Accelerating Future

Reducing the probability of human extinction is more important than everything else, because humans are the only known source of “intelligence”, “creativity”, “values”, and if we die, the universe is boring. No one in the future will care that you saw a funny movie. They will care if you helped Earth-originating intelligent life survive its self-destructive adolescent phase.

For those who wish to make their lives actually mean something, there’s the existential risk reduction career network:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4lg/existential_risk_reduction_career_network

Interested in donating to existential risk reduction efforts? Would you like to exchange career information with like-minded others? Then you should consider the Existential Risk Reduction Career Network! (“X Risk Network” for those short on time.) From the front page of the website:

“This network is for anyone interested in donating substantial amounts (relative to income) to non-profit organizations focused on the reduction of existential risk, such as SIAI, FHI, and the Lifeboat Foundation. [...] We are a community of people assisting each other to increase our resources available for contribution. Members discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different careers, network, share advice on job applications and career advancement, assist others with finding interviews, and occasionally look for qualified individuals to hire from within the network.”

For more details, including on the process of requesting invitations, head on over to the front page at http://www.xrisknetwork.com/

Keep in mind that the network is for students as well, not just those currently on the job market. The network also has discussion of long term job strategy, school admissions, and intern possibilities.

Join an elite group of far-sighted individuals by contributing at least 5% of your income to existential risk reduction charities.

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For those curious about what all the fuss over Less Wrong is about, Louie Helm, formerly a Singularity Institute Visiting Fellow, has a post up on what he’s learned from reading the core sequences and following it up with participation.

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From Less Wrong.

There will be a meetup for people from lesswrong in Los Angeles, on Friday July 9th, 2010 at 3PM. Roundtrip carpooling from San Diego is definitely available and other carpooling options also develop. The time and location are designed to make it possible for people from lesswrong to get together and talk. Later, anyone interested should be able to walk to the first meeting of the LA Chapter of the SENS Foundation where Aubrey de Grey will be attending. It should be a good time if you can make it! See below the cut for more details.

The exact location of the meetup is still in flux: possibly somewhere on the UCLA campus, possibly at a nearby coffee shop, possibly the same facility as the SENS meeting. This text will be edited when something stabilizes. See the comments below to help work out the details.

The format will be very free form – mostly talking, eating, and/or drinking. Topics are especially likely to include cryonics and life extension given the proximity of the SENS Meeting, but saving the world and “rationality itself” will probably be on the menu as well :-)

See you there!

Everyone who makes it, have fun. Remember to encourage people to attend Singularity Summit. The more smart people show up, the better.

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Roko has a new thesis that makes sense, which is basically a rediscovery of Bryan Caplan’s “Rational Irrationality”:

Making yourself happy is not best achieved by having true beliefs, primarily because the contribution of true beliefs to material comfort is a public good that you can free ride on, but the signaling benefits and happiness benefits of convenient falsehoods pay back locally, i.e. you personally benefit from your adoption of convenient falsehoods. The consequence is that many people hold beliefs about important subjects in order to feel a certain way or be accepted by a certain group. Widespread irrationality is ultimately an incentive problem.

For more about rational irrationality, read The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, an excellent book. The book basically proves that voter attitudes about economics are in great disagreement with the experts, and that the experts are unbiased in the ways they are traditionally accused of. Systematic biases of the public are explored, such as anti-market bias, antiforeign bias, make-work bias, and pessimistic bias. This book will cause you to reevaluate public polls on the health of the economy and probably start ignoring them.

The basic idea of “rational irrationality” is that people are rational when it matters to them, and irrational when it doesn’t matter and there is an emotional incentive to choose the false belief. I consider this result promising, because it suggests that human beings in general can be rational when they have to be. It implies that people aren’t irrational due to lack of intelligence so much as lack of motivation.

Here’s some praise of the book from the back jacket:

“Bryan Caplan blends economics, political science, and psychology in an arresting and informative polemic that is witty, crisp, cogent, provocative, and timely. You may or not agree with his assessment of our democracy, but you will be entertained, challenged, and perhaps angered, but also enlightened.”

– Scott Keeter, Pew Research Center

Caplan’s book is a recent data point in a trend of analyzing democracy for where it works and where it doesn’t, instead of blindly worshipping it. The problem with blind worship is that people ask questions, and ultimately you have to provide answers, or they look for answers elsewhere.

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Here’s a good quote that was recently posted on the “etjaynesstudy” Yahoo Group:

“As a colleague of the writer once remarked, ‘Philosophers are free to do whatever they please, because they don’t have to do anything right.’ But a responsible scientist does not have that freedom; he will not assert the truth of a general principle, and urge others to adopt it, merely on the strength of his own intuition.”

– E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory: the Logic of Science

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Why Do Atheists Have to Talk About Atheism?

A few days ago I saw some blog comment, I forget where it was, but it was something like, “It’s not atheism that I mind all that much, it’s just atheists’ incredible air of smugness about it.”

Being convinced about the high probability of something because your epistemology forces you to be given the observed evidence cannot be an act of smugness or unsmugness itself. I suppose it’s how you present it, but people trying to avoid debating the central core of any given argument will always accuse the other side of smugness, to change the subject.

Of course, the issue is really about status. Low or medium-status people are not allowed to make controversial assertions that contradict the cherished beliefs of high-status people because this is seen as a social power grab. Furthermore, there are many low-status people that indiscriminately oppose the cherished beliefs of high-status people for their own satisfaction.

For more on this, see “The 9/11 Meta-Truther Conspiracy Theory”.

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My friend and colleague Tom McCabe, who I consider one of the smartest people I know, has been Twittering some interesting stuff lately, in the last few hours especially. He has been posting a list of lies. Here is that list below, ending with #19:

A list of lies. #1: For most Americans, an Ivy League college is more expensive than other private or public colleges.

Lie #2: Most lawyers are wealthy and earn a six-figure income.

Lie #3: Teachers are poorly paid, can be easily fired, and have terrible working conditions.

Lie #4: Most millionaires wear expensive suits, have expensive watches and drive expensive foreign-made cars.

Lie #5: Recycling paper or plastic is a cost-effective way to help the environment.

Lie #6: (hopefully everyone knows this by now): Real estate always goes up.

Lie #7: The stock market returns 8-12% over the long term (real number is more like 5% including dividends.)

Lie #8: Paying to go to a no-name college is an investment, which will pay out much more than it cost in future wages.

Lie #9: Mathematics is about numbers and equations and calculations and algorithms (see http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf)

Lie #10: America is more socially mobile than the Old World (France, Germany, Scandinavia, Spain, Italy et. al.)

Lie #11: Rich people, as a general rule, pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than middle-class people.

Lie #12: There is a Biblical law prohibiting abortion.

Lie #13: Illiteracy, in the sense of not being able to read and understand newspaper, is essentially nonexistent among Western adults.

Lie #14: Health insurance is a hedge against risk, like package insurance or life insurance (it’s more like a protection racket).

Lie #15: Americans nowadays are freer than Americans in 1900, or most people in third world countries.

Lie #16: America since 1930 is essentially a capitalist, entrepreneurial, free-market society.

Lie #17: Big company mergers and acquisitions generally create value for shareholders.

Lie #18: Most people want to get rich.

# Lie #19: A majority of people who matriculate into college graduate within six years.

How many of these lies do you believe? The only one which really would surprise me is the last one.

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Decision Theory for Humans from Jeriaska on Vimeo.

For a funny part, see 27:00.

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Great article by Patri Friedman at Less Wrong. He turned my thinking around on the issue, in less than 15 seconds of reading.

Other interesting posts include “Can we create a function that provably predicts the optimization power of intelligences?” by whpearson and Do Fandoms Need Awfulness? by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

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Continuing with the theme that Michael Vassar mentioned in our interview, that “collective wisdom” is really wrong about a whole heck of a lot, and that we should doubt the basic sanity of the world, Robin Hanson links an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice”, that completely trashes The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, long considered the Bible of writing and grammar. Every serious writer is supposed to have it.

It opens thus:

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won’t be celebrating.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

The author, Geoffrey K. Pullum, is head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh. The entire article is great and causes me to completely question the advice I’ve received from senior writers over the last few years. Let me skip to the last paragraph, for the conclusion:

So I won’t be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I’ve spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.

How could tens of thousands of English teachers have missed all these obvious-in-retrospect arguments over the last 50 years?

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For the reasoning behind this, read “How to Disagree”.

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