Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# My favorite popular scientific self-help books

I've spent several years studying [scientific self-help](/lw/3nn/scientific_selfhelp_the_state_of_our_knowledge/). I'm sharing some of what I've learned in my sequence [The Science of Winning at Life](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Science_of_Winning_at_Life), but I probably won't have time to write additional posts in that series for a while. In the meantime, those who are interested in what mainstream scientists have discovered so far about effective self-help methods may want to read some of my favorite popular-level scientific self-help books:

*   Wiseman, _[59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute](http://www.amazon.com/59-Seconds-Change-Minute-Vintage/dp/0307474860/)_
*   Steel, _[The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Things Done](http://www.amazon.com/Procrastination-Equation-Putting-Things-Getting/dp/0061703613/)_
*   Seligman, _[Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being](http://www.amazon.com/Flourish-Visionary-Understanding-Happiness-Well-being/dp/1439190755/)_
*   Halverson, _[Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals](http://www.amazon.com/Succeed-How-Can-Reach-Goals/dp/1594630739/)_
*   Burns, _[Feeling Good](http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Therapy-Revised-Updated/dp/0380810336/)_

See also: [My favorite journals](/lw/7jb/scholarship_booster_my_favorite_journals/).
# Rationalist sites worth archiving?

One of my long-standing interests is in writing content that will [age gracefully](http://www.gwern.net/About#long-content), but as a child of the Internet, I am addicted to linking and linkrot is profoundly threatening to me, so another interest of mine is in archiving URLs; [my current methodology](http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs) is a combination of archiving my browsing in public archives like Internet Archive and locally, and proactively archiving entire sites. Anyway, sites I have previously archived in part or in total include:

1.  LessWrong (I may've caused some downtime here, sorry about that)
2.  OvercomingBias
3.  SL4
4.  [Chronopause.com](http://chronopause.com/)
5.  Yudkowsky.net (in progress)
6.  Singinst.org
7.  PredictionBook.com (for obvious reasons)
8.  LongBets.org & LongNow.org
9.  Intrade.com
10.  Commonsenseatheism.com
11.  finney.org
12.  nickbostrom.com
13.  unenumerated.blogspot.com & [http://szabo.best.vwh.net/](http://szabo.best.vwh.net/)
14.  weidai.com
15.  mattmahoney.net
16.  aibeliefs.blogspot.com

Having recently added WikiWix to my archival bot, I was thinking of re-running various sites, and I'd like to know - what other LW-related websites are there that people would like to be able to access _somewhere_ in 30 or 40 years?

(This is an important long-term issue, and I don't want to miss any important sites, so I am posting this as an Article rather than the usual Discussion. I already regret not archiving Robert Bradbury's full personal website - having only his [Matrioshka Brains article](http://www.gwern.net/docs/1999-bradbury-matrioshkabrains.pdf) \- and do not wish to repeat the mistake.)
# LessWrong and Rationality ebooks via Amazon

After just spending some time browsing [free nonficton kindle ebooks on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_tc_sc_2_2?rh=n:157325011,p_74:0-0&sort=reviewrank_authority&pf_rd_r=06XN0ZBQCQ2XSHRC9D10&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_t=301&pf_rd_i=free%20kindle%20books&pf_rd_p=1278455062&pf_rd_s=structured-results-2&qid=1315756161&sr=1-2-tc), it occurred to me that it might be a good idea for SIAI/LW to publish for free download through Amazon some introductory LW essays and other useful introductory works like [Twelve Virtues of Rationality](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues) and [The Simple Truth](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth).

People who search for 'rationality' on Google will see Eliezer's _Twelve Virtues of Rationality_ and LW. It would nice if [searching for rationality on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_p_n_feature_browse-b_mrr_2?rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Arationality%2Cp_n_feature_browse-bin%3A618073011&bbn=283155&sort=pricerank&keywords=rationality&ie=UTF8&qid=1315757326&rnid=618072011) also led people to similar resources that could be read on the Kindle with just one click. It would considerably expand the audience of potential readers (and LW contributors and SIAI donors).
# [Help]: Social cost of cryonics? 

Over the past few months I've been doing a lot of reading about cryonics, and though I agree with the arguments of [Eliezer Yudkowsky](/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/) and [Robin Hanson](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/break-cryonics-down.html) on the issue, I still feel uncomfortable about actually signing up. Upon reflection, my [true rejection](/lw/wj/is_that_your_true_rejection/) is my fear of the social cost of cryonics, i.e. being perceived as [weird and completely incomprehensible](/lw/wj/is_that_your_true_rejection/) by everyone around me. I've read the ["Hostile Wife Phenomenon" article on Depressed Metabolism](http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/is-that-what-love-is-the-hostile-wife-phenomenon-in-cryonics/), the [New York Times Magazine article on Robin Hanson's personal situation](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/magazine/11cryonics-t.html) (as well as [Robin's reply](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/modern-male-sati.html)), and scores of comments on LessWrong, and it looks a lot of cryonicists do indeed experience the feeling that Eliezer describes in [Lonely Dissent](/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/).

My concerns about the social cost of cryonics can be broken down into two categories:

*   _Loss of existing relationships with family, friends, etc._ I value the relationships I currently have with my family and friends, and signing up for cryonics would jeopardize many of these relationships. Most of my friends and family members are not interested in rationality and would be completely baffled if I decided to sign up. Nonetheless, I do not want to lose these relationships, as they are currently an important part of my life; I would consider my life to be significantly worse than it is now if I had to sever a lot of these emotional ties.
*   _Increased difficulty of forming relationships in the future._ I'm not particularly good at forming new relationships, and I'm very worried that signing up for cryonics will create an insurmountable social stigma that will make it nearly impossible for me to do so.

Overall, though, I have very little information about what the social cost of cryonics really is beyond a few scattered anecdotes and secondhand descriptions of cryonicists' lives. Ultimately, I don't really know how many of my fears would actually be realized if I signed up. This makes it difficult to for me to make a decision, as I am very risk-averse and I feel reluctant to choose something that could potentially make the next six or seven decades of my life miserable. As a result, I have decided to engage in some data collection.

To do so, I would like to hear about your experiences. If you are currently signed up for cryonics, I would very much appreciate it if you took a minute or two to describe the effects that signing up has had on your relationships and your social life in general. If you are not signed up, your feedback on this topic is still welcome. Links to articles would be good, but discussion of personal experiences would be better.
# Ask LW: What are some well-designed institutions?

I've been reading "Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution" and it's awesome. It's inspired me to ask LW:

Can you give me an example of a good institution? Why is it a good institution? What caused it to become a good institution?

It can be an institution at any level of organization. If you'd like to talk about why your brain is a good institution I'd like to hear about that. Or the country of Burma. Or the free market. Or the Catholic memeplex. Whatever you wish.
# [Link] Dilbert author tries to try

Scott Adams, author of Dilbert, believes that [trying to try is more effective than trying](http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/systems/):

> ...my system is that I _attempt_ to exercise five times a week around lunchtime. And I always allow myself the option of driving to the gym then turning around and going home. What I've discovered is that the routine of preparing to exercise usually inspires me to go through with it even if I didn't start out in the mood.\[...\]  
>   
> If I had a goal instead of a system, I would have failed \[when I didn't exercise\]. And I would have felt like a loser. That can't be good for motivation. That failure might be enough to prevent me from going to the gym the next time I don't feel 100%, just to avoid the risk of another failure.

Regular Less Wrong readers will remember Eliezer Yudkowsky's warning about [trying to try](/lw/uh/trying_to_try/):

> But when we deal with humans, _being satisfied with having a plan_ is not at all like _being satisfied with success._  The part where the plan has to maximize your probability of succeeding, gets lost along the way.  It's far easier to convince ourselves that we are "maximizing our probability of succeeding", than it is to convince ourselves that we will succeed.
> 
> Almost any effort will serve to convince us that we have "tried our hardest", if trying our hardest is all we are trying to do.

Adams says the danger of trying is that you will fail in trying, which will bruise your self-esteem and cripple your motivation to try again. Yudkowsky says the danger of trying to try is that you will succeed in trying to try, leaving you too easily satisfied and unmotivated to actually **do** the thing you were trying to try to do.

Have any readers had success in trying to try?
# 9/11 as mindkiller

Noah Millman [wrote](http://theamericanscene.com/2011/09/11/the-mind-killer):

> In retrospect, what suffered the most lasting damage from the terrorist attacks of ten years ago was my belief in my own rationality. I believed that I was thinking things through seriously, and coming to difficult but true conclusions about what had happened, what would happen, what must happen. Here is part of what I wrote, to friends and family, several days later:
> 
> > _Our President has made it clear: we are at war. I do not anticipate that this will be a short or an easy war. Our enemy has operations in dozens of countries, including this one. He is supported, out of enthusiasm or fear, by many governments among our purported friends as well as among our enemies. He has shown his cunning, his ruthlessness, and most of all his patience, in his successful plot to kill thousands of innocents and bring down the symbols of our civilization. And in striking at him, as we must, we will bring down others who will in turn seek their own vengeance upon us._
> 
> There is not a single factual assertion in that paragraph that I had any reason to believe I could substantiate. I did not know anything about the enemy. I had no idea whether or not there were “operations” in dozens of countries – I don’t even know what I meant by “operations.” I know what I was referring to with the business about being “supported” by friends and enemies, but “support” is a deliberately fuzzy word; I wouldn’t have used it if I was trying to make a concrete assertion with clear implications. The purpose of that assertion, like everything else, was to build up my first assertion. We were at war. And it wouldn’t be short or easy. Because that conclusion, though grim, was one that imparted meaning to the murder of 3,000 people. I thought I was being serious – examining the facts, calculating the likely negative consequences of necessary action, preparing myself for the unfortunate necessities of life. But I wasn’t doing anything of the kind. I was engaged in a search for meaning in which reason was purely instrumental.

Link (which includes additional good retrospectives) thanks to [Ampersand](http://www.amptoons.com/blog/2011/09/11/the-911-anniversary/).

This article may have more political content than is suitable for LW-- if you'd rather discuss it elsewhere, I've linked it at [my blog](http://nancylebov.livejournal.com/502459.html). I've posted about it here because it's an excellent example of updating and of recognizing motivated cognition even if well after the fact.
# Rationality tip: Predict your comment karma

For the last few months I've taken up the habit of explicitly predicting how much karma I'll get for each of my contributions on LW. I picked up the habit of doing so for Main posts back in the Visiting Fellows program, but I've found that doing it for comments is way more informative.

It forces you to build decent models of your audience and their social psychology, the game theoretic details of each particular situation, how information cascades should be expected to work, your overall memetic environment, etc. It also forces you to be reflective and to expand on your gut feeling of "people will upvote this a lot" or "people will downvote this a little bit"; it forces you to think through more specifically why you expect that, and how your contributions should be expected to shape the minds of your audience on average.

It also makes it easier to notice confusion. When one of my comments gets downvoted to -6 when I expected -3 then I know some part of my model is wrong; or, as is often the case, it will get voted back up to -3 within a few hours.

Having powerful intuitive models of social psychology is important for navigating disagreement. It helps you realize when people are agreeing or disagreeing for reasons they don't want to state explicitly, why they would find certain lines of argument more or less compelling, why they would feel justified in supporting or criticizing certain social norms, what underlying tensions they feel that cause them to respond in a certain way, etc, which is important for getting the maximum amount of evidence from your interactions. All the information in the world won't help you if you can't interpret it correctly.

Doing it well also makes you look cool. When I write from a social psychological perspective I get significantly more karma. And I can help people express things that they don't find easy to explicitly express, which is infinitely more important than karma. When you're taking into account not only people's words but the generators of people's words you get an automatic reflectivity bonus. Obviously, looking at their actual words is a prerequisite and is also an extremely important habit of sane communication.

Most importantly, gaining explicit knowledge of everyday social psychology is like explicitly understanding a huge portion of the world that you already knew. This is often a really fun experience.

There are a lot of subskills necessary to do this right, but maybe doing it wrong is also informative, if you keep trying.
# Leveling IRL - followup

I have finally achieved [level 1](/lw/71r/leveling_irl_level_1/), so I can talk about these things again!

It seems that our concept of leveling conflated two different ideas of self-improvement that should've been kept separate. The first idea is about trying out new things, like making pancakes, solving a trivial programming problem or playing the intro to "Smoke on the Water". Trying out new things is a lot of fun, but as many commenters have noted, it doesn't necessarily give you a long-term upgrade. (NB to everyone who considers me a strong rationalist: you'd change your opinion if you saw my pancakes!) 

The second idea is about establishing habits of practice. Some goals force you to set up a daily routine before you can achieve them. In retrospect, that daily routine always turns out to have been the main thing of value, and the actual result is almost an afterthought. For example, my routine over the last several months has looked like this: cold shower every day, jump-rope workout and drum practice every weekday, strength training twice a week, travel every weekend. Once you get into the groove, you don't wanna get out.

So maybe instead of designing level 2 we could somehow incentivize each other to pick up (and keep) rigorous habits, e.g. write N words every day without exception? Any ideas?
# Interview with Singularity Institute Research Fellow Luke Muehlhauser

Yesterday I sat down with Lukeprog for a few hours and we produced this ten-page interview for the Singularity Institute blog. This interview contains information about the Singularity Institute's technical research program and recent staff changes that hasn't been announced anywhere else!  We hope you find it informative. 

[http://singinst.org/blog/2011/09/15/interview-with-new-singularity-institute-research-fellow-luke-muehlhuaser-september-2011/](http://intelligence.org/blog/2011/09/15/interview-with-new-singularity-institute-research-fellow-luke-muehlhuaser-september-2011/)
# Which Fields Are Underserved?

I'm currently about 2/3rds through Jane Jacobs' "[The Death and Life of Great American Cities](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_American_Cities)". This is one of the defining works of modern urban planning, and Jane Jacobs is considered one of our most important [urban planning thinkers](http://www.planetizen.com/topthinkers).

It's a fine book, but I found myself surprised at just how unimpressive it is for a work of such supposed importance. Her hypothesis is simple enough that I can summarize it here:

-Cities succeed by having many people using the city streets throughout the day. Large numbers of people keep the streets safe, and provide enough traffic for businesses to thrive.

-To achieve this constant stream of people, streets should have a large variety of different businesses which are utilized at different times, and should eliminate barriers that prevent the flow of people.

Jacobs' reaches this hypothesis through her own observations of various cities, along with a few bits of data concerning densities, crime rates, etc. But there's no systematic examination of data, no meticulously constructed arguments, and no addressing of criticisms or alternate explanations. Evidently, all that it takes to be a great work in urban planning is the barest rudiments of basic science. (This isn't the first time I've been critical of [supposed great works in this field](/lw/2kk/book_recommendations/2ei6).)

It strikes me that, for whatever reason, Urban Planning is an underserved field* - the scholarship behind it doesn't compare to, say, the quality of work done in evolution, or cognitive psychology.

I have my theories for why this might be**, but it got me thinking - which other fields show a distinct lack of quality work done in them? What other fields are underserved?

-

*There is of course the possibility that I'm unfamiliar with more recent, higher quality urban planning literature.

**Namely, that urban planning is an offshoot of architecture, which has tended to value on aesthetic judgement and intuition over empiricism and rigorously constructed arguments.
# Case study: Folding@home

Latest in an irregular series, some of whose previous entries were [Edge.org](/lw/7gy/case_study_reading_edges_financial_filings/) and the [Girl Scouts](/lw/5el/are_girl_scout_cookies_deliciously_evil_a_case/)...

I examine the Folding@home distributed computing project with reference to the costs (electricity resulting in air pollution causing deaths) and benefits (some papers): [http://www.gwern.net/Charity is not about helping](http://www.gwern.net/Charity%20is%20not%20about%20helping). Additional data on either side of the cost-benefit is welcome.

(I also recently split out my essay describing [things I have changed my mind on](http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes).)
# The Ramblings of an Old Man Succumbing to Dementia

My grandfather died several years ago, before I began to seriously consider cryonics. He deteriorated markedly as he approached death. Nevertheless, he was smart enough to want to be part of the new technologies "the kids were putting out these days." At age 90, with some help, he created a blog and posted [this entry](http://redcockaded.blogspot.com/2007/02/old-age-is-worth-living-to.html):

>   
> As my memory weakens, I no longer perform much, but I deeply enjoy life. My wife, Genie, and my three daughters help me a lot, with food, walks, talks, and gifts. I usually feel good. Many other people say and do nice things for me.  
>   
> ...  
>   
> Life began as cells 3 ½ billion years ago and gradually spread out from one species to another. There is no evidence of any species living after death. Therefore, each human should enjoy life, itself. Long before our Earth formed, our Universe spread out 14 billion years ago, long after material existed, which may have been forever. On that basis, I think human lives are a result of amazing development. We can enjoy life deeply into old age and on almost to death. No human should weaken true enjoyment by physically attacking another human. A human may argue with another human with the purpose of keeping both lives enjoyable.
> 
> When approaching death, a person should overcome huge pain by mental concentration or medicine and enjoy the remainder of life. This can be done by listening to music, relatives, friends, reading, and other actions. Life can be pleasant to the end, or about to the end. Enjoy yourself. Be nice to others.

The unedited entry (still up, along with other postings to his blog) concerns the mental topics that were occupying him at the end of life: mainly birdwatching and overpopulation. I post it here as evidence that even a very old person, suffering the mental and physical burdens of advanced old age, can still enjoy themselves and value life.

From one perspective, it is the ramblings of an old man succumbing to dementia. From another, it is proof that life is never a thing to be easily surrendered.

Enjoy yourself. Be nice to others.
# Your inner Google

I just heard a comment by Braddock of Lovesystems that was brilliant:  All that your brain does when you ask it a question is hit "search" and return the first hit it finds.  So be careful how you phrase your question.

Say you just arrived at work, and realized you once again left your security pass at home.  You ask yourself, "Why do I keep forgetting my security pass?"

If you believe you are a rational agent, you might think that you pass that question to your brain, and it parses it into its constituent parts and builds a query like

X such that cause(X, forget(me, securityPass))

and queries its knowledge base using logical inference for causal explanations specifically relevant to you and your security pass.

But you are not rational, and your brain is lazy; and as soon as you phrase your question and pass it on to your subconscious, your brain just Googles itself with a query like

why people forget things

looks at the first few hits it comes across, maybe finds their most-general unifier, checks that it's a syntactically valid answer to the question, and responds with,

"Because you are a moron."

Your inner Google has provided a plausible answer to the question, and it sits back, satisfied that it's done its job.

If you instead ask your brain something more specific, such as, "What can I do to help me remember my security pass tomorrow?", thus requiring its answer to refer to _you_ and _actions to remember things_ and _tomorrow_, your brain may come up with something useful, such as, "Set up a reminder now that will notify you tomorrow morning by cell phone to bring your security pass."

So, try to be at least as careful when asking questions of your brain, as when asking them of Google.
# Moral enhancement

In offline conversations, several Less Wrongers have expressed interest in 'benevolence training'. For those who are interested, here's a head start in the research...

The technical term for this is 'moral enhancement.' The key name here is [Thomas Douglas](https://sites.google.com/site/tomdouglasacademic/research), who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the topic, and continues to write papers on the subject. A recent overview is his paper [Moral Enhancement](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2614680/pdf/ukmss-3430.pdf) (2008), reprinted in _[Enhancing Human Capacities](http://www.amazon.com/Enhancing-Human-Capacities-Julian-Savulescu/dp/1405195819/)_ (2011). That chapter is followed by another chapter on the subject, by Persson and Julian Savulescu, who have written [other papers](http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/uehiro/moralenhancement2) on the subject.

[Here](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/apr/04/morality-drugs-improve-ethical-behaviour) is a _Guardian_ article on moral enhancement, and [here](http://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/uehiro/moralenhancement.mp3) is an interview on the subject for _Philosophy Bites_.

Some other key terms on the subject are [prosocial development](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470147658.chpsy0311/full) and [empathy education](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1484804/pdf/jgi021-0524.pdf).

Edit 7/29/2012: Also see [Molly Crocket on moral enhancement](http://philosophybites.com/2012/07/molly-crockett-on-brain-chemistry-and-moral-decision-making-originally-on-bioethics-bites.html).
# Fix My Head

I've been [collecting data](/lw/5qm/living_forever_is_hard_or_the_gompertz_curve/47o0) about my headaches and diet for almost four months now.  I don't see any patterns - annoyingly, I get headaches nearly every day, so there's not much information - but I thought I'd post the data set and see if anyone sees anything.  [Here it is](http://elcenia.com/itemz/data.txt).  Hopefully someone finds this an interesting problem.

It's written in note-to-self format (abbreviations like "strawbs" for "strawberries"; if I mention a complicated dish once then I'll shorten it when I eat the leftovers, as "pasta" for "pasta with artichokes and spinach and pesto"; times given approximately and not in a consistent form and often without specifying if they're a.m. or p.m., though they are in chronological order).  Quantities aren't given, although if they're suspected to be relevant I may be able to remember specific instances (for unusual foods) or typical portions (for ordinary foods) - other details might also be recollectable similarly.  I also don't notice when headaches go away, so I don't know how long they last except when they last all day or become noticeably worse during their course.  My sleep schedule varied considerably over this period, but trends more night owl than early bird (for a while I was outright nocturnal).  I moved three time zones west at the end of July, should that matter at all.

I'm not soliciting commentary on my diet except insofar as it can be compellingly related to my headaches.

ETA: Assume that every single day I'm drinking lots of skim milk.  (2-6 cups depending on how much I eat and how it's spaced out.)  There's a couple of exceptions, mostly when I'm in transit for most of a day or run out of milk, but not many and they don't seem to correlate with headaches.
# Timeline of major Eliezer Yudkowsky publications

Below is a timeline of major Eliezer Yudkowsky publications. Note that, to my knowledge, everything on AI before 2006 is now obsolete. That's the nature of a quickly-moving field!

*   [Staring into the Singularity](http://web.archive.org/web/200101250239/http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html) (1996) \[Eliezer age 17\]
*   [Coding a Transhuman AI 1.0](http://web.archive.org/web/200102021657/http://sysopmind.com/AI_design.temp.html) (1998)
*   [Frequently Asked Questions about the Meaning of Life](http://web.archive.org/web/200101232358/http://sysopmind.com/tmol-faq/tmol-faq.html) (1999)
*   [The Plan to Singularity](http://web.archive.org/web/20010213215810/http://sysopmind.com/sing/plan.html) (1999)
*   [Coding a Transhuman AI 2.2](http://web.archive.org/web/200102020421/http://singinst.org/CaTAI.html) (2000)
*   [General Intelligence and Seed AI](http://intelligence.org/ourresearch/publications/GISAI/index.html) (2001)
*   [**Creating Friendly AI**](http://intelligence.org/upload/CFAI.html) (2001)
*   [Levels of Organization in General Intelligence](http://intelligence.org/upload/LOGI.html) (2002)
*   [An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes) (2003)
*   [**Coherent Extrapolated Volition**](http://intelligence.org/upload/CEV.html) (2004)
*   [A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical) (2005)
*   [Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks](http://intelligence.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf) (2006)
*   [**Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk**](http://intelligence.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf) (2006)
*   [**The Less Wrong Sequences**](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences#Major_Sequences) (2006-2009)
*   [Three Worlds Collide](http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pdf) (2009)
*   [Timeless Decision Theory](http://intelligence.org/upload/TDT-v01o.pdf) (2010)
*   [Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality](http://www.elsewhere.org/rationality/) (2010-2011)
*   [Complex Value Systems are Required to Realize Valuable Futures](http://intelligence.org/upload/complex-value-systems.pdf) (2011)
*   [The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence](http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/artificial-intelligence.pdf) (2011) - w/ Nick Bostrom
# Timeline of Carl Shulman publications

All publications I know of:

*   [Which Consequentialism? Machine Ethics and Moral Divergence](http://intelligence.org/upload/machine-ethics-moral-divergence.pdf) (2009) - w/ Henrik Jonsson & Nick Tarleton
*   [Machine Ethics and Superintelligence](http://intelligence.org/upload/machine-ethics-superintelligence.pdf) (2009) - w/ Henrik Jonsson & Nick Tarleton
*   [Omohundro's Basic AI Drives and Catastrophic Risks](http://intelligence.org/upload/ai-resource-drives.pdf) (2010)
*   [Implications of a Software-Limited Singularity](http://intelligence.org/upload/ECAPShulmanSandberg.pdf) (2010) - w/ Anders Sandberg
*   [Superintelligence Does Not Imply Benevolence](http://intelligence.org/upload/ECAPFoxShulman.pdf) (2010) - w/ Joshua Fox
*   [Whole Brain Emulation and the Evolution of Superorganisms](http://intelligence.org/upload/WBE-superorganisms.pdf) (2010)
*   [Arms Races and Intelligence Explosions](http://singularityhypothesis.blogspot.com/2011/04/arms-races-and-intelligence-explosions.html) (forthcoming) - w/ Stuart Armstrong
*   [How Hard is Intelligence? The Evolutionary Argument and Observation Selection Effects](http://www.nickbostrom.com/aievolution.pdf) (forthcoming) - w/ Nick Bostrom
# Decision Fatigue, Rationality, and Akrasia.

I was reading the NY Times article on [Decision Fatigue](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?pagewanted=all), when I came upon a hypothesis I would like everyone's feedback on.

I take as a premise that there seems to be a high prevalence of akrasia in the lesswrong community.

I also take as a premise that the sequences give us a more-than-usual detailed model of the world, one that presents us with more possible trade-offs we could be making in every day life.

So the conjecture that by trying to reduce bias and perform a lot of cognitive calculation, we effectively spend large parts of our days in a decision fatigued state, leading to akrasia problems.

Does this sound (un)reasonable? Why? How would you go about turning this into a testable proposition?

**UPDATE: Anna Salamon has put up a detailed poll [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dHpaX2M5dnhwSjhXaG9EV2NNNTdMLUE6MQ#gid=0) that may shed some light on the situation. Please take some time to fill it in.**
# I hate TL;DR

It's a minor annoyance but perhaps I am not the only one who feels this way.

I dislike it when we summarize our posts and articles with a "tl;dr". There's a perfectly good English word for it, namely "summary".

"tl;dr", besides being an ugly internetism, seems to me to convey a certain additional meaning, over the neutral "summary". If, as happens on the rest of the web, a commenter responds to a post with "tl;dr", it expresses an expectation to be entertained without exercising the reader's attention span or making him think. It's also an easy and insulting way to respond to someone you disagree with, avoiding having to process their argument and maybe change your mind.

If an author uses it in their own article, it seems to me to be pandering to the same expectation, apologising for actually having something to say that takes a few paragraphs to explore properly. Less Wrong, a community consisting largely of above average people in terms of intelligence and ability to follow detailed arguments, is the last place I'd like or expect to see that attitude validated. If your post has substance and says something I didn't know/think before, of course it will take work - apparently even in the thermodynamic sense - to process it...

It's particularly jarring to see a tl;dr appended to posts that took me only a few seconds to read in full anyway.

Or maybe it's just me. I don't know.

/rant
# Scientist vs. philosopher on conceptual analysis

In [Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy](/lw/4vr/less_wrong_rationality_and_mainstream_philosophy/), [Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory](/lw/5kn/conceptual_analysis_and_moral_theory/), and [Pluralistic Moral Reductionism](/lw/5u2/pluralistic_moral_reductionism/), I suggested that traditional philosophical conceptual analysis often fails to be valuable. Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran has recently made some of the points in a [polite sparring](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/tell-tale-brain-exchange/) with philosopher Colin McGinn over Ramachandran's new book _[The Tell-Tale Brain](http://www.amazon.com/Tell-Tale-Brain-Neuroscientists-Quest-Makes/dp/0393077829/)_:

> Early in any scientific enterprise, it is best to forge ahead and not get bogged down by semantic distinctions. But “forging ahead” is a concept alien to philosophers, even those as distinguished as McGinn. To a philosopher who demanded that he define consciousness before studying it scientifically, Francis Crick once responded, “My dear chap, there was never a time in the early years of molecular biology when we sat around the table with a bunch of philosophers saying ‘let us define life first.’ We just went out there and found out what it was: a double helix.” In the sciences, definitions often follow, rather than precede, conceptual advances.
# You'll be who you care about

Eliezer [wonders](/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/) about the thread of conscious experience: "I don't think that, if I were _really_ selfish, I could jump off a cliff knowing smugly that a different person would experience the consequence of hitting the ground."

Instead of wondering whether we _should_ be selfish towards our future selves, let's reverse the question. Let's _define_ our future selves as agents that we can strongly influence, and that we strongly care about. There are other aspects that round out our intuitive idea of future selves (such as having the same name and possessions, and a thread of conscious experience), but this seems the most fundamental one.

In future, this may help clarify issues of [personal identity](/lw/48h/revisiting_the_anthropic_trilemma_ii_axioms_and/) once copying is widespread:

These two future copies, Mr. Jones, are they both 'you'? "Well yes, I care about both, and can influence them both."

Mr Jones Alpha, do you feel that Mr Jones Beta, the other current copy, is 'you'? "Well no, I only care a bit about him, and have little control over his actions."

Mr Evolutionary-Jones Alpha, do you feel that Mr Evolutionary-Jones Beta, the other current copy, is 'you'? "To some extent; I care strongly about him, but I only control his actions in an [updateless](/lw/15m/towards_a_new_decision_theory/) way."

Mr Instant-Hedonist-Jones, how long have you lived? "Well, I don't care about myself in the past or in the future, beyond my current single conscious experience. So I'd say I've lived a few seconds, a minute at most. The other Mr Instant-Hedonist-Jones are strangers to me; do with them what you will. Though I can still _influence_ them strongly, I suppose; tell you what, I'll sell my future self into slavery for a nice ice-cream. Delivered right now."
# NIH Solicitation: Basic research on decision making

The NIH recently announced a solicitation for [Basic Research on Decision Making: Cognitive, Affective, and Developmental Perspectives](http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-MH-12-130.html).  This is an R01, which means you aren't going to get it unless you have a team, with members who already have a bunch of publications in refereed journals.  It's possible that SIAI could go after this as a prime - unlikely that they would win, but possible.  OppNet intends to commit approximately $3,000,000 in FY 2012 to fund 5 to 15 grants in response to this FOA.  Applications budgets may not exceed $500,000 direct costs per year. Letter of intent due December 18, 2011.
# Machine learning and unintended consequences

In [Artificial Intelligence as a Negative and Positive Factor in Global Risk](http://intelligence.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf), Yudkowsky uses the following parable to illustrate the danger of using case-based learning to produce the goal systems of advanced AIs:

> Once upon a time, the US Army wanted to use neural networks to automatically detect camouflaged enemy tanks.  The researchers trained a neural net on 50 photos of camouflaged tanks in trees, and 50 photos of trees without tanks.  Using standard techniques for supervised learning, the researchers trained the neural network to a weighting that correctly loaded the training set - output "yes" for the 50 photos of camouflaged tanks, and output "no" for the 50 photos of forest.  This did not ensure, or even imply, that new examples would be classified correctly.  The neural network might have "learned" 100 special cases that would not generalize to any new problem.  Wisely, the researchers had originally taken 200 photos, 100 photos of tanks and 100 photos of trees.  They had used only 50 of each for the training set.  The researchers ran the neural network on the remaining 100 photos, and without further training the neural network classified all remaining photos correctly.  Success confirmed!  The researchers handed the finished work to the Pentagon, which soon handed it back, complaining that in their own tests the neural network did no better than chance at discriminating photos.
> 
> It turned out that in the researchers' data set, photos of camouflaged tanks had been taken on cloudy days, while photos of plain forest had been taken on sunny days.  The neural network had learned to distinguish cloudy days from sunny days, instead of distinguishing camouflaged tanks from empty forest.

I once stumbled across the source of this parable online, but now I can't find it.

Anyway, I'm curious: Are there any well-known examples of this kind of problem _actually_ causing serious damage — say, when a narrow AI trained via machine learning was placed into a somewhat novel environment?
# Cognitive Style Tends To Predict Religious Conviction (psychcentral.com)

http://psychcentral.com/news/2011/09/21/cognitive-style-tends-to-predict-religious-conviction/29646.html

> Participants who gave intuitive answers to all three problems \[that required reflective thinking rather than intuitive\] were one and a half times as likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence as those who answered all of the questions correctly.

> Importantly, researchers discovered the association between thinking styles and religious beliefs were not tied to the participants’ thinking ability or IQ.

> participants who wrote about a successful intuitive experience were more likely to report they were convinced of God’s existence than those who wrote about a successful reflective experience.

I think this is the source but I can't be sure:

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-ofp-shenhav.pdf

http://lesswrong.com/lw/7o4/atheism\_autism\_spectrum/4vbc

[Reddit /r/psychology discussion](http://www.reddit.com/r/psychology/comments/kp66x/cognitive_style_tends_to_predict_religious)
# Cognitive Neuroscience, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, and Coherent Extrapolated Volition

Suppose we want to use [the convergence of humanity's preferences](http://intelligence.org/upload/CEV.html) as the utility function of a seed AI that is about to determine the future of its light cone.

We figured out how to get an AI to extract preferences from human behavior and brain activity. The AI figured out how to extrapolate those values. But my values and your values and Sarah Palin's values aren't fully converging in the simulation running the extrapolation algorithm. Our simulated _beliefs_ are converging because on the path to reflective equilibrium our partially simulated selves have become true Bayesians and [Aumann's Agreement Theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem) holds. But our preferences aren't converging quite so well.

What to do? We'd like the final utility function in the FOOMed AI to adhere to some common-sense criteria:

1.  _Non-dictatorship_: No single person's preferences should dictate what the AI does. Its utility function must take multiple people's (extrapolated) preferences into account.
2.  _Determinism_: Given the same choices, and the same utility function, the AI should always make the same decisions.
3.  _Pareto efficiency_: If every (extrapolated) person prefers action A to action B, the AI should prefer A to B.
4.  _Independence of irrelevant alternatives_: If we — a group of extrapolated preference-sets — prefer A to B, and a new option C is introduced, then we should still prefer A to B regardless of what we think about C.

Now, [Arrow's impossibility theorem](/lw/1cy/arrows_theorem_is_a_lie/) says that we can only get the FOOMed AI's utility function to adhere to these criteria if the extrapolated preferences of each partially simulated agent are related to each other cardinally ("A is 2.3x better than B!") instead of ordinally ("A is better than B, and that's all I can say").

Now, if you're an old-school ordinalist about preferences, you might be worried. Ever since [Vilfredo Pareto](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto) pointed out that cardinal models of a person's preferences go far beyond our behavioral data and that as far as we can tell utility has "no natural units," some economists have tended to assume that, in our models of human preferences, preference must be represented ordinally and not cardinally.

But if you're keeping up with the latest cognitive neuroscience, you might _not_ be quite so worried. It turns out that [preferences _are_ encoded cardinally after all](/lw/71x/a_crash_course_in_the_neuroscience_of_human/), and they _do_ have a natural unit: action potentials per second. With cardinally encoded preferences, we _[can](/lw/1cy/arrows_theorem_is_a_lie/)_ develop a utility function that represents our preferences and adheres to the common-sense criteria listed above.

Whaddya know? The last decade of cognitive neuroscience has produced a somewhat interesting result concerning the plausibility of CEV.
# Stanislav Petrov Day

A reminder for everyone: on this day in 1983, [Stanislav Petrov saved the world](/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/).

It occurs to me this time around that there's an interesting relationship here - 9/26 is forgotten, while 9/11 is remembered. Do something charitable, and not patriotic, sometime today.
# Edward Nelson claims proof of inconsistency in Peano Arithmetic

We've discussed [Edward Nelson's beliefs and work before](/lw/3aj/exponentiation_goes_wrong_first/). Now, he claims to [have a proof of a contradiction in Peano Arithmetic](http://www.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/papers/outline.pdf); which if correct is not that specific to PA but imports itself into much weaker systems. I'm skeptical of the proof but haven't had the time to look at it in detail. There seem to be two possible weakpoints in his approach. His approach is to construct a system Q_0^* which looks almost but not quite a fragment of PA and then show that PA both proves this system's consistency and proves its inconsistency. 

First, he may be mis-applying the Hilbert-Ackermann theorem-when it applies is highly technical and can be subtle. I don't know enough to comment on that in detail. The second issue is that in trying to show that he can use finitary methods to show there's a contradiction in Q\_0^* he may have proven something closer to Q\_0^* being omega-inconsistent. Right now, I'm extremely skeptical of this result.  

If anyone is going to find an actual contradiction in PA or ZFC it would probably be Nelson. There some clearly interesting material here such as using a formalization of the  surprise examiation/unexpected hanging to get a new proof of of Godel's Second Incompleteness Theorem. The exact conditions which this version of Godel's theorem applies  may be different from the conditions under which the standard theorem can be proven.
# Cryonic suspension where?

I want to sign up for cryonic suspension. I haven't done so yet because I haven't been able to decide which organization to use. I'm not expecting you guys to choose for me, but it would be very helpful if those of you who are signed up (or will sign up) would say which organization you went with and why.

I've found the following three organizations. Did I miss any that I should be considering?

*   [http://www.americancryonics.org/](http://www.americancryonics.org/)
*   [http://www.cryonics.org/](http://www.cryonics.org/)
*   [http://www.alcor.org/](http://www.alcor.org/)

I'm in the US midwest area, if that will make a difference. My goal would be to maximize the chance of this working. My sub-goal would be to spend the least amount of money. I'm not old yet, so I expect to be able to get funding from life insurance.
# Rationality Quotes With Attributions Hidden: from Mein Kampf to Men****x

This thread has an experimental format for posting rationality quotes. Here is the format:

**For those posting quotes**:

Post the quote as usual, but not the author, original language translated from, or other information. That information is to be input after the quote according to the following format:

\[Source\](http://linkgoes.here "hovertext goes here")

For example:

>When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place.

\[Source\]([http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/30216.html](http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/30216.html) "Goethe, translated.")

The source information will be available by hovering the mouse over "Source", without opening a new page. This format allows quotations to be evaluated with less context available, with all that entails. I hope this allays some of the uncertainty regarding why words of the Bible or authors such as Nietzsche are sometimes poorly received. People are encouraged to vote without considering the source information. If locally idolized people said genuinely silly things even considering the context, feel free to post those as well, but please use your best judgement as to whether or not taking it out of context is fair to the speaker.

Please use your own judgement in deciding which quotes thread to post material. This isn't intended to compete with the main thread, it's an experiment to see if people like a different format better. Some people thought this format, or something like it, should simply be tried on the next regular quotes thread to minimize any disruption caused by having multiple threads, while others thought disruption wold be minimized by having a separate thread and leaving the main thread as normal. This is what I decided to do.

The usual rules apply, except that there is no fixed limit to the number of quotes one may submit, because I'd like to populate this thread without taking too much from the usual thread.

*   Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately.  (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments.  If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
*   Do not quote yourself.
*   Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.