The average time people take to complete the survey is 20 minutes, with most people taking 15 and a long tail of people taking up to several hours, presumably because they went on to do something else for a while and returned to complete it later.
Thanks for mentioning the problem with the links. Fixed.
This is an awesome, awesome, awesome post! I think you have nailed a few important axis of variance that we usually neglect.
Now, precisely because you are still part of the community and can accept rationalist memes, you are an important sample to learn what the rationalist community is not. At least what it is not necessarily.
Would you, and any other self-identified rationalist sidekick, please fill out this survey?
I am analyzing how personality is related to beliefs about consciousness and memetic affiliations. If only heroes fill out the questionnaire, I may associate traits that are not actually relevant for rationality with rationality.
Personally, I think that the difference you are pointing out ultimately comes down to testosterone, and relatedly, Aspergers.
I’m currently running a study on personality and consciousness in the transhumanist community. The questionnaire also inquires into the possible effects of Aspergers in memetic affiliations.
Of course, LessWrongers are an important piece of the puzzle. Please help me by answering this survey:
qualiacomputing.com/2015/07/18/state-space-of-background-assumptions/
My guess is that there are several variables that are indeed positively correlated throughout the entire range, but are particularly highly correlated at the very top. Why not? I’m pretty sure we can come up with a list.
Did you know that we already have instances of things that pass the Turing test?
And more surprisingly, that we don’t generally consider them conscious?
And the most amazing of all: That they have existed for probably at the very least a hundred thousand years (but possibly much more)?
I am talking about the characters in our dreams
They fool us into thinking that they are conscious! That they are the subjects of their own worlds just as people presumably are when awake.
You can have a very eloquent conversation with a dream character without ever noticing there is any apparent lack of consciousness. You can even ask them about their own consciousness (I have done so).
The riddle to why this is possible involves a very deep state of affairs that we are scarcely aware of in daily life. Namely, that your phenomenal self is, just as well, a dream character.
sorry
This seems to be associated with higher than average testosteron levels. If you inject testosterone to a random man he will very prone to not lie and be overly straightforward.
If you lack an objective, a good goal is to be able to solve national math Olympiad problems in the time allowed for the competitions.
At this rate it might be very rational to look at ways to modify our cognitive architecture and limbic system to experience long term and sustained attraction and love… rather than hack it via external stimuli.
MDMA is promising when it comes to revive intimacy between long term couples. But its neurotoxic profile makes this non-workable for most people. Long term sustainable mood enrichers and love enhancers should be developed… this will be much more life enriching than just rationally learning what relationship style best suits you.
The crux of the disagreement, I think, is in the way we understand the self-assessment of our experience. If consciousness is epiphenomenal or just a different level of description of a purely physical world, this self-assessment is entirely algorithmic and does not disclose anything real about the intrinsic nature of consciousness.
But consciousness is not epiphenomenal, and a purely computational account fails to bridge the explanatory gap. Somehow conscious experience can evaluate itself directly, which still remains a not well understood and peculiar fact about the universe. In addition, as I see it, this needs to be acknowledged to make more progress in understanding both ethics and the relationship between the physical world and consciousness.
No, dude, the correct answer is “because he is a man!”
I think you are not aware of research in acquired taste. It turns out that the effect of particular foods and drinks on psychological states create some deep subconscious associations. Take this as a clear and striking example:
“A study that investigated the effect of adding caffeine and theobromine (active compounds in chocolate) vs. a placebo to identically-flavored drinks that participants tasted several times, yielded the development of a strong preference for the drink with the compounds.[3]”
I think that’s why I do enjoy beer now, even though I thought exactly as you did several years ago. I thought it was a huge collective rationalization. Which I still think is a big part of it, specially among teenagers and young adults who like to boast about being strong drinkers and how oh-dear they love alcohol so very much. But grown up people do drink, say, one beer alone and seem to enjoy it quite a bit. But without the pleasant relaxation that usually follows, though, the taste would not be agreeable. So we see a deep neurological change in the way we process taste.
It is my understanding that outrage is the result of ‘selective empathy’ if at all, and VERY often completely lacking in empathy. E.g. When a group of people are outraged to a gay couple for having gay sex. Ok, so where is empathy in this case? Victimless crime evoking huge deontological moral self-righteousness and anger.
We know that many zealous followers are willing to die for the honor of their leaders. It would not be very surprising to see that happen in early Christianity.
And yet fire as a phenomenon exists in several spatio-temporal coordinates, right? If the observer of consciousness is a property of conscious experience as a physical phenomena, maybe we should expect to find it wherever consciousness exists.
“Arguing over the meaning of a word nearly always means that you’ve lost track of the original question.”
Eliezer Yudkowsky
“‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof be silent,’ the seventh and final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, is to me the most beautiful but also the most errant. ‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof write books, and music, and invent new and better terminology through mathematics and science,’ something like that, is how I would put it. Or, if one is not predisposed to some such productivity, ‘. . . thereof look steadfastly and directly into it forever.’”
-- Daniel Kolak, comment on a post by Gordon Cornwall.
It actually sounds to me like CEV will indeed spit it out. It will explain how a better understanding of what we are will lead us to abandon the constrains of the human experience in th search for maximizing the goodness of the universe, a scenario that we would understand if we were smarter, had grown more closer together and had a better grasp of the nature of identity and consciosness and subjective reward.
I think there are 3 pages.