Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# Estimation as a game

I was inspired to write this post after reading [Gunnar_Zarncke](/user/Gunnar_Zarncke/)'s [Raising numerate children](/r/discussion/lw/iha/raising_numerate_children/).

Developing rational patterns of thought in children is very important and I'm glad Gunnar brought that issue up.

I wanted to share with you some thoughts I have regarding estimation games.

From an early age I've been constantly calculating various kinds of estimates - e.g. "how many people live in this building", "how long will it take to cross the US on foot", "what's the height of that tower", "how many BMWs are manufactured annually" and so on.

I believe that practising this technique is not only fun but also helpful. Sometimes one has no way or time to acquire accurate information regarding something and even a rough estimate can be very valuable. 

People are often surprised when they see me do it whereas for me it is completely natural. I think the reason is that I do it from a very early age.

I think it's easy and natural for children to grasp if this method is introduced through everyday experiences. By making this into a game children can gain intuitive understanding of quantitative techniques. I suspect many children can enjoy this kind of games.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Do you remember yourself doing something like this? From what age? Do you practice anything similar with your children?
# A Muggle Studies course

At my local Harry Potter fanclub (Bogotá, Colombia) some members teach "classes" on subjects they're passionate about. We've had informal courses on history, creative writing, English, etc. But recently some other classes have appeared that have made me worry seriously: astrology, divination, ancient runes, and all other sorts of nonsense. They're not taught as folklorical pieces of the past, but as serious practices that are supposed to actually work. I think this is particularly dangerous for the small kids that comprise the majority of the fanclub and still need help learning that magic doesn't exist.

So I proposed the fanclub chief that I could teach a Muggle Studies class: logic, critical thinking, philosophy of science, etc. In two weeks we'll have our first class, and I intend to begin talking about the most common biases. I already downloaded this website's PDF guide to holding a Less Wrong meeting. Aside from that, what can you suggest for a successful Muggles Studies course?
# Rationality, competitiveness and akrasia

Here's an internal dialogue I just had.

**Q:** How do we test rationality skills?

**A:** We haven't come up with a comprehensive test yet.

**Q:** Maybe we can test some part of rationality?

**A:** Sure. For example, you could test resistance to akrasia by making two contestants do some simple chores every day. The one who fails first, loses.

**Q:** That seems like a pointless competition. If I'm feeling competitive, why would I ever skip the chores and lose?

**A:** Whoa, wait. If competitiveness can cure akrasia, that's pretty cool!

Now we just need to figure out how to make people more competitive in the areas they care about...
# PSA: Very important policy change at Cryonics Institute

In the past, the [Cryonics Institute](http://www.cryonics.org/) has had a policy that said that they would not accept anyone who is not a member. This has [changed](http://www.cryonics.org/emergency-situations/deceased-non-member). The policy now is that someone who has full legal authority over your body can sign you up after you die. It costs $36,250 to be frozen if you are not signed up, which is more expensive. They also will not do anything until you have been on dry ice for 2 weeks after they have been contacted, so not being a member is more risky. 

This is very important news for anyone who is currently cryocrastinating. It means that you can drastically increase your chances of survival without filling out any forms. All you have to do is tell a loved one you want to be frozen upon death, and that you would like them to take responsibility for making sure this happens. This takes literally 30 seconds. Do it now!

This news might also be a reason to not sign up right away, if you think something better (like radical life extension or uploading) will come along in your lifetime. We should discuss this in the comments.

Edit: The general consensus of this discussion is that this is a really bad reason not to sign up for cryonics.
# The best 15 words

People want to tell everything instead of telling the best 15 words.  They want to learn everything instead of the best 15 words.  In this thread, instead post the best 15-words from a book you've read recently (or anything else).  **It has to stand on its own.** It's not a summary, the whole value needs to be contained in those words.

*   It doesn't need to cover everything in the book, it's just the best 15 words.
*   It doesn't need to be a quote, it's just the best 15 words.
*   It doesn't have to be 15 words long, it's just the best "15" words.
*   It doesn't have to be precisely true, it's just the best 15 words.
*   It doesn't have to be the main 15 words, it just has to be the best 15 words.
*   It doesn't have to be the author's 15 words, it just has to be the best 15 words.
*   Edit: It shouldn't just be a neat quote--the point of the exercise is to struggle to move from a book down to 15 words.

I'll start in the comments below.

(Voted by the Schelling study group as the best exercise of the meeting.)
# How do you say no?

Some people seem to be a bit too generous for their own good. I know a precious few people who are especially good at saying "no" when asked to take on new responsibilities that would put them over their limits. I love working with people like that because I can always trust them to tell me when it would be better for me to find someone else to do the thing. I expect this to be an extremely valuable skill it would probably be good for many of us to understand, learn, and be able to teach to people who really need it.

If you frequently find yourself overburdened, think it's not entirely necessary for you to be doing as much as you are, and can recall a specific instance in the last month where someone asked you to do something and you accepted against your better judgement, I invite you to describe what you were feeling and thinking at the time.

  

Alternately, if you're an unusually busy and productive person who nevertheless is good at saying "no", I'd like to hear about

1.  a specific example of a time when you said no to new responsibility, what was going on in your head, and how it felt
2.  how exactly you believe you decide whether to take on or reject prospective responsibilities if you have an explicit model
3.  whether you consider yourself more or less empathetic or compassionate than average
4.  whether there was ever a time when you had that "don't know how to say no" problem, and if so what changed
# October Monthly Bragging Thread

Since it had a decent amount of traffic until a good two weeks into September (and I thought it was a good idea), I'm reviving this thread.

[Joshua_Blaine](http://lesswrong.com/user/Joshua_Blaine/):

> In an attempt to encourage more people to _actually do awesome things_ (a la instrumental rationality), I am proposing a new monthly thread (can be changed to bi-weekly, should that be demanded). Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining **the most awesome thing you've done this month**. You may be as blatantly proud of you self as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself _the coolest freaking person ever_ because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.
> 
> Remember, however, that this **isn't** any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread._This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesomest thing they've done all month. not will do. not are working on_. **have already done.** This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.
> 
> So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?
# How to Learn from Experts

The key difference between experts and beginners is the quality of their abstractions. Masters of a field mentally organize information in a way that's relevant to the tasks at hand. Amateurs may know as many facts and details as experts but group them in haphazard or irrelevant ways.

For example, experienced Bridge players group cards by suit, then number. They place the most importance on the face cards and work down. Bridge amateurs group solely by number and place equal importance on all numbers. Professional firemen group fires by how the fire was started and how fast it’s spreading-features they use to contain the fire. Novices group fires by brightness and color. Both have the same information, but the firemen hone in on the useful details faster.^1^

**Learn abstractions from masters.** If you ask a Software Architect which database technology you should use, circumstances will eventually change and you'll need to ask them again and pay them again. But if you ask the Architect to teach you how to choose a database then you can adapt to changing circumstances. **Ideally you should emerge with a clear set of rules**-something like a flow-chart for that decision. A good example is this article on [whether you should use hadoop](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/hadoop_hatred.html). Clear criteria let you make a high-quality decision by focusing on the relevant details.

After talking to the expert you can write up the flow-chart or criteria and send it to them to get their opinion. This ensures you understood what the expert was trying to say, and lets you get additional details they might add. Most importantly it gives them something valuable to share with people seeking similar advice, so you're able to add value to their lives as a thank you for their advice. 

Caveats to this method:

*   In some domains there are details only professionals know. Academic research has a [secret paper-passing network](http://chewychunks.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/the-secret-paper-passing-network-in-science-and-beyond/) with ideas known to top researchers 1-2 years before they’re published. So you need to be in constant contact with these experts and hear the details from them. However, this typically only matters if you’re aiming to become a top-class expert yourself. 
*   Experts aren’t always conscious of the abstractions they use. They’ll say one thing and do another. So you should ask them to guide you through a specific situation and ask them several questions about how their decision would change if some conditions are different.
*   You may not have a specific question you want answered-you might want to find “unknown unknowns.” In that case ask the expert for stories-things they did that made a big difference. Then analyze those situations to figure out what criteria they used. 

  

1: _[The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance](http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbooks-Psychology/dp/0521600812/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380902611&sr=8-1&keywords=cambridge+handbook+of+expertise)_
# Ganesalingam and Gowers on automated theorem-proving

Ganesalingam and Gowers recently released an [ArXiV preprint](http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4501) of their article "A fully automatic problem solver with human-style output" about a theorem-proving program they have written that generates _human-readable output_. Gowers had blogged about the program [in April 2013](http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/answers-results-of-polls-and-a-brief-description-of-the-program/), after soliciting responses from readers regarding answers generated by the program and by humans (without explicitly revealing that one of the answerers was a machine) [in March 2013](http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/an-experiment-concerning-mathematical-writing/).

There do exist theorem-proving systems such as [Coq](http://coq.inria.fr/). In fact, it was announced about a year ago that the proof of the Feit-Thompson odd-order theorem, which originally appeared in a 255-page journal article in 1963, had been completely [verified using Coq](http://www.msr-inria.fr/news/feit-thomson-proved-in-coq/). But the Gowers-Ganesalingam program differs in that the output of this program is a human-style proof (for better or worse) whereas Coq uses a formal language syntax (see [here](http://ssr2.msr-inria.inria.fr/~jenkins/current/BGsection7.html#normed_constrained_meet_trans) for a small part of the proof of the Feit-Thompson theorem using Coq).

The ArXiV preprint contains details of the program and how the authors believe it improves on existing programs. One of the ways they believe they are better than past provers is their ability to more explicitly code for picking promising lines of reasoning.

I'd appreciate comments from LessWrong readers about the specifics of the Ganesalingam-Gowers program, and any broader ramifications of their ability to create this program for predictions related to artificial intelligence.
# Megameetup on December 13-15th, NYC

This winter, we'll be hosting a megameetup on December 13th-15th. This is the weekend of the [Winter Solstice](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/244974495/brighter-than-today-a-secular-solstice), a big event we're putting together the rationality, humanist and transhumanist communities of the area. (The Solstice celebration is on Saturday evening - if you'd like to attend, you should check out the kickstarter and back it. [Seating is limited and tickets are sold in advance are $25](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/244974495/brighter-than-today-a-secular-solstice)).

[![](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2000477/brighterThanToday.jpg)](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/244974495/brighter-than-today-a-secular-solstice)

Eight members of the New York Rationality community recently moved into a gorgeous house in Brooklyn. It's got 5500 square feet. The first floor, approximately 1800 square feet, has four areas that with sliding doors that can either be treated as a single, huge meetup space, or broken into smaller areas.

Also it has secret doors.

We have named it "Highgarden."

![](http://img.streeteasy.com/nyc/image/19/48500519.jpg)    ![](http://img.streeteasy.com/nyc/image/79/53693179.jpg)

We're really looking forward to turning this into a genuine rationality community center. We have self improvement meetups every other Sunday (the next one is on the October 13th), and have other one-off events in the works.

Friday night and Saturday afternoon will primarily casual hangouts, before most of us head over to the Solstice event. On Sunday there will be a presentation on the current state of Effective Altruism. We're aiming to have other presentations as well but details are not finalized yet.

We have a large (but not unlimited) array of crash space, so if you'd like to spend Friday and/or Saturday night at Highgarden, you should let us know in advance.  
  
Looking forward to seeing many of you there!  
  
**_When + Where_**

_Highgarden House -851 Park Place Brooklyn NY, 11261_

_Friday, December 13th, 7:00 PM - Saturday, December 15th, 7:00 PM_
# Superintelligence fiction - "Understand", by Ted Chiang

[http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm?2](http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm?2). 15-30 min read time, rated "pretty good" by me.

There are a couple of interesting features of this story that I would like to discuss - but I don't want to introduce any spoilers, so I'll just leave this here for now.
# Advice for a smart 8-year-old bored with school 

Although my 8-year-old son likes his teacher, he is frequently bored at school.  He attends a high quality suburban public school in the United States.  He has a lot of traits in common with LessWrong readers, and we would like advice for what he can do to counter his boredom.  Many of you must have found grade school more or less tedious.  What were your coping strategies?
# The selfish reason to write something for Ada Lovelace Day

Last October there was a [discussion post](/lw/ezb/happy_ada_lovelace_day/) on Ada Lovelace Day, and it met with something of a lukewarm reception. Fair enough. There are legitimate criticisms of this particular blogosphere event, and people are welcome to subscribe to those criticisms, or not, as they see fit. Personally, I'm quite fond of Ada Lovelace Day, in no small part because I get a chance to write about one of my nerdy interests in a public place with a reasonable expectation that a lay audience will attempt to engage with it. This year, the occasion falls on October 15th, and as a result I'm currently drafting a short piece on Esther Duflo, a development economist responsible for pioneering randomised controlled trials of policy interventions in developing countries. She's [rather prolific](http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=esther+duflo), has a shelf full of academic awards, and is a [hot tip](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/09/thomson-reuters-predicts-the-2013-nobel-laureate-in-economics.html) for a Nobel Memorial Prize over the next few years or so.

So I was thinking about this: I get to talk about the importance of randomised controlled trials in policy-making; I get to talk about evidence-based philanthropy; I get to wrap it up with a [don't-put-mustard-on-the-cat](http://flyingmoose.org/heman/mustard.htm) closing message of how it's not enough to just _care_ about an issue, you have to be _informed_ on it as well, (and by the way, there's this thing called "effective altruism" you might want to look up); and I can expect a reasonable number of readers to actually engage with it, because it's ostensibly written about the work of an interesting woman on Ada Lovelace Day.

You can probably see where I'm going with this by now.

Whether or not you think it's valuable to publicise the work of women in STEM, it is an excellent opportunity to sneak assorted pro-rationality memes under the radar to an audience that wouldn't necessarily engage with them otherwise. Less Wrong has a lot of eloquent people with knowledge across a wide assortment of different domains. I'm curious as to what we could come up with if we made a concerted effort to do this.

For that matter (and Harry Potter fanfic aside), it's an interesting question as to what other popular internet phenomena can be co-opted for this purpose.
# Teaching rationality to kids?

I'm finally getting around to reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow". Much of it I had already learned on LW and elsewhere. Maybe that's why my strongest impression from the book is how accessible it is. Simple sentences, clear and vivid examples, easy-to-follow exercises, a remarkable lack of references to topics not explained right away.

I caught myself thinking "This is a book I should have read as a kid". In my first language, I think I could have managed it as early as 11 years old. Since [measured IQ is strongly influenced by habits of thinking](http://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_higher_than_our_grandparents.html) and [cognitive returns can be reinvested](http://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf), I'm sure I would be smarter now if I had.

So I have decided to buy a stack of these books and give them to kids on their, say, 12th birthdays. Then maybe Dan Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" a year later - and HPMOR a year after that? I would like to see more suggestions from you guys.

It should be obviously better to start even earlier. So how do you teach rationality to a nine-year-old? Or a seven-year-old? Has anybody done something like that? Please name books, videos or web sites.

If such media are not available, creating them should be low-hanging fruit in the quest to raise the global IQ and [sanity waterline](/lw/1e/raising_the_sanity_waterline/). [ELI5 writing](http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/‎) is very learnable, after all, and ELI5 type interpretations of, say, the sequences, [might be helpful for adults too](/lw/kh/explainers_shoot_high_aim_low/).
# [Link] Low-Hanging Poop

**Related:** [Son of Low Hanging Fruit](/r/discussion/lw/h4u/link_son_of_lowhanging_fruit/)

[Another post](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/low-hanging-poop/) on finding low hanging fruit from [Gregory Cochran](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Cochran)'s and [Henry Harpending](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Harpending)'s blog [West Hunter](http://westhunt.wordpress.com/).

> _Clostridium difficile _causes a potentially serious kind of diarrhea triggered by antibiotic treatments. When the normal bacterial flora of the colon are hammered by a broad-spectrum antibiotic, _C. difficile_ often takes over and causes real trouble.  Mild cases are treated by discontinuing antibiotic therapy, which often works: if not, the doctors try oral metronidazole (Flagyl), then vancomycin , then intravenous metronidazole.  This doesn’t always work, and _C. difficile_ infections kill about 14,000 people a year in the US.
> 
> One recent [trial](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1205037) shows that fecal bacteriotherapy, more commonly called a stool transplant, works like gangbusters, curing ~94% of patients. The trial was halted because the treatment worked so well that refusing to poopify the control group was clearly unethical.  I read about this, but thought I’d heard about such stool transplants some time ago.  I had.  It was mentioned in _The Making of a Surgeon_, by William Nolen, published in 1970. Some crazy intern – let us call him Hogan – tried a stool transplant on a woman with a _C. difficile infection._ He mixed some normal stool with chocolate milk and fed it to the lady.  It made his boss so mad that he was dropped from the program at the end of the year.  It also worked. It was inspired by a article in _Annals of Surgery, _so this certainly wasn’t the first try.  According to Wiki,  there are more than 150 published reports on stool transplant, going back to 1958.
> 
> So what took so damn long?  Here we have a simple, cheap, highly effective treatment for _C. difficile_ infection that has only become officially valid this year. Judging from the _H. pylori  _story_,_ it may still take years before it is in general use.
> 
> Obviously, sheer disgust made it hard for doctors to embrace this treatment.  There’s a lesson here: in the search for low-hanging fruit,  reconsider approaches that are embarrassing, or offensive, or downright disgusting.
> 
> **Investigate methods were abandoned because people hated them, rather because of solid evidence showing that they didn’t work.**
> 
> Along those lines, no modern educational reformer utters a single syllable about corporal punishment: doesn’t that make you suspect it’s effective?  I mean, why we aren’t we caning kids anymore?  The Egyptians said that a boy’s ears are in his back: if you do not beat him he will not listen. Maybe they knew a thing or three.
> 
> Sometimes, we hate the idea’s _authors_: the more we hate them, the more likely we are to miss out on their correct insights. Even famous assholes had to be competent in _some_ areas, or they wouldn’t have been able to cause serious trouble.
# [Link] You and Your Research

I've seen [Richard Hamming's](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming) classic talk You And Your Research referenced several times on LessWrong and figured I would post the full version. The introduction is reproduced below:

> The title of my talk is, ``You and Your Research.'' It is not about managing research, it is about how you individually do your research. I could give a talk on the other subject - but it's not, it's about you. I'm not talking about ordinary run-of-the-mill research; I'm talking about great research. And for the sake of describing great research I'll occasionally say Nobel-Prize type of work. It doesn't have to gain the Nobel Prize, but I mean those kinds of things which we perceive are significant things. Relativity, if you want, Shannon's information theory, any number of outstanding theories - that's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
> 
> Now, how did I come to do this study? At Los Alamos I was brought in to run the computing machines which other people had got going, so those scientists and physicists could get back to business. I saw I was a stooge. I saw that although physically I was the same, they were different. And to put the thing bluntly, I was envious. I wanted to know why they were so different from me. I saw Feynman up close. I saw Fermi and Teller. I saw Oppenheimer. I saw Hans Bethe: he was my boss. I saw quite a few very capable people. I became very interested in the difference between those who do and those who might have done.
> 
> When I came to Bell Labs, I came into a very productive department. Bode was the department head at the time; Shannon was there, and there were other people. I continued examining the questions, \`\`Why?'' and \`\`What is the difference?'' I continued subsequently by reading biographies, autobiographies, asking people questions such as: ``How did you come to do this?'' I tried to find out what are the differences. And that's what this talk is about.

I consider this talk good and useful not only for those interested in research, but for those interested in achieving much of anything. [Check it out!](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)
# [Link] Trouble at the lab

**Related:** [The Real End of Science](/lw/erk/link_the_real_end_of_science/)

[From](http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble) the Economist.

> “I SEE a train wreck looming,” warned Daniel Kahneman, an eminent psychologist, in an open letter last year. The premonition concerned research on a phenomenon known as “priming”. Priming studies suggest that decisions can be influenced by apparently irrelevant actions or events that took place just before the cusp of choice. They have been a boom area in psychology over the past decade, and some of their insights have already made it out of the lab and into the toolkits of policy wonks keen on “nudging” the populace.
> 
> Dr Kahneman and a growing number of his colleagues fear that a lot of this priming research is poorly founded. Over the past few years various researchers have made systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited priming experiments. Many of these replications have failed. In April, for instance, a paper in _PLoS ONE_, a journal, reported that nine separate experiments had not managed to reproduce the results of a famous study from 1998 purporting to show that thinking about a professor before taking an intelligence test leads to a higher score than imagining a football hooligan.
> 
> The idea that the same experiments always get the same results, no matter who performs them, is one of the cornerstones of science’s claim to objective truth. If a systematic campaign of replication does not lead to the same results, then either the original research is flawed (as the replicators claim) or the replications are (as many of the original researchers on priming contend). Either way, something is awry.
> 
> ...

  
I recommend reading the whole thing.
# What should normal people do?

What should a not-very-smart person do?  Suppose you know a not-very-smart person (around or below average intelligence).  S/he read about rationality, has utilitarian inclinations, and wants to make the world better.  However, s/he isn't smart enough to discover new knowledge in most fields, or contribute very much to a conversation of more knowledgeable experts on a given topic.  Let's assume s/he has no exceptional talents in any area.

How do you think a person like that could best use his/her time and energy?  What would you tell the person to do?  This person may be, compared to average LW readership, less capable of noticing the irrationality in his/her actions even if s/he wants to be rid of it, and less easily able to notice the flaws in a bad argument.  S/he may never be able to deeply understand why certain arguments are correct, certain scientific facts have to be the way they are, and telling him/her to be unsure or sure about anything seems dangerous if s/he doesn't really understand why.  

My practical advice might be:

1) If you want to give to charity, follow GiveWell recommendations.  

2) Learn about the basic biases, and commit to resisting them in your own life. 

3)  Follow advice that has been tested, that correctly predicts a positive outcome.  If a hypothesis is untestable (there's an unsensible dragon in your garage) or doesn't predict anything (fire comes from phlogiston in combustable substances), or is tested and demonstrably false (god will smite you if you say it doesn't exist), don't waste time and energy on it.  If you want to improve, look for tested methods that have significant positive results relevant to the area of interest.  Similarly, if a person regularly gives you advice that does not lead to good outcomes, stop following it, and if someone gives advice that leads to good outcomes, start paying attention even if you like that person less.  

At a more general level, my thoughts are tentative, but might include basic LW tenets such as:

1) Don't be afraid of the truth, because you're already enduring it.

2) If all the experts in a field agree on something, they might be wrong, but you are extremely unlikely to be better at uncovering the truth, so follow their advice, which might appear to conflict with...

3) Don't trust deep wisdom.  Use Occam's razor, think about simple, basic reasons something might be true (this seems good for religion and moral issues, bad for scientific ideas and understanding)

4) If you find yourself flinching away from an idea, notice that, and give it extra attention.  

Note:  I mean this as a serious, and hopefully non-insulting question.  Most people are intellectually near-average or below-average, and I have not seen extensive discussion on how to help them lead happier lives that make the world a better place.
# Intellectual energy

One of the big variations I see between people is the amount of energy they habitually put into thinking, and I haven't seen this discussed anywhere.

General advice about improving health and lowering intellectual friction would seem to help increase the ability to think, and ideas like "take five minutes to consider the problem" adds impetus, but I'm not sure what the general difference is between me and most people, or [Yvain](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/25/list-of-fictional-drugs-banned-by-the-fda/) and me.

Intellectual drive isn't an unalloyed good-- cranks have high drive combined with low self-editinig, and some types of depression include a compulsion to think about topics that cause misery and/or inertia. Part (all?) of the value of meditation is getting some time off from thinking. Still, increasing intellectual drive would probably be a good thing for a lot of people. 

Has anyone found that rationality training or anything else increases the default desire to think?
# Replicating Douglas Lenat's Traveller TCS win with publicly-known techniques

Douglas Lenat's program [EURISKO](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko) is legendary in the AI community for a distinct real-world achievement: allowing Lenat to win the the Traveller TCS roleplaying game tournament two years in a row (and then semi-voluntarily not competing subsequent years). Lenat never released EURISKO's source code, leaving how he managed to pull off this feat somewhat of a mystery. Yet Lenat's later work based on EURISKO does not seem to have yielded anything else in the way of practical benefits. 

Some time ago on LessWrong, someone proposed [trying to figure out what Lenat did and reimplementing EURISKO](/lw/10g/lets_reimplement_eurisko/). But [Eliezer is worried this could be dangerous](/lw/10g/lets_reimplement_eurisko/sxe). So I have another proposal: see if Lenat's accomplishment can be replicated using machine learning and genetic programming techniques that are already publicly known.

My suspicion is that Lenat's TCS win tells us more about TCS than about EURISKO, that TCS is likely a game that's inherently vulnerable to the "find winning strategies by simulating a lots of games on a computer" meta-strategy. I've heard, for example, that battles are often tactically trivial, with the outcome of battles effectively determined by the composition of the two fleets (and fleet composition is what Lenat used EURISKO for). If that hypothesis is correct, though, it suggests it shouldn't be necessary to reimplement EURISKO specifically to get a program that's good at designing TCS fleets. If that turns out not to be the case, it would be evidence that there really is something special about EURISKO after all.

Does anyone know if anyone has tried this? As a novice computer programmer, I think it might be a good project to hone my programming skills. Input on how to approach such a project would be appreciated.
# Is it worth your time to read a lot of self help and how to books?

Some time ago, I noticed that lukeprog seems to have an exceptional knack for reading up on a subject and actually putting what he's learned to practical use. At first I thought he might be some weird genetic freak, literally - some people are good at math, others are good at languages, maybe Luke is just good at putting stuff he's read to practical use. That, or I hoped he had some secret to it that he could put into words and share with the rest of us.

But then then it occurred to me that Luke, by his own account, has spent a ridiculous amount of time reading self-help books. In a LessWrong post, he says, ["I've spent several years studying scientific self-help"](/lw/7k6/my_favorite_popular_scientific_selfhelp_books/); IIRC his personal site used to have a ridiculous number of reviews of self-help books, including ones with a less scientific approach. This makes me suspect that probably, spending all that time reading self-help books made him better at learning how to do things. Even reading crappy self-help books (which again IIRC Luke's old website said he did a lot of, at first) may have helped, insofar as it taught him to tell good advice from bad.

He may be able to verbalize some of what he learned, like "look for books that take a scientific approach," but I suspect he's developed considerable non-verbalizable yet learnable skill in this area. I see a parallel here for my own skill at doing library research factual questions: some of it I can verbalize (Google it, read the Wikipedia article, look rigorous academic work, [look for hard data on the opinions of experts](/lw/iu0/trusting_expert_consensus/)), but a lot of it is stuff I can't verbalize, which another person could only gain through spending as much time doing research as I have.

I've previously had an aversion to reading much in the way of self help and how to books because of an expectation that mostly they'll suck, but now I think that maybe, when I get some spare time, I should buckle down, pick a topic (maybe writing), and read a bunch of how to books anyway, with a hope of actually getting better at the thing but mostly as an exercise in learning to learn how to do things. But I'm curious to know if other people think this is a good idea - if they see a flaw in my logic, or if anyone who's read a lot of self help and how to books can comment on whether they think it helped them tell good advice from bad.
# Supplementing memory with experience sampling

If you asked me how happy I've been, I'd think back over my recent life and synthesize my memories into a judgement. Since I'm the one experiencing my life you would think this would be accurate, but our memories aren't fair. For example, people who had their hand in 57° water for 60 seconds rated the experience as less pleasant than people who had their hand in the same 57° water for the same 60 seconds, followed by 30 seconds with the water slowly rising to 59°. (Kahneman 1993, [pdf](http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/~perlman/0903-EmoPaper/KahnemanFredricksonSchreiberRedelmeier_1993_WhenMorePainIsPreferredToLess.pdf)) This is the [peak-end rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak%E2%80%93end_rule) where when we look back at an experience we don't really consider the duration and instead evaluate it based on how it was at its peak and how it ended.

This disagreement between emotion as it is experienced and emotion as it is remembered is called the memory-experience gap, and the peak-end rule is only one of the causes. The problem is, generally we only have access to memories of our emotion, which means if you're given the ice-water choice you'll repeatedly choose the option with more suffering. How can we get around this?

When psychologists want to get at experiential emotion they give people little timers. Every time the timer goes off the person writes down how happy/sad they are at that moment. This is an external sampling method that lets us use any sort of aggregation we would like, and it's fair in a way our internal methods are not. When I first read about this I thought "neat" and moved on, but recently I realized I that with a computer in my pocket I could do this myself. After [asking around](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/630685254572) I ended up with the [TagTime](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=bsoule.tagtime) Android app, which is the only way I've found to do this that (a) works without an internet connection and (b) has an equal probability of sampling at every moment.

The response screen looks like:

![](http://www.jefftk.com/tagtime-screenshot-sm.png)

You tap tags to say which ones currently apply. I have them sorted by frequency. To add new tags you turn the phone sideways and type text:

![](http://www.jefftk.com/tagtime-addtags-screenshot.png)

That's a little annoying, but most of the time I'm not entering a new tag.

I have tags for happiness (numbers 0-9, added as I need them), for aspects of activities, and for people I'm with. Every so often I email the data to myself and add it to my [full log](http://www.jefftk.com/tagtime.log) which backs a [graph](http://www.jefftk.com/happiness_graph):

[![](http://www.jefftk.com/happiness_graph_screenshot.png)](http://www.jefftk.com/happiness_graph)

Retrospective happiness still matters; you want to be happy with your life looking back. Because this is our memory, however, we're already aware of it and already optimize for it in our life. Adding sampled data should allow us to adjust that optimization to fix the things that are important but hidden by our biased memories.
# Why didn't people (apparently?) understand the metaethics sequence?

There seems to be a widespread impression that [the metaethics sequence](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence) was not very successful as an explanation of Eliezer Yudkowsky's views. [It even says so on the wiki](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences#The_Metaethics_Sequence). And frankly, I'm puzzled by this... hence the "apparently" in this post's title. When I read the metaethics sequence, it seemed to make perfect sense to me. I can think of a couple things that may have made me different from the average OB/LW reader in this regard:

1.  I read [Three Worlds Collide](/lw/y4/) _before_ doing my systematic read-through of the sequences.
2.  I have a background in academic philosophy, so I had a similar thought to [Richard Chapell's](/lw/435/what_is_eliezer_yudkowskys_metaethical_theory/3foq) linking of Eliezer's metaethics to rigid designators independently of Richard.

Reading the comments on the metaethics sequence, though, hasn't enlightened me about what exactly people had a problem with, aside from a lot of arguing about definitions over whether Eliezer counts as a relativist.

  

What's going on here? I ask mainly because I'm thinking of trying to write a post (or sequence?) explaining the metaethics sequence, and I'm wondering what points I should address, what issues I should look out for, etc.
# [Link] Lost and Found 

**Related:** [Son of Low Hanging Fruit](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/h4u/link_son_of_lowhanging_fruit/), [Low Hanging Poop](/r/discussion/lw/iud/link_lowhanging_poop/)

A [post](http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/lost-and-found/) by [Gregory Cochran](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Cochran)'s and [Henry Harpending](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Harpending)'s blog [West Hunter](http://westhunt.wordpress.com/).

> Marcus Terentius Varro  was called the most learned of the Romans.  But what did he know, and how did he know it? I ask because of this quote, from _Rerum rusticarum libri III_ (Agricultural Topics in Three Books):
> 
> “Especial care should be taken, in locating the steading, to place it at the foot of a wooded hill, where there are broad pastures, and so as to be exposed to the most healthful winds that blow in the region. A steading facing the east has the best situation, as it has the shade in summer and the sun in winter. If you are forced to build on the bank of a river, be careful not to let the steading face the river, as it will be extremely cold in winter, and unwholesome in summer. 2 Precautions must also be taken in the neighbourhood of swamps, both for the reasons given, and because there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.” “What can I do,” asked Fundanius, “to prevent disease if  I should inherit a farm of that kind?” “Even I can answer that question,” replied Agrius; “sell it for the highest cash price; or if you can’t sell it, abandon it.”
> 
> I get the distinct impression that someone (probably someone other than Varro) came up with an approximation of germ theory 1500 years before [Girolamo Fracastoro](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girolamo_Fracastoro).  But his work was lost.
> 
> Everybody knows, or should know, that the vast majority of Classical literature has not been preserved.  Those lost works contained facts and ideas that might have value today – certainly there are topics that we understand much better because of insights from Classical literature. For example,  Reich and Patterson find that some of the Indian castes have existed for something like three thousand years:  this is easier to believe when you consider that Megasthenes wrote about the caste system as early as 300 BC.
> 
> We don’t put much effort into recovering lost Classical literature.  But there are ways in which we could push harder – by increased funding for work on the Herculaneum scrolls, or the Oxyrhynchus papyri collection, for example.  Some old-fashioned motivated archaeology might get lucky and find another set of Amarna cuneiform letters, or a new Antikythera  mechanism.
# Halloween thread - rationalist's horrors.

This is a kind of "X files" thread.

Post experiences which spooked you, which made you doubt reality, mathematical or physical laws, your sanity, memory or perception. The more improbable the better, but no second-hand legends please, share only what you personally experienced. If you had the event later explained rationally please use rot13 to avoid spoilers.
# 2013 Census/Survey: call for changes and additions

I have finally gotten the survey to a point where I'm pretty happy with it. I have no big changes I want to make this year. But as is the tradition, please take a week to discuss what _minor_ changes you want to the survey (within the limits of what Google Docs and finite time can do) and I will try to comply. In particular, we can continue the tradition that any question you request can be added to the Extra Credit section unless it's illegal or horribly offensive.

You can find last year's survey results [here](/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/) and you can find the very preliminary version of this year's survey (so far exactly the same as last year's) [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?usp=drive_web&formkey=dGZ6a1NfZ0V1SV9xdE1ma0pUMTc1S1E6MA#gid=0).

**EDIT:** I don't particularly like the IQ test or the Big Five test used last year. If you have any better replacements for either, tell me and I'll put them in.

**EDIT2:** CFAR, you added seven questions last year. Let me know what you want to do with those this year. Keep them? Remove them? Replace them?
# Meetup: Somewhere you do not live even close to

Six out of the last 10 posts are about single meetups. And I care about none of them.

I will look into whipping together some kind of bot that periodically posts threads like the open thread or a meetup thread. Voice your opinion in the comments if you do not want me to do that.

That is all.
# Academic Cliques

In my article on [trusting expert consensus](/lw/iu0/trusting_expert_consensus/), I talked about the value of having hard data on the opinions of experts in a given field. The unspoken subtext was that you should be careful of claims of expert consensus that don't have hard data to back them up. I've joked that when a philosopher says there's a philosophical consensus, what he really means is "I talked to a few of my friends about this and they agreed with me."

What's often really happening, though (at least in philosophy) is that the "consensus" really reflects the opinions of a particular academic clique. A sub-group of experts in the field spend a disproportionate amount of time talking to each other, and end up convincing themselves they represent the consensus of the entire profession. A rather conspicuous example of this is what I've called [the Plantinga clique](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/hallq/2013/11/the-plantinga-clique/) on my own blog—theistic philosophers who've convinced themselves that the opinions of Alvin Plantinga represent the consensus of philosophy.

But it isn't just theistic philosophers who do this. When I was in school, it was still possible to hear fans of Quine claim that everyone knew Quine had refuted the analytic synthetic distinction. Post [PhilPapers survey](http://philpapers.org/surveys/), hopefully people have stopped claiming this. And one time, I heard a philosophy blogger berating scientists for being ignorant of the findings in philosophy that all philosophers agree on. I asked him for examples of claims that all philosophers agree on, I responded with examples of philosophers who rejected some of those claims, "Ah," he said, "but they don't count. Let me tell you who's opinions matter..." (I'm paraphrasing, but that was what it amounted to.)

I _strongly_ suspect this happens in other disciplines: supposed "consensuses of experts" are really just the opinions of one clique within a discipline. Thus, I tend to approach claims of consensus in any discipline with skepticism when they're not backed up by hard data. But I don't actually know of verifiable examples of this problem outside of philosophy. Has other people with backgrounds in other disciplines noticed things like this?