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Reading an old comment under "Unequally yoked" that says:
Pope Benedict once talked about people who try and live with a question mark in the center of their lives. He said they always end up being functionally atheist.
I think this description is wonderful, and while a sin for Catholics, I invite all aspiring rationalists at living with a question mark at the center of their lives!
I had alot of fun helping to co-organize the NYC SSC meetup. I was wondering if people had advice on what questions to use an icebreaker when welcoming new people into the rationalist community. Here are two questions I have tried at the SSC meetup:
-"How long have you been reading Scot?" : Some people found this question obvious and uninspired but it worked pretty well.
-"Has Rationality has had direct practical benefits in your daily life?" : I think the later question would have worked better at a "lesswrong" not a SSC meetup. A common feeling was they valued "rationality" in discussion and weren't especially interested in using rationality for self improvement.
Does anyone have suggestions for better questions?
What made you decide to come to the meetup?
What do you expect from the meetup?
What do you think you do that nobody else who attends the meetup does?
A bit harder: Where did you change your beliefs in the last year?
-"Has Rationality has had direct practical benefits in your daily life?" :
While that's an interesting question it doesn't seem like a good icebreaker question. A person might feel bad about having to good answer to it.
I really would prefer to the ability to see IR and UV, but in the meantime this is interesting. Sample:
...we designed a wearable passive multispectral device that uses two distinct transmission filters, one for each eye, to enhance the user's ability to perceive spectral information. We fabricated and tested a design that "splits" the response of the short-wavelength cone of individuals with typical trichromatic vision, effectively simulating the presence of four distinct cone types between the two eyes ("tetrachromacy"). Users of this device were able to differentiate metamers (distinct spectra that resolve to the same perceived color in typical observers) without apparent adverse effects to vision
I'm also interested in what expanded color vision would be like, but it looks like that paper was describing one of the obvious approaches I'd already thought of. I didn't read the whole paper, but from the abstract, it looks analogous to one of the widely-used treatments for color blindness, namely a single red-tinted contact lens.
Many other vertebrates are tetrachromats. Mammals are unusual for being more color-blind. The loss of two types of cone cells is thought to be due to the nocturnal phase of our evolution when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Primates have since evolved a third kind again. Birds never went through this phase and are still tetrachromats.
A gene-therapy experiment gave color vision to color-blind monkeys. This approach could theoretically produce a fourth type of cone cell as well, but could they then distinguish more colors?
Some women may be natural tetrachromats, due to a mutation in a photopigment gene in one X chromosome, but not the other. It's not clear if the tetrachromat ability of certain women is due to ancestral neural pathways from when we were tetrachromats, but given the random way gene therapy works in the monkey's cells, it seems likely that neuroplasticity is enough. Given consistent "pixels" that react preferentially to certain colors, the brain learns to perceive them as colors. Thus, I believe it's likely that the human brain could learn to perceive a color gamut built from even five or more primary colors, given proper inputs.
The fact that sensory substitution works suggests a non-invasive approach. If you could track and target the eye well enough for a display to consistently change the color sensitivity of a scattered subset of retinal cells, it's likely you could use it to train your brain to not only distinguish new colors, but to perceive new color qualia.
The color processing system in the human brain is not that plastic. The higher levels probably yes, but the lower levels: No. Sure you can perceive and have benefits from these filters, but it's not exactly the same as having earch processing or luminance and chrominance built into your hardware.
http://www.allpsych.uni-giessen.de/rauisch/readings/Gegenfurtner.NatRevNeurosc.2003.pdf
Claim: EAs should spend a lot of energy and time trying to end the American culture war.
America, for all its terrible problems, is the world's leading producer of new technology. Most of the benefits of the new technology actually accrue to people who are far removed from America in both time and space. Most computer technology was invented in America, and that technology has already done worlds of good for people in places like China, India, and Africa; and it's going to continue help people all over the world in the centuries and millennia to come. Likewise for medical technology. If an American company discovers a cure for cancer, that will benefit people all over the globe... and it will also benefit the citizens of Muskington, the capitol of the Mars colony, in the year 4514.
It should be obvious to any student of history that most societies, in most historical eras, are not very innovative. Europe in the 1000s was not very innovative. China in the 1300s was not very innovative, India in the 1500s was not very innovative, etc etc. France was innovative in the 1700s and 1800s but not so much today. So the fact that the US is innovative today is pretty special: the ability to innovate is a relatively rare property of human societies.
So the US is innovative, and that innovation is enormously beneficial to humanity, but it's naive to expect that the current phase of American innovation will last forever. And in fact there are a lot of signs that it is about to die out. Certainly if there were some large scale social turmoil in the US, like revolution, civil war, or government collapse, it would pose a serious threat to America's ability to innovate.
That means there is an enormous ethical rationale for trying to help American society continue to prosper. There's a first-order rationale: Americans are humans, and helping humans prosper is good. But more important is the second-order rationale: Americans are producing technology that will benefit all humanity for all time.
Currently the most serious threat to the stability of American society is the culture war: the intense partisan political hatred that characterizes our political discourse. EAs could have a big impact by trying to reduce partisanship and tribalism in America, thereby helping to lengthen and preserve the era of American innovation.
I think it's an interesting point about innovation actually being very rare, and I agree. It takes a special combination of things for to happen and that combination doesn't come around much. Britain was extremely innovative a few hundred years ago. In fact, they started the industrial revolution, literally revolutionising humanity. But today they do not strike me as particularly innovative even with that history behind them.
I don't think America's ability to innovate is coming to end all that soon. But even if America continues to prosper, will that mean it continues to innovate? It takes more than prosperity for innovation to happen. It takes a combination of factors that nobody really understands. It takes a particular culture, a particular legal system, and much more.
It takes more than prosperity for innovation to happen. It takes a combination of factors that nobody really understands.
I don't know about that. People have been discussing how does an innovation hub (like Silicon Valley) appear and how one might create one -- that is a difficult problem, partially because starting a virtuous circle is hard.
But general innovation in a society? Lemme throw in some factors off the top of my mind:
That's a partial list. It also takes good universities, a culture that produces a willingness to take risks, a sufficient market for good products, and I suspect a litany of other things.
I think once you've got a society that genuinely innovates started, it can be hard to kill that off, but it can be and has been done. The problem is, as you mentioned, very few societies have ever been particularly innovative.
It's easy to use established technology to build a very prosperous first world society. For example: Australia, Canada, Sweden. But it's much harder for a society to genuinely drive humanity forwards and in the history of humanity it has only happened a few times. We forget that for a very long time, very little invention happened in human society anywhere.
First you will have to fight against the current trend of rationalists avoiding even discussing culture-war topics. SSC is currently edging towards more limitations on what can be discussed, where culture-war topics can be banned and are at least siloed into separate discussion areas. I think we should try to keep LessWrong an area where there are no limitations on topics that can be discussed - although we might try to enforce the level and quality of discussion to a certain standard. Politics is the mind-killer, but that doesn't mean you can't avoid being mind-killed when you talk about it.
France is at place 18 in the global innovation index with a score of 54.04 while the US is at place 4 with a score of 61.40.
Given that you live in Berkely US innovation is more visible to you than French innovation. You don't see the French trains that are much better than anything that the US has at present.
The US is a bit more innovative then France but if you say that France isn't innovating at all today while the US does, that produces a flawed view.
America, for all its terrible problems, is the world's leading producer of new technology.
True.
That means there is an enormous ethical rationale for trying to help American society continue to prosper.
Not true. There's rationale to help America continue be inventive, but that's not the same thing at all as "continue to prosper" since the US looks at the moment like an empire in decline -- one that will continue to prosper for a while, but will be too ossified and sclerotic to continue innovating.
Note that it's received wisdom in Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) that you need to innovate in the world of bits because the world of atoms is too locked-down. There are some exceptions (see e.g. Musk), but overall the difference between innovations in bits and innovations in atoms is huge and stark.
Currently the most serious threat to the stability of American society is the culture war
Not true at all. Even in Berkeley what you have is young males playing political-violence LARP games (that's how you get laid, amirite?) and that's about it.
Read less media -- it optimizes for outrage.
Over the Hump, and Starting a Return to Normality
There are some downsides to being a data pack-rat, as well as the obvious up-sides.
I'm in the process of moving to a new house, and the last month has pretty much been dedicated to that project - everything from a new set of floorboards being laid down to finding the best stores near the new place to buy my favourite beverage (grapefruit Perrier). The process is still ongoing, and I'm still going to be paying rent at the old place for some months to come; for example, even after getting rid of nearly all my mass-market paperback novels, there are still a /lot/ of books in the old family library that are still going to have to be shlepped over to the new one, and not a single member of my family has great strength or endurance.
But most of the hard work and planning is done, and life is settling into a new normal: today, I hope and plan to apply for a new library card, do some banking, grab some income tax forms, and just maybe visit the nearby branch of a computer store to upgrade my laptop's RAM. My sleep schedule is still ridiculous, if I lose 50 pounds I'll still going to be overweight, asthma sucks... but a lot of the stresses from the old home are just plain gone. I am, as I see it, in about as good a mental state as I'm likely to be in the foreseeable future.
Which means that, barring unexpectable crises, it's time for me to start writing again. My current plan: When I hit my new local public library today, I'm going to sit down for a while and start going over my partial draft of 'Extracted', to both refamiliarize myself with it and to start nudging any details I find that seem to need editing. And, by the time I've gone over what I've already written, to start finishing writing what I didn't get around to typing out the last time I worked on the piece.
The main bit of uncertainty around this plan is that I have insufficient data to predict whether, how soon, and how severely I will go through my next bout of more-severe-than-everyday anhedonic depression. I'm hopeful that the release of stress from the old home will make such a bout less likely; but I'm also aware of the statistics that show that the act of moving to a new home adds its own form of stress. Barring low-probability black-swan events, my range of expected mid-term futures runs from going back to my previous levels of depression, all the way up to completing a novel and beginning the brand-new venture of learning about e-publishing.
This looks interesting. Sample:
Two main sources of behaviour. Seems to map roughly to dual process theory? Bottom-up - perception-action cycle. Top-down - goal creation and enactment.
Different strengths and weaknesses, not clear which system should have control. Eg trying to concentrate on a problem while being distracted by traffic noises vs trying to concentrate on a problem while ignoring the oncoming car.
Conflict between the two is mediated by executive functions. Main components are working memory, goal management and attention.
and
Why interrupt ourselves, especially when we know the costs and we are trying to focus? How might tech exacerbate self-interruption?
Optimal foraging. Mariginal Value Theorem. Explore vs exploit - switch resources when predicted value of new resource outweighs switching costs. Accurate predictions of foraging behaviour in several animal species.
Information foraging. MVT has been applied to browsing patterns. Perhaps can explain self-interruption too?
Never ever, once, sometimes...
One problem I have with that post on generalizing from one example is that it somehow presupposes that the conclusions I draw from observing an isolated occurrence are somehow 'idle'. It's not for nothing that I think a man kicking a soda machine 'aggressive'. I might not even think it, unless I am asked; but I will certainly be wary of leaving my kid in his presence. I know what my kid's capable of - soda machines have nothing on him, and I don't want there to be any reason whatsoever to suppose he might be kicked. So yes, my labeling the angry man 'aggressive' is just a way to make a mental note in fine print.
...and so these are the kinds of statements that I expect to see on LW, but not in RL except as a joke.
A New Form of Social Withdrawal in Japan: A Review of Hikikomori
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4886853/
"hikikomori has become a silent epidemic with tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of cases now estimated in Japan. The differential diagnosis includes anxiety and personality disorders, but current nosology in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders may not adequately capture the concept of hikikomori. Treatment strategies are varied and lack a solid evidence basis,"
"A lifestyle centered at home No interest or willingness to attend school or work Persistence of symptoms beyond six months Schizophrenia, mental retardation or other mental disorders have been excluded Among those with no interest or willingness to attend school or work, those who maintain personal relationships (e.g., friendships) have been excluded."