Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# Litany of a Bright Dilettante

So, one more litany, hopefully someone else finds it as useful.

It's an understatement that humility is not a common virtue in online discussions, even, or especially when it's most needed.

I'll start with my own recent example. I thought up a clear and obvious objection to one of the assertions in [Eliezer's critique](/lw/gzq/bayesian_adjustment_does_not_defeat_existential/8sp1) of the FAI effort compared with the Pascal's Wager and started writing a witty reply. ...And then I stopped. In large part because I had just gone through the same situation, but on the other side, dealing with some of the comments to my post about time-turners and General Relativity by those who know next to nothing about General Relativity. It was irritating, yet here I was, falling into the same trap. And not for the first time, far from it. The following is the resulting thought process, distilled to one paragraph.

I have not spent 10,000+ hours thinking about this topic in a professional, all-out, do-the-impossible way. I probably have not spent even one hour seriously thinking about it. I probably do not have the prerequisites required to do so. I probably don't even know what prerequisites are required to think about this topic productively. In short, there are almost guaranteed to exist unknown unknowns which are bound to trip up a novice like me. The odds that I find a clever argument contradicting someone who works on this topic for a living, just by reading one or two popular explanations of it are minuscule. So if I think up such an argument, the odds of it being both new and correct are heavily stacked against me. It is true that they are non-zero, and there are popular examples of non-experts finding flaws in an established theory where there is a consensus among the experts. Some of them might even be true stories. No, Einstein was not one of these non-experts, and even if he were, I am not Einstein.

And so on. So I came up with the following, rather unpolished mantra:

**If I think up what seems like an obvious objection, I will resist assuming that I have found a [Weaksauce Weakness](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeaksauceWeakness) in the experts' logic. Instead I may ask politely whether my argument is a valid one, and if not, where the flaw lies.**

If you think it useful, feel free to improve the wording.
# Want to have a CFAR instructor visit your LW group?

Cat, who has volunteered extensively at CFAR (and taught at CFAR), will be visiting many cities in Europe over the coming months.

She is awesome.  

Also, the list of cities that she is visiting will probably be determined in the next few days.

If you'd like to have her visit your LW meetup group, share some of our classes with your meetup, and generally bring connections back and forth... comment below, or PM her (or me)!  I suspect this can be a lot of fun, and useful as well.  Offers of couch space and similar are also appreciated.

For now this is just for Europe, probably, but no harm in touching base from other cities as well; it's possible she'll visit elsewhere later.
# Can somebody explain this to me?: The computability of the laws of physics and hypercomputation

["Hypercomputation"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation) is a term coined by two philosophers, Jack Copeland and Dianne Proudfoot, to refer to allegedly computational processes that do things Turing machines are in principle incapable of doing. I'm somewhat dubious of whether any of the proposals for "hypercomputation" are really accurately described as computation, but here, I'm more interested in another question: is there any chance it's possible to build a physical device that answers questions a Turing machine cannot answer?

I've read a number of Copeland and Proudfoot's articles promoting hypercomputation, and they claim this is an open question. I have, however, seen some indications that they're wrong about this, but my knowledge of physics and computability theory isn't enough to answer this question with confidence. 

Some of the ways to convince yourself that "hypercomputation" might be physically possible seem like obvious confusions, for example if you convince yourself that some physical quality is allowed to be any real number, and then notice that because some reals are non-computable, you say to yourself that if only we could measure such a non-computable quantity then we could answer questions no Turing machine could answer. Of course, the idea of doing such a measurement is physically implausible even if you could find a non-computable physical quantity in the first place. And that mistake can be sexed up in various ways, for example by talking about "analog computers" and assuming "analog" means it has components that can take any real-numbered value.

Points similar to the one I've just made exist in the literature on hypercomputation (see [here](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.10.4467&rep=rep1&type=pdf) and [here](http://www1.maths.leeds.ac.uk/~pmt6sbc/docs/davis.myth.pdf), for example). But the critiques of hypercomputation I've found tend to focus on specific proposals. It's less clear whether there are any good _general_ arguments in the literature that hypercomputation is physically impossible, because it would require infinite-precision measurements or something equally unlikely. It seems like it might be possible to make such an argument; I've read that the laws of physics are consiered to be computable, but I don't have a good enough understanding of what that means to tell if it entails that hypercomputation is physically impossible.

Can anyone help me out here?
# Minor, perspective changing facts

There's a lot of background mess in our mental pictures of the world. We try and be accurate on important issues, but a whole lot of the less important stuff we pick up from the media, the movies, and random impressions. And once these impressions are in our mental pictures, they just don't go away - until we find a fact that causes us to say "huh", and reassess.

Here are three facts that have caused that "huh" in me, recently, and completely rearranged minor parts of my mental map. I'm sharing them here, because that experience is a valuable one.

1.  Think terrorist attack on Israel - did the phrase "suicide bombing" spring to mind? If so, you're so out of fashion: the last suicide bombing in Israel was in [2008](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_attacks) \- a year where dedicated suicide bombers managed the feat of killing a grand total of 1 victim. Suicide bombings haven't happened in Israel for over half a decade.
2.  Large scale plane crashes seem to happen all the time, all over the world. They must happen at least a few times a year, in every major country, right? Well, if I'm reading this [page](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_commercial_aircraft) right, the last time there was an airline crash in the USA that killed more that 50 people was... in [2001](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587) (2 months after 9/11). Nothing on that scale since then. And though there has been crashes on route to/from Spain and France since then, it seems that major air crashes in western countries is something that essentially never happens.
3.  The major cost of a rocket isn't the fuel, as I'd always thought. [It seems](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Launch_prices) that the Falcon 9 rocket costs $54 million per launch, of which fuel is only $0.2 million (or, as I prefer to think of it - I could sell my house to get enough fuel to fly to space). In the difference between those two prices, lies the potential for private spaceflight to low-Earth orbit.
# A thought-process testing opportunity

If you haven't seen the video of a wet towel being wrung out in space yet, it provides a great opportunity to test some basic rationality skills.

Skill #1: Notice the opportunity. (I failed this test. I had a fuzzy, wrong idea about what would happen. I didn't notice the fuzziness of my own thinking until after I watched the video, when it was too late to apply basic rationality skills. I'll never know if I could have made a correct prediction.)

Skill #2: Enumerate possibilities.

Skill #3: Incorporate prior information. 

Skill #4: Making clear predictions.

Skill #5: Understanding why/how your prediction failed/succeeded.

Skill #6: There may be some things you predicted and some you didn't. Don't forget to notice the partial failures along with the partial success.

Experiment:

You are on the International Space Station. You get a towel soaking wet, then you wring it out. What happens?

[Video of the experiment](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=o8TssbmY-GM)

If you haven't seen it, don't scroll into the comments.

Don't click the link until you've thought about it!
# Normativity and Meta-Philosophy

I find Eliezer's explanation of what "should" means to be [unsatisfactory](/lw/1fz/a_less_wrong_singularity_article/19pv), and here's an attempt to do better. Consider the following usages of the word:

1.  You should stop building piles of X pebbles because X = Y*Z.
2.  We should kill that police informer and dump his body in the river.
3.  You should one-box in Newcomb's problem.

All of these seem to be sensible sentences, depending on the speaker and intended audience. #1, for example, seems a reasonable translation of what a [pebblesorter](/lw/sy/sorting_pebbles_into_correct_heaps/) would say after discovering that X = Y*Z. Some might argue for "pebblesorter::should" instead of plain "should", but it's hard to deny that we need "should" in some form to fill the blank there for a translation, and I think few people besides Eliezer would object to plain "should".

Normativity, or the idea that there's something in common about how "should" and similar words are used in different contexts, is an active area in academic philosophy. I won't try to [survey](http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/content/70/2/331.full.pdf?keytype=ref&ijkey=Q50DmwsULURmO5j) the current theories, but my current thinking is that "should" usually means "better according to some shared, motivating standard or procedure of evaluation", but occasionally it can also be used to _instill_ such a standard or procedure of evaluation in someone (such as a child) who is open to being instilled by the speaker/writer.

It seems to me that different people (including different humans) can have different motivating standards and procedures of evaluation, and apparent disagreements about "should' sentences can arise from having different standards/procedures or from disagreement about whether something is better according to a shared standard/procedure. In most areas my personal procedure of evaluation is something that might be called "doing philosophy" but many people apparently do not share this. For example a religious extremist may have been taught by their parents, teachers, or peers to follow some rigid moral code given in their holy books, and not be open to any philosophical arguments that I can offer.

Of course this isn't a fully satisfactory theory of normativity since I don't know [what "philosophy" really is](/lw/2id/metaphilosophical_mysteries/) (and I'm not even sure it really is a thing). But it does help explain how "should" in morality might relate to "should" in other areas such as decision theory, does not require assuming that all humans ultimately share the same morality, and avoids the need for linguistic contortions such as "pebblesorter::should".
# Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt: apparently a transhumanist

It makes a lot of sense for the Google people to be transhumanist, with Sergey Brin and Larry Page working with the Singularity University, but still I was surprised to hear this on the new Colbert Report (of the 23rd of April):

> Colbert: Can I live forever?  
> Schmidt: Yes.  
> Colbert: Really?  
> Schmidt: But not now. They need to invent some more medicine.  
> Colbert: So I can live forever, but later. So I just need to live long enough for later to become now.  
> Schmidt: But your digital identity will live forever. Because there's no delete button.  
> Colbert: On me?  
> Schmidt: That's correct.  
> Colbert: That's profound.

He seemed quite serious, too.

I guess a lot of people would take transhumanism more seriously if they heard the top people at Google are in. To me, I actually find it makes Google seem more trustworthy. In-group psychology is weird.

Here's [another good interview](http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11217) with Eric Schmidt. No explicit transhumanism, but some fairly intense plans entirely compatible with it.

(edited: corrected title)
# [LINK] How to calibrate your confidence intervals

In the book "How to Measure Anything" D. Hubbard presents a step-by-step method for calibrating your confidence intervals, which he has tested on hundreds of people, showing that it can make 90% of people almost perfect estimators within half a day of training.

I've been told that the Less Wrong and CFAR community is mostly not aware of this work, so given the importance of making good estimates to rationality, I thought it would be of interest.

(although note CFAR has developed its [own games](http://acritch.com/credence-game/) for training confidence interval calibration)

The main techniques to employ are:

> ### Equivalent bet:
> 
> For each estimate imagine that you are betting $1000 on the answer being within your 90% CI. Now compare this to betting $1000 on a spinner where 90% of the time you win and 10% of the time you lose. Would you prefer to take a spin? If so, your range is too small and you need to increase it. If you decide to answer the question your range is too large and you need to reduce it. If you don’t mind whether you answer the question or take a spin then it really is your 90% CI.
> 
> ### Absurdity Test:
> 
> Start with an absurdly large range, maybe from minus infinity to plus infinity, and then begin reducing it based upon things you know to be highly unlikely or even impossible.
> 
> ### Avoid Anchoring:
> 
> Anchoring occurs when you think of a single answer to the question and then add an error around this answer; this often leads to ranges which are too narrow. Using the absurdity test is a good way to counter problems brought on by anchoring; another is to change how you look at your 90% CI. For a 90% CI there is a 10% chance that the answer lies outside your estimate, and if you split this there is a 5% chance that the answer is above your upper bound and a 5% chance that the answer is below your lower bound. By treating each bound separately, rephrase the question to read ‘is there a 95% chance that the answer is above my lower bound?’. If the answer is no, then you need to increase or decrease the bound as required. You can then repeat this process for the other bound.
> 
> ### Pros and cons:
> 
> Identify two pros and two cons for the range that you have given to help clarify your reasons for making this estimate.
> 
> Once you have used these techniques you can make another equivalent bet to check whether your new estimate is your 90% CI.

To train yourself, practice making estimates repeatedly while using these techniques, until you reach 100% accuracy.

To read more and try sample questions, read the article we prepared on 80,000 Hours [here](http://80000hours.org/blog/170-estimation-part-i-how-to-do-it).
# Real-world examples of money-pumping?

Intransitive preferences are a [demonstrable](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_inconsistency) [characteristic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allais_paradox) of human behaviour.  So why am I having such trouble coming up with real-world examples of money-pumping?

"Because I'm not smart or imaginative enough" is a perfectly plausible answer, but I've been mulling this one over on-and-off for a few months now, and I haven't come up with a single example that really captures what I consider to be the salient features of the scenario: a tangled hierarchy of preferences, and exploitation of that tangled hierarchy by an agent who cyclically trades the objects in that hierarchy, generating trade surplus on each transaction.  

It's possible that I am in fact thinking about money-pumping all wrong.  All the nearly-but-not-quite examples I came up with (amongst which were bank overdraft fees, Weight Watchers, and exploitation of addiction) had the characteristics of looking like swindles or the result of personal failings, but from the inside, money-pumping must presumably feel like a series of gratifying transactions.  We would _want_ any cases of money-pumping we were vulnerable to.

At the moment, I have the following hypotheses for the poverty of real-world money-pumping cases:

1.  Money-pumping is prohibitively difficult.  The conditions that need to be met are too specific for an exploitative agent to find and abuse.
2.  Money-pumping is possible, but the gains on each transaction are generally so small as to not be worth it.
3.  Humans have faculties for identifying certain classes of strategy that exploit the limits of their rationality, and we tell any would-be money-pumper to piss right off, much like Pascal's Mugger.  It may be possible to money-pump wasps or horses or something.
4.  Humans have some other rationality boundary that makes them too stupid to be money-pumped, to the same effect as #3.
5.  Money-pumping is prevalent in reality, but is not obvious because money-pumping agents generate their surplus in non-pecuniary abstract forms, such as labour, time, affection, attention, status, etc.
6.  Money-pumping is prevalent in reality, but obfuscated by cognitive dissonance.  We rationalise equivalent objects in a tangled preference hierarchy as being different.
7.  Money-pumping is prevalent in reality, but obscured by cognitive phenomena such as time-preference and discounting, or underlying human aesthetic/moral tastes, (parochial equivalents of [pebble-sorting](/lw/sy/sorting_pebbles_into_correct_heaps/)), which humans convince themselves are Real Things that are Really Real, to the same effect as #6. 

Does anyone have anything to add, or any good/arguable cases of real-world money-pumping?
# [LINK] Is it worth the time?

Another gem from [xkcd](http://xkcd.com): [Is It Worth the Time?](http://xkcd.com/1205/) It visually answers the question:

> How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you're spending more time than you save? 

Of course, he's not the first person to ask this question, but the visual is handy. Note that the times are calculated assuming you'll save the time over five years.

For example, I've been pondering how to shorten my showers. If I can shave off 1 minute daily, I should be willing to invest up to (but no more than) an entire day to do it. If I think I can shave off five minutes preparing my breakfast, I should be willing to spend up to _six days_ attempting to do so.
# Mortal: A Transponyist Fanfiction

I recently published [Mortal](http://www.fimfiction.net/story/95424/mortal), a novella-length My Little Pony fanfiction meant to introduce anti-death concepts to an unfamiliar audience. Short description:

> Twilight Sparkle's friends have lived long and happy lives. Now their time is coming to an end, but Rainbow Dash, at least, will not go gently. Twilight has the power to save her friend's life. Is it worth violating the natural order?

This is a character-driven melodrama. It's not particularly rationalist, but it's very, very transhumanist. Unlike, say, [Friendship is Optimal](/lw/fi8/launched_friendship_is_optimal/), I wouldn't necessarily recommend this one to people who don't already know the source. It assumes familiarity with the characters and the world.

I am going to talk about how I put together the story and how people reacted to it. This will contain spoilers.

This line exists so you can break out of the automatic "read everything on the page" mode if you want to avoid the spoilers.

This story was structured as something of a bait-and-switch. I watched the [reaction](/lw/efo/a_my_little_pony_fanfic_allegedly_but_not_mainly/) to a previous transhumanist horsefic (yes, there's more than one), and I was struck by how easily readers matched the _explicitly anti-death_ narrative to the "immortality is a curse" trope. Rather than fight against this trend, I decided to work with it. The first act is meant to look like a story about learning to accept the inevitability of death. Starting in chapter 3, I break further and further away from that mold until the protagonists finally rebel against the status quo.

The first chapters got a lot of people invested who I suspect would've been turned off by a less familiar opening. Once I was into the third act, I stopped being subtle and used every trick in the book to make the pro-death characters look like the unreasonable ones. Judging by the comments, there's no shortage of readers who were angry at having their expectations flouted, but quite a few seem thoughtful, and some explicitly changed their mind on the subject.
# Seeking reliable evidence - claim that closing sweatshops leads to child prostitution

I've been looking for reliable evidence of a claim I've heard a few times. The claim is that the closing of sweatshops (by anti-globalization activists) has resulted in many of the child workers becoming prostitutes. The idea is frequently proffered as an example of do-gooder foolishness ignoring basic economics and screwing people over.

However, despite searching for a while, I can't find anything to indicate that this actually happened.

Some guy at the Library of Economics and Liberty mentions it [here](http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Powellsweatshops.html):

> In one famous 1993 case U.S. senator Tom Harkin proposed banning imports from countries that employed children in sweatshops. In response a factory in Bangladesh laid off 50,000 children. What was their next best alternative? According to the British charity Oxfam a large number of them became prostitutes.

But in [the article](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/22/opinion/reckonings-hearts-and-heads.html), Paul Krugman mentions the Oxfam study without citation:

> In 1993, child workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets -- and that a significant number were forced into prostitution.

I looked at some Oxfam stuff, but couldn't find the study.

A similar claim is made in _The Race to the Top: The Real Story of Globalization_ by Tomas Larsson (go [here](http://store.cato.org/books/race-top-real-story-globalization-hardback) and use the search tool for the word 'prostitution'), but doesn't mention the Oxfam study:

> Keith E. Maskus, an economist at the University of Colorado, has studied the issue... He concludes that... "The celebrated French ban of soccer balls sewn in Pakistan for the World Cup in 1998 resulted in significant dislocation of children from employment. Those who tracked them found that a large proportion ended up begging and/or in prostitution,"

I looked for a paper or something by Maskus but came up empty.

I was taught this fact at a Poli Sci class in college, but I'm starting to think it's more likely to be an information cascade. Can anyone do a better job than me?

Thanks in advance.
# [Link] More Right launched

Various people (including [Konkvistador](/user/Konkvistador/overview/) who has been talking about it the most) have launched their blog [More Right](http://www.moreright.net/)

"A group blog, More Right is a place to discuss the many things that are touched by politics that we prefer wouldn’t be, as well as right wing ideas in general. It grew out of the correspondences among like minded people in late 2012, who first began their journey studying the findings of modern cognitive science on the failings of human reasoning and ended it reading serious 19th century gentlemen denouncing democracy. Surveying modernity, we found cracks in its façade. Findings and seemingly correct ideas, carefully bolted down and hidden, met with disapproving stares and inarticulate denunciation when unearthed. This only whetted our appetites. Proceeding from the surface to the foundations, we found them lacking. This is reflected in the spirit of the site."
# Antijargon Project

When a group of people talk to each other a lot they develop terms that they can use in place of larger concepts. This makes it easier to talk to people inside the group, but then it's harder to talk about the same ideas with people outside the group. If we were smart enough to keep up fully independent vocabularies where we would always use the right words for the people we were talking to, this wouldn't be an issue. But instead we get in the habit of saying weird words, and then when we want to talk to people who don't know those words we either struggle to find words they know or waste a lot of time introducing words. Especially when the group jargon term offers only a minor advantage over the non-jargon phrasing I think this is a bad tradeoff if you also want to speak to people outside the group.

Recently I've been working on using as little jargon as possible. Pushing myself to speak conventionally, even when among people who would understand weird terms a little faster, can be frustrating, but I think I'm also getting better at it.

_I also posted this [on my blog](http://www.jefftk.com/news/2013-05-05)_
# Justifiable Erroneous Scientific Pessimism

In an erratum to my previous post on Pascalian wagers, it has been plausibly argued to me that _all_ the roads to nuclear weapons, including plutonium production from U-238, may have bottlenecked through the presence of significant amounts of Earthly U235 (apparently even the giant heap of unrefined uranium bricks in Chicago Pile 1 was, functionally, empty space with a scattering of U235 dust).  If this is the case then Fermi's estimate of a "ten percent" probability of nuclear weapons may have actually been justifiable because nuclear weapons were almost impossible (at least without particle accelerators) - though it's not totally clear to me why "10%" instead of "2%" or "50%" but then I'm not Fermi.

We're all familiar with examples of _correct_ scientific skepticism, such as about Uri Geller and hydrino theory.  We also know many famous examples of scientists just completely making up their [pessimism](http://www.foresight.org/news/negativeComments.html), for example about the impossibility of human heavier-than-air flight.  Before this occasion I could only think offhand of one other famous example of _erroneous_ scientific pessimism that was _not_ in defiance of the default extrapolation of existing models, namely Lord Kelvin's careful estimate from multiple sources that the Sun was around sixty million years of age.  This was wrong, but because of new physics - though you could make a case that new physics might well be expected in this case - and there was some degree of contrary evidence from geology, as I understand it - and that's not exactly the same as technological skepticism - but still.  Where there are sort of two, there may be more.  Can anyone name a third example of _erroneous_ scientific pessimism whose error was, to the same degree, not something a smarter scientist could've seen coming?

I ask this with some degree of trepidation, since by most standards of reasoning essentially anything is "justifiable" if you try hard enough to find excuses and then not question them further, so I'll phrase it more carefully this way:  I am looking for a case of erroneous scientific pessimism, preferably about technological impossibility or extreme difficulty, where it seems clear that the inverse case for possibility would've been weaker if carried out strictly with contemporary knowledge, after exploring points and counterpoints.  (So that relaxed standards for "justifiability" will just produce even more justifiable cases for the technological possibility.)  We probably should also not accept as "erroneous" any prediction of technological impossibility where it required more than, say, seventy years to get the technology.
# Wikifying the blog list

Konkvistador's excellent [List of Blogs by LWers](/lw/d8t/blogs_by_lwers/) led me to some of my favorite blogs, but is pretty well hidden and gradually becoming obsolete. In order to create an easily-update-able replacement, I have created the wiki page [List of Blogs](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/List_of_Blogs) and added most of the blogs from Konkvistador's list. If you have a blog, or you read blogs, please help in the following ways:

\-\- Add your blog if it's not on there, and _if it has updated in the past few months_ (no dead blogs this time, exceptions for very complete archives of excellent material like Common Sense Atheism in the last section)

\-\- Add any other blogs you like that are written by LWers or frequently engage with LW ideas

\-\- Remove your blog if you don't want it on there (I added some prominent critics of LW ideas who might not want to be linked to us)

\-\- Move your blog to a different category if you don't like the one it's in right now

\-\- Add a description of your blog, or change the one that already exists

\-\- Change the name you're listed by (I defaulted to people's LW handles)

\-\- Bold the name of your blog if it updates near-daily, has a large readership/commentership, and/or gets linked to on LW a lot

\-\- Improve formatting

Somebody more familiar with the Less Wrong twittersphere might want to do something similar to [Grognor's Less Wrong on Twitter](/lw/d92/less_wrong_on_twitter/)
# Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

[Thus spake Eliezer](/lw/5c0/epistle_to_the_new_york_less_wrongians/):

> A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite _wish_ spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite _wish_ spells.

It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, [a recent post](/lw/gdl/my_simple_hack_for_increased_alertness_and/) advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.

So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it _hasn't_ worked, it would be useful to post that too.
# Why is it rational to invest in retirement? I don't get it. 

I know I said I'd be gone... but this was just a comment originally, and I noticed it may actually be relevant.

Elharo [said in Munchkin Ideas](/lw/h9b/post_ridiculous_munchkin_ideas/8zkf):

> Put as much money as you can afford into tax advantaged retirement accounts. In the U.S. that means 401K, 403b, IRA, SEP, etc.

I'm interested in the following:  
  
Why should people invest in retirement? Or, instead, why should someone invest as much as most do in retirement.  
  
**Few facts that make it a boggling question for me:**

You are 10% to 20% [likely to die](http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_sur_rat_to_age_65_men-survival-rate-age-65-men) before you enjoy even your first retirement year.  
  
People adjust much more to harsh economical conditions than they believe they would. They remain happy, as many studies by Seligman and others show.  
  
People who retire are only happier as retirees if they retired by choice (I lost the paper, sorry).  
  
Most people here live in rich countries - darn, hate to be the exception! - , and their state would happily provide them with at least the maximal retirement plan legal in my country (aprox 2000 dollars/month). And surely would provide them with double the minimal (about 200/month) if they needed.  
  
If you have descendants, they may support you in case you are still alive, and if you are not rich enough to keep a house, you have a good excuse to be in company of loved ones (you have nowhere else to go).

Last, but not least: That person [is not](http://libgen.info/view.php?id=363943)  [even you](http://marcsandersfoundation.com/assets/pdfs/ammoniusfinal.pdf) that much anyway.

Given all that, I have no clue what the whole fuss about retirement plans, and being 60% of a rich old person with a crappy body is all about, specially if you are in the grave.

I mean, in the cryopreservation chamber, of course.

Edit: A related question not worth its own post, but maybe worth discussing, is Should inheritance "jump" a generation. Everyone inheriting from grandparents, instead of parents? Just the abstract ethical question. Regardless of implementation procedure.
# 10-Step Anti-Procrastination Checklist

Despite recent strides in my productivity habits, I still catch myself procrastinating at work more often than I'd like.  It's not that I make a conscious decision to put off a project; it just feels as though I wake up 20 minutes later and realize that nothing got accomplished. (Or, to avoid the passive voice and take much-deserved responsibility, I "realize that I haven't accomplished anything".)

I've been looking for techniques to improve, and got a lot out of [LukeProg](/user/lukeprog/)'s articles on [How to Beat Procrastination](/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/) and [My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination](/lw/9wr/my_algorithm_for_beating_procrastination/), based on Piers Steel's [The Procrastination Equation](http://www.amazon.com/Procrastination-Equation-Putting-Things-Getting/dp/0061703613/).[  
](/lw/9wr/my_algorithm_for_beating_procrastination/)

But I also wanted a way to put the principles to use with the lowest activation cost possible.  I can't expect unmotivated future-me to be too cooperative; I need to provide him with an easy path to get in flow.

So! I developed a 10-Step Productivity Checklist, pulling the concepts from Luke's articles and adding a couple points that are important for me.  Now whenever I notice myself being unproductive I have a much easier time following the steps one by one until I get back in a good mindset to work.

### Productivity Checklist:

1.  **What is the task?** Make sure you're going to focus on one thing at a time.
    
2.  **Do you have something to drink?** Get yourself some tea, coffee, or water.
    
3.  **Are distractions closed?** Shut the door, quit Tweetdeck, close the Facebook and Gmail tabs, and set skype to "Do not disturb."
    
4.  **What music will you listen to inspire yourself to be productive or get in flow?** Put on a good instrumental playlist! (I love video game soundtracks, further notes in comments.)
    
5.  **Why are you doing this task?**  Trace the value until you feel the benefit.
    
6.  **What are the parts to this task?**  Break things down as much as you can, until they're physical actions if possible.
    
7.  **What are some ways to gamify the task?**  Try to have fun with it!
    
8.  **What are some rewards you can offer yourself for completing sections of the task?** Smiling, throwing your arms up in the air and proclaiming victory, or M&M's all count.
    
9.  **What's an achievable goal for this sitting?** Set a reasonable expectation for yourself.
    
10.  **How long will you work until you take a break?**  Set a timer and commit to focusing.
    

### Get into flow!

I'd love to hear from you:

*   Whether these are useful
*   Any ideas for good ways to enact these steps
*   Steps that should be added/removed/tweaked
*   Whether there are other posts/resources that you've found valuable

I hope this helps you as much as it's helping me, and that together we can make it even better!
# [Paper] On the 'Simulation Argument' and Selective Scepticism

Jonathan Birch recently [published](http://philpapers.org/rec/BIROTS) an interesting critique of Bostrom's simulation argument.  Here's the abstract:

> Nick Bostrom’s ‘Simulation Argument’ purports to show that, unless we are confident that advanced ‘posthuman’ civilizations are either extremely rare or extremely rarely interested in running simulations of their own ancestors, we should assign significant credence to the hypothesis that we are simulated. I argue that Bostrom does not succeed in grounding this constraint on credence. I first show that the Simulation Argument requires a curious form of selective scepticism, for it presupposes that we possess good evidence for claims about the physical limits of computation and yet lack good evidence for claims about our own physical constitution. I then show that two ways of modifying the argument so as to remove the need for this presupposition fail to preserve the original conclusion. Finally, I argue that, while there are unusual circumstances in which Bostrom’s selective scepticism might be reasonable, we do not currently find ourselves in such circumstances. There is no good reason to uphold the selective scepticism the Simulation Argument presupposes. There is thus no good reason to believe its conclusion.

The paper is behind a paywall, but I have uploaded it to my shared Dropbox folder, [here](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ifrylhwtyq8xyke/qmAqhqMYds/Birch%20-%20On%20the%20%E2%80%98simulation%20argument%E2%80%99%20and%20selective%20scepticism.pdf).

EDIT: I emailed the author and am glad to see that he's decided to participate in the discussion below.
# Terminology suggestion: Say "degrees utility" instead of "utils" to prompt affine thinking

[A common mistake people make with utility functions is taking individual utility numbers as meaningful](/lw/ggm/pinpointing_utility/), and performing operations such as adding them or doubling them.  But utility functions are only defined up to positive affine transformation.

Talking about "utils" seems like it would encourage this sort of mistake; it makes it sound like some sort of quantity of _stuff_, that can be meaningfully added, scaled, etc.  Now the use of a unit -- "utils" -- instead of bare real numbers does remind us that the scale we've picked is arbitrary, but it doesn't remind us that the _zero_ we've picked is also arbitrary, and encourages such illegal operations as addition and scaling.  It suggests linear, not affine.

But there is a common everyday quantity which we ordinarily measure with an affine scale, and that's temperature.  Now, in fact, temperatures really do have an absolute zero (and if you make sufficient use natural units, they have an absolute scale, as well), but generally we measure temperature with scales that were invented before that fact was recognized.  And so while we may have Kelvins, we have "degrees Fahrenheit" or "degrees Celsius".

If you've used these scales long enough you recognize that it is meaningless to e.g. add things measured on these scales, or to multiply them by scalars.  So I think it would be a helpful cognitive reminder to say something like "degrees utility" instead of "utils", to suggest an affine scale like we use for temperature, rather than a linear scale like we use for length or time or mass.

The analogy isn't entirely perfect, because as I've mentioned above, temperature actually can be measured on a linear scale (and with sufficient use of natural units, an absolute scale); but the point is just to prompt the right style of thinking, and in everyday life we usually think of temperature as an (ordered) affine thing, like utility.

As such I recommend saying "degrees utility" instead of "utils".  If there is some other familiar quantity we also tend to use an affine scale for, perhaps an analogy with that could be used instead or as well.
# [TED Talk] Peter Singer on Effective Altruism

[http://www.ted.com/talks/peter\_singer\_the\_why\_and\_how\_of\_effective\_altruism.html](http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_singer_the_why_and_how_of_effective_altruism.html)

> If you're lucky enough to live without want, it's a natural impulse to be altruistic to others. But, asks philosopher Peter Singer, what's the most effective way to give? He talks through some surprising thought experiments to help you balance emotion and practicality -- and make the biggest impact with whatever you can share. Sometimes controversial, always practical ethicist Peter Singer stirs public debate about morality, from animal welfare to global poverty.
# [LINK] Soylent crowdfunding

[Rob Rhinehart](http://robrhinehart.com/)'s food replacement [Soylent](https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body) now has a crowdfunding campaign.

> Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health, and vastly reduces your environmental impact by eliminating much of the waste and harm coming from agriculture, livestock, and food-related trash.

If you're interested in one or more of these benefits, send in some money! There is also a [new blog post](http://robrhinehart.com/?p=507).
# Be a little bit more trusting than most people think sensible

I am just working on a list of rationalist rules I live by, and this is the one I have most confidence in, so it seems a good topic for my first ever post (which will be short as I have to be on a train in 15)

Since people routinely exaggerate risk, and social norms pull us towards the [crabs in a bucket](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality) effect (especially for women) I want to correct for that. (Preferably without ending up with a giant Rob Me sign over my head, but that's not the direction I err in.)

For example, there was this rationalist walked into a bar. I had a lot of luggage - everything I need for a four day break, including over two thousand pounds worth of electronic devices and binoculars. I am insured, but it would be an especially annoying time to lose stuff. I had a coffee and then I needed the bathroom, which was far away through a lot of people.

I knew logically how little risk there was in leaving all my stuff; a Highland bar in the middle of the afternoon is even safer than where I live in Edinburgh, and no-one was pinging any alarm bells, but I still spent more time than I'd like to admit convincing myself I didn't have to drag the huge bag with me to the ladies and back. Yes brain, even though I'm alone, and the customers are men, and I'm a middle aged woman, and my mother would freak if she saw me... 

Of course it was fine, like it was the last  hundred times. One day I hope to not even have to persuade myself, but meanwhile I notice my prediction was correct and feel just a little bit pleased with myself.
# Collecting expressions of interest in a rationality conference in August

On the principle of organising events that I want to attend myself, I would very much like to organise a rationality conference/convention in the UK. I organise events for a living; in addition, in my free time I've organised five ~200 person weekend conventions and several other events.

At the moment I am thinking of a one day event on a weekend or a Friday in August, at Stamford Bridge or somewhere else easy to get to around London. There would probably also be a pre-conference dinner, or private bar night with music.

Costs would be in the region of £50-£100 a head including lunch.

Can I get a show of hands to see if the idea is viable?
# [LINK] Bets do not (necessarily) reveal beliefs

When does a bet fail to reveal your true beliefs? When it hedges a risk in your portfolio.

If this claim does not immediately strike you as obviously true, you may benefit from reading [this post](http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.ca/2013/05/bets-do-not-necessarily-reveal-beliefs.html) by econblogger Noah Smith. Excerpt:

> ...Alex Tabarrok famously declared that "[a bet is a tax on bullshit](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/11/a-bet-is-a-tax-on-bullshit.html)".
> 
> But this idea, attractive as it is, is not quite true. The reason is something that I've decided to call the Fundamental Error of Risk. It's a mistake that most people make (myself often included!), and that an intro finance class spends months correcting. The mistake is looking at the risk and return of single assets instead of total portfolios. Basically, the risk of an asset - which includes a bet! - is based mainly on how that asset relates to _other assets in your portfolio_.
# Finding interesting communities

diegocaleiro said this in [Research is Polygamous](/r/discussion/lw/hj5/research_is_polygamous_the_importance_of_what_you/ "Research is Polygamous"):

> Being in an area where the most awesome people are is not asking to "lose the game" it is being in an environment that [cultivates greatness](/lw/52g/the_good_news_of_situationist_psychology/).

It made me think of the recent post in Main on [How to Build a Community](/lw/hfq/how_to_build_a_community/ "How to Build a Community"). And reflect a bit on how, while I've lived pretty much exclusively online for the last ten years, the lack of meatspace social contact is finally beginning to annoy me. So here's a question for the group: Not how does one build a community, but where and how does one _find_ existing communities that are worth joining? And what are some examples? Not counting LW itself and its tributaries.

A few things I've tried or will try, in no particular order:

Mensa. Didn't work out terribly well, largely because I seemed to have very little in common with anyone else there. Apparently intelligence alone is an insufficient filter.

Geek conventions. (e.g. Dragoncon) I'm a giant flaming unrepentant geek, so I get the feeling of being among my own kind, and selecting for passion seems to work better than selecting for intelligence insofar as finding interesting people goes. The sheer size of the crowd makes getting at the people who are actually doing awesome things difficult, though. 

Makerspaces. For those that haven't heard the term, these are a sort of shared lab for private individuals. I actually became aware of these through item 2. Seems promising and it's the next thing I intend to look into, within the next few weeks. Unfortunately the nearest established one, like the nearest LW meetup, is downtown through murdertraffic; a 2-3 hour round trip.

I _suspect_, but have no significant evidence, that universities containing graduate schools would also be a good bet. But I'm long out of college (I dropped out, for irrelevant reasons) and have no wish (or money, or time) to go back. I occasionally apply for jobs at the closest such place to me, but haven't had a hit yet and I'm unsure I would want to move downtown anyway. I do get the impression that many here are undergrads or graduate students, so opinions on whether that route may be worth pursuing are welcome.

Beyond that? I don't know. There don't seem to be many communities that both select for _being awesome_ and are accessible to anyone who cares to be awesome. I've found that social reinforcement for doing cool stuff helps a lot. I don't _like_ that fact very much, but I had better find a way to use it.