Can we finance cryogenics by revival awards?
Create a market for frozen humans. The reward is for the agent who performs the revival. Investors can either search for revival technology and patent it, or they can invest in frozen humans, which they can sell to agents who wish to attempt revival.
Maybe the head is the most vulnerable region to injury, and the locating of the self in the head reflects the need to protect the brain and other inputs (mouth, eyes, ears).
I hypothesise a lower proportion of drinkers than the rest of the population. (subject of course to cultural norms where you come from)
Curiously, high SES in the United States is correlated with more frequent alcohol consumption.
The discussion itself is a good case study in complex communication. Look at the levels of indirection:
A: What is true about growth, effort, ability, etc?
B: What do people believe about A?
C: What is true about people who hold the different beliefs in B?
D: What does Dweck believe about C (and/or interventions to change B)?
E: What does Scott believe about C (by way of discussing D, and also C, and B, and A)?
Yikes! Naturally, it’s hard to keep these separate. From what I can tell, the conversation is mostly derailing because people didn’t understand the differences between levels at all, or because they aren’t taking pains to clarify what level they are currently talking about. So everyone gets that E is the “perspective” level, and that D is the contrasting perspective, but you have plenty of people confusing (at least in discussion) levels ABC, or A and BC, which makes progress on D and E impossible.
(Not the OP, but musing on part of this)
I’ve never been in therapy, but I find it almost impossible to map certain psychological concepts and questions to coherent internal things. It’s like when someone describes political liberalism as “the belief that government should be bigger”: It’s not total nonsense, but it doesn’t connect with solid, and it’s probably a sign of confusion if you feel that you can give a categorical answer.
Or another way: Trying to apply these concepts to myself feels like asking if some Canadian guy more culturally Japanese or Spanish (extroversion/introversion, high/low self-esteem, inner/outer locus of control, masculine/feminine). I can see that certain percentage of the world population is really clearly Japanese or Spanish, but what’s the meaning of saying this Canadian guy is more Japanese, or even that he’s more Japanese in contexts X, Y, and Z, and more Spanish in environments P, Q, and R?
Well put.
Furthermore, is there any great mystery about the possible scope of these hidden opinions? I suspect (though how can I verify?) that most of these “too controversial to mention” opinions can be enumerated by simple inversion of common beliefs.
Blue is right → Blue is wrong Green is good → Green is bad
If we’re talking about things you can’t say because of moral outrage, then there aren’t that many beliefs that are common enough to provoke widespread outrage by publicly challenging them. Maybe you can’t guess exactly why Blue is Actually Bad, but you know the general forms of how it could be so.
Certainly there are other, more exotic things you shouldn’t say in public (“How to build a super laser weapon from pocket change”, etc), but I doubt this problem is the driving force here.
Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being stumbled over.
-- Oliver W. Holmes
I agree that this isn’t happening to LW. (To avoid repetition, I talk about a bit more about motivation in this comment)
I’m a bit curious what prompted you to post this?
Well, I think it’s true, interesting, and useful :)
The argument is a specific case of a more general form (explaining changing group dynamics by selection into the group, driven by the norms of the group, but without the norms necessarily causing a direct change to any individual’s behavior) which I think is a powerful pattern to understand. But like a lot of social dynamics, explicitly pointing it out can be tricky, because it can make the speaker seem snooty or Machiavellian or tactless, and because it can insult large classes of people, possibly including current group members. I felt that LW is one of the few places where I could voice this type of argument and get a charitable reception (after all, I’m indirectly insulting everyone who likes to talk politics, which is most people, including me :P)
To be clear: I don’t think lesswrong is currently being hurt by this dynamic. But I do see periodic comments criticizing the use of only internal risks (mind-killing ourselves) as the justification for avoiding political topics. I’m sympathetic to some of these critiques, and I wanted to promote a reason to avoiding political topics that didn’t imply that mind-killing susceptibility was somehow an insurmountable problem for individuals.
On outguessing the market: With only public information, can someone (expect to) determine better times to invest into diversified funds? Specifically, is it a good idea to use the “being greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy” heuristic?
Seems to be a working memory aid for me.
If I have to manipulate equations mentally, I’ll (sort of) explain the equation sub-vocally and assign chunks of it to different fingers/regions of space, and then move my fingers around or reassign to regions, as if I’m “dragging and dropping” (e.g. multiply by a denominator means dragging a finger pointing at the denominator over and up). Even if I’m working on paper, this helps me see one or two steps further ahead than I could do so using internal mental imagery alone. I don’t remember explicitly learning this.
If you would like to be horrified, represent the number of deaths from WWII in unary in a text document and scroll through it (by copy pasting larger and larger chunks, or by some other method).
There are about 4000 “1” characters in a page in MS Word, so at 20 million battle deaths, you’ll get about 5000 pages.
I agree that the relationship is separate question. I did find some links though:
Here is a Swedish conscripts study, finding that pre-morbid IQ was negatively associated with later adult depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia, but positively related to mania, measured by hospital admittance. This New Zealand study replicates this: Low childhood IQ predicts depression, anxiety, while higher IQ predicts bipolar.
These are about the best “large homogeneous” population studies I could find, in two more-or-less standard Western cultures. There is one study that tracked some particularly high performing children through adulthood, but the results weren’t much different regarding mental illness than a normal high intelligence sample would be. Needless to say, it gets complicated when you look at populations that are preselected (college students, etc) or more diverse. Most popular articles that claim a uniform association are looking at some narrow populations (e.g. famous artists), or reporting how intelligence relates to different presentations of a given mental illness (e.g. intelligence seems to the presentation of anxiety).
Even assuming genetic risk for a mental illness was unrelated to education or intelligence, you’d expect something like this given the environmental correlates: Better family conditions early on, better social status later. While there are some environmental stressors that are probably associated with higher intelligence (graduate/medical/law school, perhaps more status anxiety?), these are probably not severe enough to outweigh the stressors in the opposite direction.
Just leaving the phone across the room didn’t work for me, but the lock did.
There are all sorts of possible schemes: I also thought about putting the clock up in an inaccessible location (a high shelf in my closet). Then turning it off would require physically dragging a stepladder or chair from some other room, bringing it in, being awake enough not to fall off it, etc.
My sleep tends to be delayed and irregular. I put my alarm clock in a locked box. In the morning, it takes ~45 seconds to get out of bed, walk across the room, and open the combination lock. Since doing so, my waking time has greatly smoothed.
There are roughly four prototypical white American regions/cultures, which correspond to fairly clear demographic events. Two of these are distinct white “rural” cultures (crudely: the western cowboy and the southern redneck) but these are often misleadingly combined into a unified “rural” stereotype that doesn’t really describe many actual people. This makes about as much sense as combining New York and San Francisco to create the archetypal “urban” American. Alas, the media is based in big coastal cities, and so even many Americans conflate the two.
So I think what you’ve noticed is that the cowboy culture has this individualist current, that leads to fewer public displays of religion, even though the people tended to be privately religious. Whereas the redneck culture has a more group-based history, with an theological approach (Evangelicalism) that requires more public displays of faith.
For the immigration element, look at this is map of self-reported ancestry.
The huge region of self-identified German ancestry is centered on historically cowboy culture areas, and the Grey region labeled “American” is redneck culture. The “American” self-identification usually means Northern England / Southern Scotland / Northern Ireland, but far in the past.
The Grey region is the so-called Bible Belt, sometimes just referred to as “the South”, or as Appalachia. The lower-class whites in this area are the basis for the redneck stereotype (see Google images for pictures), but the area really doesn’t have the cowboy flavor. The cowboy or frontier rural culture historically spread out over the modern-day-German-ancestry areas in waves. The modern impact of this is complicated, but it’s sufficient to say that the rural cultures of the West are rather different from the rural culture of the South.
So I’m not too surprised if aspects of cowboy culture appeal more to Europeans today than redneck culture, because the modern areas where cowboy cultural flourished were inhabited by the descents of immigrants who were closer to modern Europe (culturally and temporally) than the people who founded redneck culture.
I can’t comment on alcohol use, but on recuperative activity:
Different types of “burnt out” suggest different remedies.
If you just spent 8 hours sitting at a desk, you might get a bump from a game of tennis, or a long walk. If you just spent 8 hours on your feet, that game of tennis might not help.
If you just spent 8 hours alone, then socialize. If you were dealing with customers and coworkers and crowds nonstop, maybe do something alone.
Anecdote: When I lived in college dorms (4 people in 2 bunk beds in a unit), my idea of heaven was sitting alone in a quiet empty room. The desire evaporated as soon as I moved out.
Sometimes people match to the wrong class of remedies: If you’re angry (a negative, high-arousal state), you might not want to go out with friends (social activity = further arousal). If you’re lethargic and depressed (negative, low-arousal), the long hot bath might makes things worse (hot bath = low arousal).
Yes! I think this is it. The wikipedia article links to these ray diagrams, which I found helpful (particularly the fourth picture).
I suspected it had to do with an overlap in the penumbra, or the “fuzzy edges”, of the shadow, but I kept getting confused because the observation isn’t what you would expect, if you think of the penumbra as two separate pictures that you’re simply “adding together” as they overlap.
Note: This post raises a concern about the treatment of depression.
If we treat depression with something like medication, should we be worried about people getting stuck in bad local optima, because they no longer feel bad enough that the pain of changing environments seems small by comparison? For example, consider someone in a bad relationship, or an unsuitable job, or with a flawed philosophic outlook, or whatever. The risk is that you alleviate some of the pain signal stemming from the lover/job/ideology, and so the patient never feels enough pressure to fix the lover/job/ideology.
Also, I’m pretty confident that the medical profession has thought about this in detail, but I’ve been spinning my wheels trying to find the right search terms. Does anyone know where to look, or have other recommendations?
Good points. This may be another case where we evolved to have probability-weighted-by-utility intuitions, and where we work backwards from these intuitions when ask for a model of raw probability.