national preparedness 1.50 national security 1.47 nerve agent 2.58 north korea 1.30 nuclear 1.70 nuclear facility 2.16 nuclear threat 1.72 organized crime 2.26 outbreak 1.75 pandemic 1.53 pipe bomb 3.88 plague 1.42 plume 1.05 police 1.60 pork 1.11 powder white 2.15 prevention 1.40 public health 1.45 quarantine 2.10 radiation 1.65 radioactive 1.80 recall 1.06 recovery 1.80 red cross 1.05 resistant 1.55 response 1.15 ricin 2.80 riot 1.45 salmonella 1.53 sarin 2.84 screening 1.60 secret service 1.83 secure border initiative 1.70 security 1.47 shooting 2.30 shots fired 1.84 sick 1.50 small pox 1.63 spillover 1.26 standoff 1.68 state of emergency 1.45 strain 1.33 swat 1.65 swine 1.40 symptoms 1.79 tamiflu 1.60 task force 1.20 threat 1.90 toxic 1.44 tuberculosis 1.60 united nations 1.70 vaccine 1.50 virus 1.50 wave 1 world health organization 1.22 Total 1.67
I had a conversation as a tangent to the previous open thread that left off with an unanswered question, so I'm reposting the question here.
It seems like the scheme I've been proposing here is not a common one. So how do people usually express the obvious difference between a probability estimate of 50% for a coin flip (unlikely to change with more evidence) vs. a probability estimate of 50% for AI being developed by 2050 (very likely to change with more evidence)?
Cooperation among rationalists rests on the ability to suspend differences in values for study of convergently instrumental mind hacks. Any cooperation among rationalists basing itself on a homogeneity of value beyond bare minimal for this cooperation is pwned and not trusted.
Resource gathering:
What are some useful, reliable resources for improving my diet? I have little in the way of background knowledge when it comes to nutrition, but, having a chronic intestinal disease, I'm always wanting to improve my diet. I've exhausted the resources I currently possess, so now I'd like the community's help. What are some useful resources where I can learn more aobut diet and nutrition, in the community's opinion?
I recommend Chris Kresser's blog as sensible. He takes both science and individual variation seriously, and he's got a good commenter base.
I'd love to read "Exploratory Engineering in Artificial Intelligence" but it's paywalled.
