trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[Link] Personality change key to improving wellbeing
by XiXiDu — 2012-03-06T11:30:16.116Z

‘Is Personality Fixed? Personality Changes as Much as “Variable” Economic Factors and More Strongly Predicts Changes to Life Satisfaction,’ published in Social Indicators Research (doi: 10.1007/s11205-012-0006-z)

[...] small positive personality changes may lead to greater increases in happiness than earning more money, marrying, or gaining employment.

[...]

We found that our personalities can and do change over time – something that was considered improbable until now – and that these personality changes are strongly related to changes in our wellbeing.

[...]

Previous studies have shown that personality accounts for up to 35% of individual differences in life satisfaction, compared to just 4% for income, 4% for employment status and between 1% and 4% for marital status. However, because it was believed our personalities were fixed, policies to improve wellbeing have focused on these lower-impacting external factors.

[...]

“Fostering the conditions where personality growth occurs – such as through positive schooling, communities, and parenting - may be a more effective way of improving national wellbeing than GDP growth.”

[...]

Personality was measured using a well-validated personality questionnaire assessing five broad dimensions which cover the breadth of a person’s personality: openness-to-experiences, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. The researchers then looked at the extent to which personality changed and how these changes related to life satisfaction in comparison to external factors, such as changes to income, changes to employment and changes to marital status. They found that personality changes at least as much as these external factors and predicted about twice as much of changes to life satisfaction over the study period.

Link: manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=8035
Main section vs. discussion section
by ShardPhoenix — 2012-03-06T05:37:31.090Z

(The following may only apply to me. I mention it to see if anyone else has had the same issue).

For a long time I have been only looking at the Discussion section and promoted main page articles. Just now on a whim I checked the non-promoted main page articles and found there were a whole bunch of them, some potentially quite interesting, that I had missed. My expectation based on past experience was that all reasonably good articles from main would be "promoted", but perhaps this has changed. If this has been going on for a while I've presumably missed quite a bit of content. Perhaps it should be made easier to find/notice these? It's a bit weird and awkward that there are 3 different non-uniform ways of finding posts.
[SEQ RERUN] Bind Yourself to Reality
by MinibearRex — 2012-03-06T02:51:42.126Z

Today's post, Bind Yourself to Reality was originally published on 22 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

There are several reasons why it's worth talking about joy in the merely real in a discussion on reductionism. One is to leave a line of retreat. Another is to improve your own abilities as a rationalist by learning to invest your energy in the real world, and in accomplishing things here, rather than in a fantasy.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Joy in Discovery, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Productivity tips for those low on motivation
by John_Maxwell — 2012-03-06T02:41:20.861Z

Lately, I've been in a months-long motivation slump. This has given me the opportunity to gain a few insights about how to get more done with less motivation:

If I have an idea for something I could do (like I had the idea to write this post), strongly consider doing it right away. Otherwise I'll put it on my to do list, where it will never get done. Doing something seems a lot easier and more fun if it's a recent, brilliant idea I'm still proud of.

If I feel generally energetic and motivated, think of the most important, intimidating task I could possibly do and work on that.

Frequently, I'll work on some kind of longer-term intervention to increase productivity, like learning about and implementing some new productivity system. Of course I'll eventually abandon the system, but it will provide benefits until then.

The opportunity cost of doing just anything in these "moments of inspiration" is quite high. I still remember wasting one of the most inspired moments of my early teenage life trying to figure out if it was a bad idea to learn Morse code because my brain could only remember a finite number of facts. My natural instinct when I feel a burst of motivation is to clear my (virtual and physical) workspace before working, but I'm beginning to think that even this uses up valuable "inspired time".

Use Autofocus. You could see the system as a systematized version of structured procrastination. It's the least stressful way to work on stuff I've come across so far.

I'm not using the system right now, but it seems to work reasonably well when I get it going; maybe next time I feel generally energetic and motivated I'll try to get started with it again.

The major downside is the system's complete obliviousness to deadlines, but the author describes some variants on his blog which might solve this problem.

Some day, if I revert to my past, highly motivated self, I hope to use Autofocus as a "lower gear" in combination with some other system, like the Pomodoro technique, which requires more focus and motivation. On my Pomodoro off-hours, I could either use Autofocus or relax completely depending on my energy level.

In general, I've noticed that my self-improvement efforts seemed to go better if I see my own behavior as inherently chaotic and try to work around that.

I've come to realize that aiming for a grand unified system for how I do everythin...
Emotional regulation, Part I: a problem summary
by Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)  — 2012-03-05T23:10:11.172Z

I have a problem with emotions.

I’ve known this for a long time. It’s a very specific problem, one that only affects me a small percentage of the time: most people I know don’t describe me as an emotional person. I’m lucky enough to have been born with the sort of brain that keeps my overall mood on an even keel, no matter how many annoying things I force myself to do.

From my (less than rigorous) comparisons between myself and other people, I think that have good luminosity: almost all of the time, I can trace back the reasons why I feel a certain way and explain it to others in a way that is consistent with my behaviour. I think I know myself pretty well-I don’t like unpredictable situations, I have sucky reaction times, and my brain does not operate at full capacity when under pressure and tends to succumb to the most obvious biases when making decisions. I like to please people, even though I try to give off an impression of not caring what other people think. I have an overactive conscience, and in order to be happy with myself, I need to at least feel like I’m working harder than average. The flip side of my sometimes-rigidity is that I’m not at all impulsive. I may be awful at changing plans in the heat of the moment, but I’m very good at deliberating on my long-term life plan and then carrying it out. Etc.

I suspect that the reason I’m not considered an emotional person is that my moment-to-moment emotional experience isn’t (usually) very intense. I feel annoyance and frustration, even anger, but not strongly enough to alter already made plans or cause me to do something I’ll later regret. I like analyzing myself, and so most of my basic emotions are accompanied by thoughts about those emotions, and I suspect that this process of deliberate analysis causes the actual emotions to be less intense. I don’t experience joy that often, or that strongly, but most of the time I’m experiencing satisfaction with my life, or thinking about things I find interesting, or taking pleasure in what I’m doing at the moment or what I anticipate doing in the near future.

But there’s one exception to the rule, one area where my emotions are anything but muted, and where years of introspection have failed to help me.

...
Meetup Tactics Open Thread
by  — 2012-03-05T19:28:17.111Z

I think we need to have more discussion of meetup tactics on LW. At my local meetup, we've been feeling a bit lost about what works best, so I hereby propose that we have semi-regular meetup tactics discussions like the open and quotes threads.

So here's a few questions to start us off:

What activities or topics of discussion have been particularly productive? What is not?

Have fun adventurous things like hiking or climbing worked?

What is your opinion on the purpose of the meetups? Is it about community? Additional discussion and learning? Practice?

Is it a good idea to have different types of meetup (discussion night, fun day, social, ???), or should everything be scheduled into regular meetups?

What things have worked for building community? There should have been some community disasters by now as well, what caused them?

What has worked for actual practice and leveling up? What hasn't?

What topics produce good discussions? How much structure should discussions have?

How does your meetup get more people to come out (recruitment, attendance, etc). What works, what doesn't work?

What untested ideas do you have for any of the above?

Discuss.
[draft] Generalizing from average: a common fallacy?
by Dmytry — 2012-03-05T11:22:01.690Z

It seems to me that there is a great deal of generalization from average (or correlation, as a form of average) when interpreting the scientific findings.

Consider Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as an example; the hypothesis is tested by measuring average behaviours of huge groups of people; at the same time, it may well be that for some people strong version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis does hold, and for some it is grossly invalid, with some people in between. We had determined that there's considerable diversity in the modes of thought by simply asking the people to describe their thought. I would rather infer from diversity of comments that I can't generalize about the human thought, than generalize from even the most accurate, most scientifically solid, most statistically significant average of some kind, and assume that this average tells of how human thought processes work in general.

In this case the average behaviour is nothing more but some indicator of the ratio between those populations; useless demographical trivia of the form "did you know that among north americans, linguistically-determined people are numerous enough to sway this particular experiment?" (a result that I wouldn't care a lot about). There has been an example posted here.

This goes for much of science, outside the physics.

There was another thread about software engineering. Even if the graph was not inverted and the co-founding variables were accounted for, the result should still have been perceived as useless trivia of the form "did you know that in such and such selection of projects the kind of mistakes that are more costly to fix with time outnumber the mistakes that are less costly to fix with time" (Mistakes in the work that is taken as input for future work, do snowball over time, and the others, not so much; any one who had ever successfully developed non-trivial product that he sold, knows that; but you can't stick 'science' label on this, yet you can stick 'science' label onto some average). Instead, the result is taken as if it literally told whenever mistakes are costlier, or less costly, to fix later. That sort of misrepresentation is in the abstracts of many papers being published.

It seems to me that this fallacy is extremely widespread. A study comes out, which generalizes from average; the elephant in the room is that it is often invalid to generalize from average; yet instea...
The Singularity Institute has started publishing monthly progress reports
by John_Maxwell — 2012-03-05T08:19:31.160Z

If anyone is curious what's going on at SI, it seems as though they've started publishing monthly progress reports on their blog. The latest was published less than a week ago for the month of February:

http://singinst.org/blog/

Thought it might be a good idea to take a minute to positively reinforce the people at SI for their work. Here on Less Wrong, it seems as though we spend a fair amount of time criticizing what they're working on, which is of course valuable. But on the whole, I think there is a very good case they're doing very important and beneficial work. So, go SI!
[SEQ RERUN] Joy in Discovery
by MinibearRex — 2012-03-05T04:31:25.553Z

Today's post, Joy in Discovery was originally published on 21 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

It feels incredibly good to discover the answer to a problem that nobody else has answered. And we should enjoy finding answers. But we really shouldn't base our joy on the fact that nobody else has done it before. Even if someone else knows the answer to a puzzle, if you don't know it, it's still a mystery to you. And you should still feel joy when you discover the answer.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Joy in the Merely Real, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
"The Journal of Real Effects"
by CarlShulman — 2012-03-05T03:07:02.685Z

Luke's recent post mentioned that The Lancet has a policy encouraging the advance registration of clinical trials, while mine examined an apparent case study of data-peeking and on-the-fly transformation of studies. But how much variation is there across journals on such dimensions? Are there journals that buck the standards of their fields (demanding registration, p=0.01 rather than p=0.05 where the latter is typical in the field, advance specification of statistical analyses and subject numbers, etc)? What are some of the standouts? Are there fields without any such?

I wonder if there is a niche for a new open-access journal, along the lines of PLoS, with standards strict enough to reliably exclude false-positives. Some possible titles:

The Journal of Real Effects

(Settled) Science

Probably True

Journal of Non-Null Results, Really

Too Good to Be False

_________________?
Writing about Singularity: needing help with references and bibliography
by  — 2012-03-05T01:27:33.289Z

It was Yudkowsky's Fun Theory sequence that inspired me to undertake the work of writing a novel on a singularitarian society... however, there are gaps I need to fill, and I need all the help I can get. It's mostly book recommendations that I'm asking for.

One of the things I'd like to tackle in it would be the interactions between the modern, geeky Singularitarianisms, and Marxism, which I hold to be somewhat prototypical in that sense, as well as other utopisms. And contrasting them with more down-to-earth ideologies and attitudes, by examining the seriously dangerous bumps of the technological point of transition between "baseline" and "singularity". But I need to do a lot of research before I'm able to write anything good: if I'm not going to have any original ideas, at least I'd like to serve my readers with a collection of well-researched. solid ones.

So I'd like to have everything that is worth reading about the Singularity, specifically the Revolution it entails (in one way or another) and the social aftermath. I'm particularly interested in the consequences of the lag of the spread of the technology from the wealthy to the baselines, and the potential for baselines oppression and other forms of continuation of current forms of social imbalances, as well as suboptimal distribution of wealth. After all, according to many authors, we've had the means to end war, poverty and famine, and most infectious diseases, since the sixties, and it's just our irrational methods of wealth distribution That is, supposing the commonly alleged ideal of total lifespan and material welfare maximization for all humanity is what actually drives the way things are done. But even with other, different premises and axioms, there's much that can be improved and isn't, thanks to basic human irrationality, which is what we combat here.

Also, yes, this post makes my political leanings fairly clear, but I'm open to alternative viewpoints and actively seek them. I also don't intend to write any propaganda, as such. Just to examine ideas, and scenarios, for the sake of writing a compelling story, with wide audience appeal. The idea is to raise awareness of the Singularity as something rather imminent ("Summer's Coming"), and cause (or at least help prepare) normal people to question the wonders and dangers thereof, rationally.

It's a frighteningly ambitio...
The kinesthesia switch
by NancyLebovitz — 2012-03-04T11:46:11.865Z

I've been working on improving my kinesthesia for about thirty years (for reasons which are not obvious to me, I've felt a strong motivation to get moved into my body), and I've found something interesting.

I was doing a chi gung exercise [1] which involves going up on the balls of my feet while pushing up with my hands, and I suddenly noticed that my body had mostly blanked out when I was in the extended position, which led to a realization that blanking out was a process rather than a thing [2]. I thought "kinesthesia switch on", and I could suddenly feel a good bit of detail about how I was wobbling-- I mean I could feel some of my bones moving relative to each other, instead of just feeling in a vague sort of way that the position didn't feel very good.

What's better, is that I remembered how to turn on the kinesthesia switch, and have continued to work with it.

A side effect of turning on the switch is that I uncurl my upper body (kinesthesia seems to have something to do with alignment), but deliberately uncurling doesn't work nearly as well as turning on the switch.

At first, I would try to turn on the switch as much as possible, but that began to feel bad-- probably because there was some perfectionism driving that approach. I've tweaked it to "as much as feels good to me".

The most noticeable effect (aside from better spirits and less akrasia) is that going up and down stairs has become a lot easier the vast majority of the time. Down stairs has been a problem for years because of accumulated knee injuries. Upstairs became problematic about 6 months ago because, for no apparent reason, I developed some sort of serious muscle tightness in my right leg. It started with pain in the back of my right heel which was clearly linked to movement, and eventually shifted to pain in what definitely felt like the muscle attachment to my sitzbone on the right.

This days, I'm mostly trotting up and down stairs rather than stepping down a step and then puting the other foot on the same step in order to avoid a good bit of pain.

The reason I'm doing this as a top level post is because I'm pretty sure the kinesthesia switch isn't the only switch-- I think other switches can be found in areas where you've done enough observation to have a chance of finding the path from one state to another, and I'm hoping there will be comments about finding other switches.

Another, and less...
Sapir-Whorf , Savings, and Discount Rates [Link]
by Nic_Smith — 2012-03-04T08:03:40.013Z

The language you speak may affect how you approach your finances, according to a working paper by economist Keith Chen (seen via posts by Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative and Economy Lab). It appears that languages that require more explicit future tense are associated with lower savings. A few interesting quotes from a quick glance:

...[I]n the World Values Survey a language’s FTR [Future-Time Reference] is almost entirely uncorrelated with its speakers’ stated values towards savings (corr = -0.07). This suggests that the language effects I identify operate through a channel which is independent of conscious attitudes towards savings. [emphasis mine]

Something else that I wasn't previously aware of:

Lowenstein (1988) finds a temporal reference-point effect: people demand much more compensation to delay receiving a good by one year, (from today to a year from now), than they are willing to pay to move up consumption of that same good (from a year from now to today).
60m Asteroid currently assigned a .022% chance of hitting Earth.
by Joshua Hobbes — 2012-03-04T07:19:26.912Z

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2012da14.html

http://rt.com/news/paint-asteroid-earth-nasa-767/

Seems like a good opportunity to bring up existential risks. And A friendly reminder that NASA is in fact pretty damned important.

Thoughts?
[SEQ RERUN] Joy in the Merely Real
by MinibearRex — 2012-03-04T06:07:59.772Z

Today's post, Joy in the Merely Real was originally published on 20 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you can't take joy in things that turn out to be explicable, you're going to set yourself up for eternal disappointment. Don't worry if quantum physics turns out to be normal.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Savanna Poets, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.