Podcasts about alicorn

An alicorn becomes old enough to gain her magic – but will she even make it in time to take the test?Written especially for this podcast by Alice.  If you enjoyed this story, please do leave us a review.  And, if you'd like to suggest an animal for a future Animal Tales story, you can do so by emailing podcast@animaltales.uk. We would love to hear from you.  Animal Tales Books!Collections of Animal Tales stories are available to buy exclusively at Amazon. Simply search for Animal Tales Short Stories or follow this link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CLJQZ9C9?binding=paperback&ref=dbs_dp_sirpi Become a PREMIUM SubscriberYou can now enjoy Animal Tales by becoming a Premium Subscriber. This gets you:All episodes in our catalogue advert freeBonus Premium-only episodes (one per week) which will never be used on the main podcastWe guarantee to use one of your animal suggestions in a storyYou can sign up through Apple Podcasts or through Supercast and there are both monthly and yearly plans available.   Discover a brand new story every Monday, Wednesday and Friday – just for you!  You can find more Animal Tales at https://www.spreaker.com/show/animal-tales-the-kids-story-podcast A Note About The AdvertsIn order to allow us to make these stories we offer a premium subscription and run adverts. The adverts are not chosen by us, but played automatically depending on the platform you listen through (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc) and the country you live in. The adverts may even be different if you listen to the story twice.  We have had a handful of instances where an advert has played that is not suitable for a family audience, despite the podcast clearly being labelled for children. If you're concerned about an advert you hear, please contact the platform you are listening to directly. Spotify, in particular, has proven problematic in the past, for both inappropriate adverts and the volume at which the adverts play. If you find this happening, please let Spotify know via their Facebook customer care page.  As creators, we want your child's experience to be a pleasurable one. Running adverts is necessary to allow us to operate, but please do consider the premium subscription service as an alternative – it's advert free.

When my son was three, we enrolled him in a study of a vision condition that runs in my family. They wanted us to put an eyepatch on him for part of each day, with a little sensor object that went under the patch and detected body heat to record when we were doing it. They paid for his first pair of glasses and all the eye doctor visits to check up on how he was coming along, plus every time we brought him in we got fifty bucks in Amazon gift credit. I reiterate, he was three. (To begin with. His fourth birthday occurred while the study was still ongoing.) So he managed to lose or destroy more than half a dozen pairs of glasses and we had to start buying them in batches to minimize glasses-less time while waiting for each new Zenni delivery. (The [...] --- First published: March 20th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yRJ5hdsm5FQcZosCh/intention-to-treat --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Discover why Avi Cohen (CEO of Entrio.io) guards trust, what he learned about the army's "fire and forget" approach, and how realizing he was the bottleneck helped him scale his company (15 minute episode). ======================================== CEO Blindspots® Podcast Guest: Avi Cohen. Avi is a co-founder and CEO of Entrio, which has raised a $11m seed round from prominent top tier investors like Communitas Capital, Vintage, Fin Capital, Alicorn, BNYM and American Family Insurance. Entrio is a platform that helps enterprises to drive the technology adoption of third party applications while reducing costs, risks, and complexity. With over 10 years of experience working with banks and technology firms, Avi has a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities in the fintech and banking sectors, and a proven track record of delivering innovative solutions and creating value for customers and partners. Prior to Entrio, Avi co-founded and led several startups. He was a Co-Founder at The Floor Hub, Israel's first fintech hub, which connected dozens of Israeli startups with global banks and corporations, resulting in multiple implementations and investments. He also incubated and launched two in-house ventures, including Mirato, a platform for third-party risk management. In addition Avi was a technology scout for the British government consulting multiple corporates and financial institutions looking to engage or invest in innovative technologies. In collaboration with Accenture, he created the Fintech government strategy for the UK and Israel. Avi holds a master's degree from Sciences Po, Paris, and a BA from Ben Gurion University. He is an alumnus of the IDF intelligence unit and a former basketball player and team captain. Avi is passionate about applying technologies to solve the biggest challenges in the business world. For more information about Entrio.io; https://www.entrio.io/ To see how much your organization could save with Entrio.io; https://www.entrio.io/roi For more information about Avi Cohen; https://www.linkedin.com/in/avi-cohen-334b8953/ ======================================== CEO Blindspots® Podcast Host: Birgit Kamps. Birgit's professional experience includes starting and selling an “Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Private Company” and a “Best Company to Work for in Texas”, and serving as a Board Member with various companies. She is also a mentor at the University of Houston's Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship. Birgit is able to help investors and executives quickly discover blind spots holding their organization back, and accelerate leadership effectiveness. In addition, Birgit is the host of the CEO Blindspots® Podcast which was recognized for having the “biggest listener growth” in the USA by 733%, and most recently for having the "top 1.5% global ranking" in its category; ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ceoblindspots.com/podcast/⁠⁠⁠⁠ To ask questions about this or one of the 250+ other CEO Blindspots® Podcast episodes, send an email to⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠birgit@ceoblindspots.com⁠

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Introducing AI-Powered Audiobooks of Rational Fiction Classics, published by Askwho on May 4, 2024 on LessWrong. (ElevenLabs reading of this post:) I'm excited to share a project I've been working on that I think many in the Lesswrong community will appreciate - converting some rational fiction into high-quality audiobooks using cutting-edge AI voice technology from ElevenLabs, under the name "Askwho Casts AI". The keystone of this project is an audiobook version of Planecrash (AKA Project Lawful), the epic glowfic authored by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Lintamande. Given the scope and scale of this work, with its large cast of characters, I'm using ElevenLabs to give each character their own distinct voice. It's a labor of love to convert this audiobook version of this story, and I hope if anyone has bounced off it before, this might be a more accessible version. Alongside Planecrash, I'm also working on audiobook versions of two other rational fiction favorites: Luminosity by Alicorn (to be followed by its sequel Radiance) Animorphs: The Reckoning by Duncan Sabien I'm also putting out a feed where I convert any articles I find interesting, a lot of which are in the Rat Sphere. My goal with this project is to make some of my personal favorite rational stories more accessible by allowing people to enjoy them in audiobook format. I know how powerful these stories can be, and I want to help bring them to a wider audience and to make them easier for existing fans to re-experience. I wanted to share this here on Lesswrong to connect with others who might find value in these audiobooks. If you're a fan of any of these stories, I'd love to get your thoughts and feedback! And if you know other aspiring rationalists who might enjoy them, please help spread the word. What other classic works of rational fiction would you love to see converted into AI audiobooks? Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Introducing AI-Powered Audiobooks of Rational Fiction Classics, published by Askwho on May 4, 2024 on LessWrong. (ElevenLabs reading of this post:) I'm excited to share a project I've been working on that I think many in the Lesswrong community will appreciate - converting some rational fiction into high-quality audiobooks using cutting-edge AI voice technology from ElevenLabs, under the name "Askwho Casts AI". The keystone of this project is an audiobook version of Planecrash (AKA Project Lawful), the epic glowfic authored by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Lintamande. Given the scope and scale of this work, with its large cast of characters, I'm using ElevenLabs to give each character their own distinct voice. It's a labor of love to convert this audiobook version of this story, and I hope if anyone has bounced off it before, this might be a more accessible version. Alongside Planecrash, I'm also working on audiobook versions of two other rational fiction favorites: Luminosity by Alicorn (to be followed by its sequel Radiance) Animorphs: The Reckoning by Duncan Sabien I'm also putting out a feed where I convert any articles I find interesting, a lot of which are in the Rat Sphere. My goal with this project is to make some of my personal favorite rational stories more accessible by allowing people to enjoy them in audiobook format. I know how powerful these stories can be, and I want to help bring them to a wider audience and to make them easier for existing fans to re-experience. I wanted to share this here on Lesswrong to connect with others who might find value in these audiobooks. If you're a fan of any of these stories, I'd love to get your thoughts and feedback! And if you know other aspiring rationalists who might enjoy them, please help spread the word. What other classic works of rational fiction would you love to see converted into AI audiobooks? Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Shat The Movies power couple Carlos and Natasha were kind enough to gift the Shat Crew three film commissions of our choice. So we  used the first to fill a glaring omission in the Pantheon of Shat: "Legend." Nursing a "Hawk The Slayer" hangover, Ash was a bit worried venturing back into her beloved fantasy genre, but she quickly discovered Legend's production value was top-notch. Gene was impressed with dwarven heroics, and Big D felt like he was having a bad acid trip. But all three Shat hosts agreed on three things: Tom Cruise looked ridiculous, Ridley Scott builds incredible worlds, and Tim Curry is a god. In this episode, your hosts discuss the difference between alicorn, unicorn and Pegasus while plunging into less critical questions, including: Why does Jack abandon his loot? Was the enchanted dress all that enchanting? How long is too long to play Frisbee with metal platters? Are goth girls dirty, sexy or both? Did Darkness deserve banishment? And which version of "Legend" is the right one to watch? Android: https://shatpod.com/android Apple: https://shatpod.com/apple All: https://shatpod.com/subscribe CONTACT Email: hosts@shatpod.com Website: https://shatpod.com/movies Leave a Voicemail: Web: https://shatpod.com/voicemail Leave a Voicemail: Call: (914) 719-7428 SUPPORT THE PODCAST Donate or Commission: https://shatpod.com/support Shop Merchandise: https://shatpod.com/shop Theme Song - Die Hard by Guyz Nite: https://www.facebook.com/guyznite

Are there examples of unicorns being magical? What exactly does acquiring unicorn horns do? And is there a deeper paper trail of the existence of this mysterious merchant? The duo dive deeper into the lore of unicorns and are taken straight to public records where mentions of a familiar merchant steal the show. - Topics Discussed:- The Holy Bible- Proof of Unicorn Magic- Mystical Horns- Alicorn Powder- Purifying Tears- Sacred Blood Blood- The Greek Merchant- Russian Turkish War- Mount AthosOur Links:Official Website - https://greythoughts.info/podcastTwitter - https://twitter.com/JustConvoPodFacebook - https://facebook.com/justconvopodInstagram -https://instagram.com/justconvopod

On the first episode of the Pippcast, host Pipp and producer Jazz are joined by Sunny Starscout to talk about how her life has changed since magic returned to Equestria.Want more My Little Pony music? There's lots more to listen to at:https://orcd.co/mylittleponyplaylist Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today on the Ether we have the AssetMantle community call number 9. You'll hear from sachinmatta.eth, Abhinav, carbonZERO, san Alicorn, Bilian BitBerry, and more! Recorded on August 18th 2022. If you enjoy the music at the end of the episodes, you can find the albums streaming on Spotify, and the rest of your favorite streaming platforms. Check out Project Survival, Virus Diaries, and Plan B wherever you get your music. Thank you to everyone in the community who supports TerraSpaces.

The Wayward Pool was a magical place, and the information given was of the upmost importance. Our adventurers now know the purpose of the Alicorn horn, but not how to wield it. They also have a prisoner to interrogat, but will he spill everything? We continue Wild Beyond the Witchlight, a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Starring: Troy as Usagi Alex as Richard Josh as Corus Tyler as Chinnopio   Want to leave a comment? -Email therancorsbrothel@gmail.com.  -Follow us on Twitter @Rancors_Brothel.

Another Sunday double-header edition! First Jason leads a VC Sunday School session on how to react when companies try and skip steps and raise larger rounds (2:51). Plus, how Pegasus (or Alicorn) companies can end up being much better investments than traditional Unicorns. Then, for This Week in Climate Startups, Molly chats with Andrew Beebe of Obvious Ventures (18:47). You will learn: 1. Andrew's focus within climate tech (electric mobility, carbon and carbon markets) 2. How Andrew's first startup exit set him up to join the solar industry 3. How contrarian bets make careers 4. The key criteria for climate investments to be good venture bets 5. How Obvious Ventures puts its "world positive" mission into practice 6. The way carbon disclosure requirements will reshape industry 7. Why Andrew recommends reading Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future"

Another Sunday double-header edition! First Jason leads a VC Sunday School session on how to react when companies try and skip steps and raise larger rounds (2:51). Plus, how Pegasus (or Alicorn) companies can end up being much better investments than traditional Unicorns. Then, for This Week in Climate Startups, Molly chats with Andrew Beebe of Obvious Ventures (18:47). You will learn: 1. Andrew's focus within climate tech (electric mobility, carbon and carbon markets) 2. How Andrew's first startup exit set him up to join the solar industry 3. How contrarian bets make careers 4. The key criteria for climate investments to be good venture bets 5. How Obvious Ventures puts its "world positive" mission into practice 6. The way carbon disclosure requirements will reshape industry 7. Why Andrew recommends reading Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future" (00:00) Jason and Molly intro today's show: VC Sunday School, TWiCS with Andrew Beebe (02:51) VCSS: companies raising big rounds before they're ready (11:20) Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist (12:38) Pegasus (alicorn) companies: flying over rounds of funding (18:47) This Week in Climate Startups w/ Andrew Beebe of Obvious Ventures (23:02) Wealthfront - Get your first $5,000 managed for free, for life at https://wealthfront.com/TWIST (24:32) The first clean tech boom in the solar industry (33:21) Embroker - Get an extra 10% off insurance for your business at https://Embroker.com/twist (34:44) Obvious and Andrew Beebe's investment thesis: “World Positive” (56:54) SaaS Syndicate, Open Scouting, Remote Demo Day, angel.university Check out Obvious Ventures: https://obvious.com FOLLOW Andrew: https://twitter.com/andrewbeebe FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Daily Dose of Recovery returns with a bit of artistic flare as David shares a short story inspired by his partnership with his food accountability buddy. 

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 5: You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue, published by Alicorn. Previously in sequence/sequence index: Living Luminously Next in sequence: Let There Be Light Luminosity is fun, useful to others, and important in self-improvement. You should learn about it with this sequence. Luminosity? Pah! Who needs it? It's a legitimate question. The typical human gets through life with astonishingly little introspection, much less careful, accurate introspection. Our models of ourselves are sometimes even worse than our models of each other - we have more data, but also more biases loading up our reflection with noise. Most of the time, most people act on their emotions and beliefs directly, without the interposition of self-aware deliberation. And this doesn't usually seem to get anyone maimed or killed - when was the last time a gravestone read "Here Lies Our Dear Taylor, Who Might Be Alive Today With More Internal Clarity About The Nature Of Memory Retrieval"? Nonsense. If Taylor needs to remember something, it'll present itself, or not, and if there's a chronic problem with the latter then Taylor can export memories to the environment. Figuring out how the memories are stored in the first place and tweaking that is not high on the to-do list. Still, I think it's worth investing considerable time and effort into improving your luminosity. I submit three reasons why this is so. First, you are a fascinating creature. It's just plain fun and rewarding to delve into your own mind. People in general are among the most complex, intriguing things in the world. You're no less so. You have lived a fair number of observer-moments. Starting with a native architecture that is pretty special all by itself, you've accumulated a complex set of filters by which you interpret your input - remembered past, experienced present, and anticipated future. You like things; you want things; you believe things; you expect things; you feel things. There's a lot of stuff rolled up and tucked into the fissures of your brain. Wouldn't you like to know what it is? Particularly because it's you. Many people find themselves to be their favorite topics. Are you an exception? (There's one way to find out...) Second, an accurate model of yourself can help you help others deal with you in the best possible way. Right now, they're probably using kludgey agglomerations of self-projection, stereotype, and automatically generated guesses that they may not bother to update as they learn more about you. I'm assuming you don't surround yourself with hostile people who would use accurate data about you to hurt and manipulate you, but if you do, certainly be judicious with whatever information your quest for luminosity supplies. As for everyone else, their having a better model of you will avoid a lot of headaches on everyone's parts. I'll present myself as an example: I hate surprises. Knowing this, and being able to tell a complete and credible story about how this works, I can explain to people who might wish to exchange gifts why they should not spring unknown wrapped items on me, and avoid that source of irritation. Most of the people around me choose not to take actions that they know will irritate me; but without a detailed explanation of exactly how my preferences are uncommon, they'll all too easily revert to their base model of a generic person. Third, and most germane to the remaining posts in this sequence: with a better picture of who you are and what your brain is up to, you can find the best low-hanging fruit in terms of hacks to change yourself. If you keep going from point A to point Z, but know nothing about the route in between, then the only way you can avoid a disliked Z is to try to come to a screeching halt right before it happens. If you could monitor the process from the start...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 7: The ABC's of Luminosity, published by Alicorn. Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: Let There Be Light Next in sequence: Lights, Camera, Action! Affect, behavior, and circumstance interact with each other. These interactions constitute informative patterns that you should identify and use in your luminosity project. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the second story from Seven Shiny Stories. The single most effective thing you can do when seeking luminosity is to learn to correlate your ABC's, collecting data about how three interrelated items interact and appear together or separately. A stands for "affect". Affect is how you feel and what's on your mind. It can be far more complicated than "enh, I'm fine" or "today I'm sad". You have room for plenty of simultaneous emotions, and different ones can be directed at different things - being on a generally even keel about two different things isn't the same as being nervous about one and cheerful about the other, and neither state is the same as being entirely focused on one subject that thrills you to pieces. If you're nervous about your performance evaluation but tickled pink that you just bought a shiny new consumer good and looking forward to visiting your cousin next week yet irritated that you just stubbed your toe, all while being amused by the funny song on the radio, that's this. For the sake of the alphabet, I'm lumping in less emotionally laden cognition here, too - what thoughts occur to you, what chains of reasoning you follow, what parts of the environment catch your attention. B stands for "behavior". Behavior here means what you actually do. Include as a dramatically lower-weighted category those things that you fully intended to do, and actually moved to do, but were then prevented from without from doing, or changed your mind about due to new, unanticipated information. This is critical. Fleeting designs and intentions cross our minds continually, and if you don't firmly and definitively place your evidential weight on the things that ultimately result in action, you will get subconsciously cherry-picked subsets of those incomplete plan-wisps. This is particularly problematic because weaker intentions will be dissuaded by minor environmental complications at a much higher rate. Don't worry overmuch about "real" plans that this filtering process discards. You're trying to know yourself in toto, not yourself at your best time-slices when you valiantly meant to do good thing X and were buffetted by circumstance: if those dismissed real plans represent typical dispositions you have, then they'll have their share of the cohort of actual behavior. Trust the law of averages. C stands for "circumstance". This is what's going on around you (what time is it? what's going on in your life now and recently and in the near future - major events, minor upheavals, plans for later, what people say to you? where are you: is it warm, cold, bright, dim, windy, calm, quiet, noisy, aromatic, odorless, featureless, busy, colorful, drab, natural, artificial, pretty, ugly, spacious, cozy, damp, dry, deserted, crowded, formal, informal, familiar, new, cluttered, or tidy?). It also covers what you're doing and things inside you that are generally conceptualized as merely physical (are you exhausted, jetlagged, drugged, thirsty, hungry, sore, ill, drunk, energetic, itchy, limber, wired, shivering? are you draped over a recliner, hiding in a cellar, hangliding or dancing or hiking or drumming or hoeing or diving?) Circumstances are a bit easier to observe than affect and behavior. If you have trouble telling where you are and what you're up to, your first priority shouldn't be luminosity. And while we often have some trouble distinguishing ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 6: Let There Be Light, published by Alicorn. Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue Next in sequence: The ABC's of Luminosity You can start from psych studies, personality tests, and feedback from people you know when you're learning about yourself. Then you can throw out the stuff that sounds off, keep what sounds good, and move on. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the first story from Seven Shiny Stories. Where do you get your priors, when you start modeling yourself seriously instead of doing it by halfhearted intuition? Well, one thing's for sure: not with the caliber of introspection you're most likely starting with. If you've spent any time on this site at all, you know people are riddled with biases and mechanisms for self-deception that systematically confound us about who we are. ("I'm splendid and brilliant! The last five hundred times I did non-splendid non-brilliant things were outrageous flukes!") Humans suck at most things, and obeying the edict "Know thyself!" is not a special case. The outside view has gotten a bit of a bad rap, but I'm going to defend it - as a jumping-off point, anyway - when I fill our luminosity toolbox. There's a major body of literature designed to figure out just what the hell happens inside our skulls: it's called psychology, and they have a rather impressive track record. For instance, learning about heuristics and biases may let you detect them in action in yourself. I can often tell when I'm about to be subject to the bystander effect ("There is someone sitting in the middle of the road. Should I call 911? I mean, she's sitting up and everything and there are non-alarmed people looking at her - but gosh, I probably don't look alarmed either..."), have made some progress in reducing the extent to which I generalize from one example ("How are you not all driven insane by the spatters of oil all over the stove?!"), and am suspicious when I think I might be above average in some way and have no hard data to back it up ("Now I can be confident that I am in fact good at this sort of problem: I answered all of these questions and most people can't, according to someone who has no motivation to lie!"). Now, even if you are a standard psych study subject, of course you aren't going to align with every psychological finding ever. They don't even align perfectly with each other. But - controlling for some huge, obvious factors, like if you have a mental illness - it's a good place to start. For narrowing things down beyond what's been turned up as typical human reactions to things, you can try personality tests like Myers-Briggs or Big Five. These are not fantastically reliable sources. However, some of them have some ability to track with some parts of reality. Accordingly, saturate with all the test data you can stand. Filter it for what sounds right ("gosh, I guess I do tend to be rather bothered by things out of place in my environment, compared to others") and dump the rest ("huh? I'm not open to experience at all! I won't even try escargot!") - these are rough, first-approximation priors, not posteriors you should actually act on, and you can afford a clumsy process this early in the game. While you're at it, give some thought to your intelligence types, categorize your love language1 - anything that carves up person-space and puts you in a bit of it. Additionally, if you have honest friends or relatives, you can ask for their help. Note that even honest ones will probably have a rosy picture of you: they can stand to be around you, so they probably aren't paying excruciatingly close attention to your flaws, and may exaggerate the importance of your virtues relative to a neutral observer's hypothetical opi...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 2: Mental Crystallography, published by Alicorn. Brains organize things into familiar patterns, which are different for different people. This can make communication tricky, so it's useful to conceptualize these patterns and use them to help translation efforts. Crystals are nifty things! The same sort of crystal will reliably organize in the same pattern, and always break the same way under stress. Brains are also nifty things! The same person's brain will typically view everything through a favorite lens (or two), and will need to work hard to translate input that comes in through another channel or in different terms. When a brain acquires new concepts - even really vital ones - the new idea will result in recognizeably-shaped brain-bits. Different brains, therefore, handle concepts differently, and this can make it hard for us to talk to each other. This works on a number of levels, although perhaps the most obvious is the divide between styles of thought on the order of "visual thinker", "verbal thinker", etc. People who differ here have to constantly reinterpret everything they say to one another, moving from non-native mode to native mode and back with every bit of data exchanged. People also store and retrieve memories differently, form first-approximation hypotheses and models differently, prioritize sensory input differently, have different levels of introspective luminosity1, and experience different affect around concepts and propositions. Over time, we accumulate different skills, knowledge, cognitive habits, shortcuts, and mental filing debris. Intuitions differ - appeals to intuition will only convert people who share the premises natively. We have lots in common, but high enough variance that it's impressive how much we do manage to communicate over not only inferential distances, but also fundamentally diverse brain plans. Basically, you can hit two crystals the same way with the same hammer, but they can still break along different cleavage planes. This phenomenon is a little like man-with-a-hammer syndrome, which is why I chose that extension of my crystal metaphor. But a person's dependence on their mental crystallography, unlike their wanton use of their hammer, rarely seems to diminish with time. (In fact, youth probably confers some increased flexibility - it seems that you can probably train children to have different crystalline structures to some degree, but much less so with adults). MWaH is actually partially explained by the brain's crystallographic regularities. A hammer-idea will only be compelling to you if it aligns with the crystals in your head. Having "useful" mental crystallography - which lets you comprehend, synthesize, and apply ideas in their most accurate, valuable form - is a type of epistemic luck about the things you can best understand. If you're intrinsically oriented towards mathematical explanations, for instance, and this lets you promptly apprehend the truth and falsity of strings of numbers that would leave my head swimming, you're epistemically lucky about math (while I'm rather likely to be led astray if someone takes the time to put together a plausible verbal explanation that may not match up to the numbers). Some brain structures can use more notions than others, although I'm skeptical that any human has a pure generalist crystal pattern that can make great use of every sort of concept interchangeably without some native mode to touch base with regularly. When you're trying to communicate facts, opinions, and concepts - most especially concepts - it is a useful investment of effort to try to categorize both your audience's crystallography and your own. With only one of these pieces of information, you can't optimize your message for its recipient, because you need to know what you're trans...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 4: Living Luminously, published by Alicorn. The following posts may be useful background material: Sorting Out Sticky Brains; Mental Crystallography; Generalizing From One Example I took the word "luminosity" from "Knowledge and its Limits" by Timothy Williamson, although I'm using it in a different sense than he did. (He referred to "being in a position to know" rather than actually knowing, and in his definition, he doesn't quite restrict himself to mental states and events.) The original ordinary-language sense of "luminous" means "emitting light, especially self-generated light; easily comprehended; clear", which should put the titles into context. Luminosity, as I'll use the term, is self-awareness. A luminous mental state is one that you have and know that you have. It could be an emotion, a belief or alief, a disposition, a quale, a memory - anything that might happen or be stored in your brain. What's going on in your head? What you come up with when you ponder that question - assuming, nontrivially, that you are accurate - is what's luminous to you. Perhaps surprisingly, it's hard for a lot of people to tell. Even if they can identify the occurrence of individual mental events, they have tremendous difficulty modeling their cognition over time, explaining why it unfolds as it does, or observing ways in which it's changed. With sufficient luminosity, you can inspect your own experiences, opinions, and stored thoughts. You can watch them interact, and discern patterns in how they do that. This lets you predict what you'll think - and in turn, what you'll do - in the future under various possible circumstances. I've made it a project to increase my luminosity as much as possible over the past several years. While I am not (yet) perfectly luminous, I have already realized considerable improvements in such subsidiary skills like managing my mood, hacking into some of the systems that cause akrasia and other non-endorsed behavior, and simply being less confused about why I do and feel the things I do and feel. I have some reason to believe that I am substantially more luminous than average, because I can ask people what seem to me to be perfectly easy questions about what they're thinking and find them unable to answer. Meanwhile, I'm not trusting my mere impression that I'm generally right when I come to conclusions about myself. My models of myself, after I stop tweaking and toying with them and decide they're probably about right, are borne out a majority of the time by my ongoing behavior. Typically, they'll also match what other people conclude about me, at least on some level. In this sequence, I hope to share some of the techniques for improving luminosity that I've used. I'm optimistic that at least some of them will be useful to at least some people. However, I may be a walking, talking "results not typical". My prior attempts at improving luminosity in others consist of me asking individually-designed questions in real time, and that's gone fairly well; it remains to be seen if I can distill the basic idea into a format that's generally accessible. I've divided up the sequence into eight posts, not including this one, which serves as introduction and index. (I'll update the titles in the list below with links as each post goes up.) You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue. Why do you want to be luminous? What good does it do, and how does it do it? Let There Be Light. How do you get your priors when you start to model yourself, when your existing models are probably full of biases? The ABC's of Luminosity. The most fundamental step in learning to be luminous is correlating your affect, behavior, and circumstance. Lights, Camera, Action! Luminosity won't happen by itself - you need to practice, and watch out for key mental items. The Spo...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 3: Generalizing From One Example, published by Alicorn. Related to: The Psychological Unity of Humankind, Instrumental vs. Epistemic: A Bardic Perspective "Everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do." -- Vlad Taltos (Issola, Steven Brust) My old professor, David Berman, liked to talk about what he called the "typical mind fallacy", which he illustrated through the following example: There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like? Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed. The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery1 to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images2. Dr. Berman dubbed this the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one's own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else's. He kind of took this idea and ran with it. He interpreted certain passages in George Berkeley's biography to mean that Berkeley was an eidetic imager, and that this was why the idea of the universe as sense-perception held such interest to him. He also suggested that experience of consciousness and qualia were as variable as imaging, and that philosophers who deny their existence (Ryle? Dennett? Behaviorists?) were simply people whose mind lacked the ability to easily experience qualia. In general, he believed philosophy of mind was littered with examples of philosophers taking their own mental experiences and building theories on them, and other philosophers with different mental experiences critiquing them and wondering why they disagreed. The formal typical mind fallacy is about serious matters of mental structure. But I've also run into something similar with something more like the psyche than the mind: a tendency to generalize from our personalities and behaviors. For example, I'm about as introverted a person as you're ever likely to meet - anyone more introverted than I am doesn't communicate with anyone. All through elementary and middle school, I suspected that the other children were out to get me. They kept on grabbing me when I was busy with something and trying to drag me off to do some rough activity with them and their friends. When I protested, they counter-protested and told me I really needed to stop whatever I was doing and come join them. I figured they were bullies who were trying to annoy me, and found ways to hide from them and scare them off. Eventually I realized that it was a double misunderstanding. They figured I must be like them, and the only thing keeping me from playing their fun games was that I was too shy. I figured they must be like me, and that the onl...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 9: The Spotlight, published by Alicorn. Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: Lights, Camera, Action Next in sequence: Highlights and Shadows Inspecting thoughts is easier and more accurate if they aren't in your head. Look at them in another form from the outside, like they belonged to someone else. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the fourth story from Seven Shiny Stories. One problem with introspection is that the conclusions you draw about your thoughts are themselves thoughts. Thoughts, of course, can change or disappear before you can extract information about yourself from them. If a flash of unreasonable anger crosses my mind, this might stick around long enough to make me lash out, but then vanish before I discover how unreasonable it was. If thoughts weren't slippery like this, luminosity wouldn't be much of a project. So of course, if you're serious about luminosity, you need a way to pin down your thoughts into a concrete format that will hold still. You have to pry your thoughts out of your brain. Writing is the obvious way to do this - for me, anyway. You don't have to publicize what you extract, so it doesn't have to be aesthetic or skillful, just serviceable for your own reference. The key is to get it down in a form that you can look at without having to continue to introspect. Whether this means sketching or scribing or singing, dump your brain out into the environment and have a peek. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that a given idea makes sense; it's harder to fool someone else. Writing down an idea automatically engages the mechanisms we use to communicate to others, helping you hold your self-analysis to a higher standard. To turn your thoughts into non-thoughts, use labels to represent them. Put them in reference classes, so that you can notice when the same quale, habit of inference, or thread of cognition repeats. That way, you can detect patterns: "Hey, the last time I felt like this, I said something I really regretted; I'd better watch it." If you can tell when something has happened twice, you can tell when it hasn't - and new moods or dispositions are potentially very important. They mean that you or something around you has changed, and that could be a valuable resource or a tricky hazard. Your labels can map onto traditional terms or not - if you want to call the feeling of having just dropped your ice cream on the sidewalk "blortrath", no one will stop you. (It can be useful, later when you're trying to share your conclusions about yourself with others, to have a vocabulary of emotion that overlaps significantly with theirs; but you can always set up an idiolect-to-dialect dictionary later.) I do recommend identifying labeled items as being more or less similar to each other (e.g. annoyance is more like fury than it is like glee) and having a way to account for that in your symbolism. Similarities like that will make it more obvious how you can generalize strategies from one thing to another. Especially if you don't think in words, you might find it challenging to turn your thoughts into something in the world that represents them. Maybe, for instance, you think in pictures but aren't at all good at drawing. This is one of the steps in luminosity that I think is potentially dispensible, so if you honestly cannot think of any way to jot down the dance of your mind for later inspection, you can just work on thinking very carefully such that if something were to be out of place the next time you came back to your thought, you'd notice it. I do recommend spending at least five to ten minutes trying to write, diagram, draw, mutter, or interpretive-dance your mental activity before you give it up as untenable for you, however. Once you have pro...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 1: Sorting Out Sticky Brains, published by Alicorn. tl;dr: Just because it doesn't seem like we should be able to have beliefs we acknowledge to be irrational, doesn't mean we don't have them. If this happens to you, here's a tool to help conceptualize and work around that phenomenon. There's a general feeling that by the time you've acknowledged that some belief you hold is not based on rational evidence, it has already evaporated. The very act of realizing it's not something you should believe makes it go away. If that's your experience, I applaud your well-organized mind! It's serving you well. This is exactly as it should be. If only we were all so lucky. Brains are sticky things. They will hang onto comfortable beliefs that don't make sense anymore, view the world through familiar filters that should have been discarded long ago, see significances and patterns and illusions even if they're known by the rest of the brain to be irrelevant. Beliefs should be formed on the basis of sound evidence. But that's not the only mechanism we have in our skulls to form them. We're equipped to come by them in other ways, too. It's been observed1 that believing contradictions is only bad because it entails believing falsehoods. If you can't get rid of one belief in a contradiction, and that's the false one, then believing a contradiction is the best you can do, because then at least you have the true belief too. The mechanism I use to deal with this is to label my beliefs "official" and "unofficial". My official beliefs have a second-order stamp of approval. I believe them, and I believe that I should believe them. Meanwhile, the "unofficial" beliefs are those I can't get rid of, or am not motivated to try really hard to get rid of because they aren't problematic enough to be worth the trouble. They might or might not outright contradict an official belief, but regardless, I try not to act on them. To those of you with well-ordered minds (for such lucky people seem to exist, if we believe some of the self-reports on this very site), this probably sounds outrageous. If I know they're probably not true... And I do. But they still make me expect things. They make me surprised when those expectations are flouted. If I'm asked about their subjects when tired, or not prepared for the question, they'll leap out of my mouth before I can stop them, and they won't feel like lies - because they're not. They're beliefs. I just don't like them very much. I'll supply an example. I have a rather dreadful phobia of guns, and accordingly, I think they should be illegal. The phobia is a terrible reason to believe in the appropriateness of such a ban: said phobia doesn't even stand in for an informative real experience, since I haven't lost a family member to a stray bullet or anything of the kind. I certainly don't assent to the general proposition "anything that scares me should be illegal". I have no other reasons, except for a vague affection for a cluster of political opinions which includes something along those lines, to believe this belief. Neither the fear nor the affection are reasons I endorse for believing things in general, or this in particular. So this is an unofficial belief. Whenever I can, I avoid acting on it. Until I locate some good reasons to believe something about the topic, I officially have no opinion. I avoid putting myself in situations where I might act on the unofficial belief in the same way I might avoid a store with contents for which I have an unendorsed desire, like a candy shop. For instance, when I read about political candidates' stances on issues, I avoid whatever section talks about gun control. Because I know my brain collects junk like this, I try to avoid making up my mind until I do have a pretty good idea of what's going on. Once...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 8: Lights, Camera, Action!, published by Alicorn. Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: The ABC's of Luminosity Next in sequence: The Spotlight You should pay attention to key mental events, on a regular and frequent basis, because important thoughts can happen very briefly or very occasionally and you need to catch them. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the third story from Seven Shiny Stories. Luminosity is hard and you are complicated. You can't meditate on yourself for ten minutes over a smoothie and then announce your self-transparency. You have to keep working at it over a long period of time, not least because some effects don't work over the short term. If your affect varies with the seasons, or with major life events, then you'll need to keep up the first phase of work through a full year or a major life event, and it turns out those don't happen every alternate Thursday. Additionally, you can't cobble together the best quality models from snippets of introspection that are each five seconds long; extended strings of cognition are important, too, and can take quite a long time to unravel fully. Sadly, looking at what you are thinking inevitably changes it. With enough introspection, this wouldn't influence your accuracy about your overall self - there's no reason in principle why you couldn't spend all your waking hours noting your own thoughts and forming meta-thoughts in real time - but practically speaking that's not going to happen. Therefore, some of your data will have to come from memory. To minimize the error introduction that comes of retrieving things from storage, it's best to arrange to reflect on very recent thoughts. It may be worth your while to set up an external reminder system to periodically prompt you to look inward, both in the moment and retrospectively over the last brief segment of time. This can be a specifically purposed system (i.e. set a timer to go off every half hour or so), or you can tie it to convenient promptings from the world as-is, like being asked "What's up?" or "Penny for your thoughts". When you introspect, there is a lot to keep track of. For instance, consider the following: What were you thinking about? (This could be more than one thing. You are a massively parallel system.) Was it a concept, image, sensation, desire, belief, person, object, word, place, emotion, plan, memory...? How tightly were you focused on it? (Is the topic itself narrow or disparate?) What other items (sensory, cognitive, emotional) seemed to intrude on your concentration, if any, and how did you react to this incursion? How did you feel about the subject of the thought? This includes not only emotional reactions like "this is depressing" or "yay!", but also what you felt inclined to do about the topic (if anything), and how important or interesting your thought seemed. How does thinking, in general, feel to you? (I conducted an informal survey of this and got no two answers the same. Anecdotally, it may be rather key to determining how you are different from others, and so in refining your model of yourself relative to the fairly generic priors we're starting with.) Coming up with a good way to conceptualize your style of thinking can help you interpret introspective data, although be sure to abandon a metaphor that looks about to snap. You might have different answers when you're "actively" thinking something through - i.e. when novel information is generated in your mind - and when you're thinking "passively", as when you read or listen to some information and absorb its content as it comes. What memories did the thought dredge up, if any - parallel situations from the past, apparently unrelated anecdotes that floated by for no reason, events where yo...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 10Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: The Spotlight Next in sequence: City of Lights Part of a good luminosity endeavor is to decide what parts of yourself you do and don't like. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the fifth story from Seven Shiny Stories. As you uncover and understand new things about yourself, you might find that you like some of them, but don't like others. While one would hope that you'd be generally pleased with yourself, it's a rare arrogance or a rarer saintliness that would enable unlimited approval. Fortunately, as promised in post two, luminosity can let you determine what you'd like to change as well as what's already present. But what to change? An important step in the luminosity project is to sort your thoughts and feelings not only by type, correlation, strength, etc, but also by endorsement. You endorse those thoughts that you like, find representative of your favorite traits, prefer to see carried into action, and wish to keep intact (at least for the duration of their useful lives). By contrast, you repudiate those thoughts that you dislike, consider indicative of negative characteristics, want to keep inefficacious, and desire to modify or be rid of entirely. Deciding which is which might not be trivial. You might need to sift through several orders of desire before finally figuring out whether you want to want cake, or like liking sleep, or prefer your preference for preferentism. A good place to start is with your macro-level goals and theoretical commitments (e.g., when this preference is efficacious, does it serve your Life Purpose™, directly or indirectly? if you have firm metaethical notions of right and wrong, is this tendency you have uncovered in yourself one that impels you to do right things?). As a second pass, you can work with the information you collected when you correlated your ABCs. How does an evaluated desire makes you feel when satisfied or unsatisfied? Does it cripple you when unsatisfied or improve your performance when satisfied? Are you reliably in a position to satisfy it? If you can't typically satisfy it, would it be easier to change the desire or to change the circumstances that prevent its satisfaction? However, this is a second step. You need to know what affect and behavior are preferable to you before you can judge desires (and other mental activity) relative to what they yield in those departments, and judging affect and behavior is itself an exercise in endorsement and repudiation. Knowing what you like and don't like about your mind is a fine thing. Once you have that information, you can put it to direct use immediately - I find it useful to tag many of my expressions of emotion with the words "endorsed" or "non-endorsed". That way, the people around me can use that categorization rather than having to either assume I approve of everything I feel, or layer their own projections of endorsement on top of me. Either would be unreliable and cause people to have poor models of me: I have not yet managed to excise my every unwanted trait, and my patterns of endorsement do not typically map on to the ones that the people around me have or expect me to have. Additionally, once you know what you like and don't like about your mind, you can begin to make progress in increasing the ratio of liked to unliked characteristics. People often make haphazard lurches towards trying to be "better people", but when "better" means "lines up more closely with vaguely defined commonsense intuitions about morality", this is not the sort of goal we're at all good at pursuing. Specific projects like being generous or more mindful are a step closer, but the greatest marginal benefit in self-revision comes of figuring out what comes in a...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 12: Lampshading, published by Alicorn. Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: City of Lights You can use luminosity to help you effectively change yourself into someone you'd more like to be. Accomplish this by fixing your self-tests so they get good results. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the seventh story from Seven Shiny Stories. When you have coherent models of yourself, it only makes good empirical sense to put them to the test. Thing is, when you run a test on yourself, you know what test you're running, and what data would support which hypothesis. All that and you're the subject generating the data, too. It's kind of hard to have good scientific controls around this sort of experiment. Luckily, it turns out that for this purpose they're unnecessary! Remember, you're not just trying to determine what's going on in a static part of yourself. You're also evaluating and changing the things you repudiate when you can. You don't just have the chance to let knowledge of your self-observation nudge your behavior - you can outright rig your tests. Suppose that your model of yourself predicts that you will do something you don't think you should do - for instance, suppose it predicts that you will yell at your cousin the next time she drops by and tracks mud on your carpet, or something, and you think you ought not to yell. Well, you can falsify that model which says you'll yell by not yelling: clearly, if you do not yell at her, then you cannot be accurately described by any model that predicts that you'll yell. By refraining from yelling you push the nearest accurate model towards something like "may yell if not careful to think before speaking" or "used to yell, but has since grown past that". And if you'd rather be accurately described by one of those models than by the "yells" model... you can not yell. (Note, of course, that falsifying the model "yells" by silently picking up your cousin and defenestrating her is not an improvement. You want to replace the disliked model with a more likable one. If it turns out that you cannot do that - if controlling your scream means that you itch so badly to fling your cousin out a window that you're likely to actually do it - then you should postpone your model falsification until a later time.) Now, of course figuring out how to not yell (let us not forget akrasia, after all) will be easier once you have an understanding of what would make you do it in the first place. Armed with that, you can determine how to control your circumstances to prevent yelling-triggers from manifesting themselves. Or, you can attempt the more difficult but more stable psychic surgery that interrupts the process from circumstance to behavior. Sadly, I can't be as specific as would be ideal here because so much depends on the exact habits of your brain as opposed to any other brains, including mine. You may need to go through various strategies before you hit on one that works for you to change what you need to change. You could find that successful strategies eventually "wear off" and need replacing and their edifices rebuilding. You might find listening to what other people do helpful (post techniques below!) - or you might not. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 13: Ureshiku Naritai, published by Alicorn. This is a supplement to the luminosity sequence. In this comment, I mentioned that I have raised my happiness set point (among other things), and this declaration was met with some interest. Some of the details are lost to memory, but below, I reconstruct for your analysis what I can of the process. It contains lots of gooey self-disclosure; skip if that's not your thing. In summary: I decided that I had to and wanted to become happier; I re-labeled my moods and approached their management accordingly; and I consistently treated my mood maintenance and its support behaviors (including discovering new techniques) as immensely important. The steps in more detail: 1. I came to understand the necessity of becoming happier. Being unhappy was not just unpleasant. It was dangerous: I had a history of suicidal ideation. This hadn't resulted in actual attempts at killing myself, largely because I attached hopes for improvement to concrete external milestones (various academic progressions) and therefore imagined myself a magical healing when I got the next diploma (the next one, the next one.) Once I noticed I was doing that, it was unsustainable. If I wanted to live, I had to find a safe emotional place on which to stand. It had to be my top priority. This required several sub-projects: I had to eliminate the baggage that told me it was appropriate or accurate to feel bad most of the time. I endorse my ability to react emotionally to my environment; but this should be acute, not chronic. Reacting emotionally is about feeling worse when things get worse, not feeling bad when things are bad for months or years on end. (Especially not when feeling bad reduces the ability to make things less bad.) Further, having a lower set point did not affect my emotional range except to shrink it; it reduced the possible impact of real grief, and wasn't compatible with the "react emotionally" plan. The low set point also compromised my ability to react emotionally to positive input, because it was attached to a systematic discounting of such positivity. I had to eliminate the baggage that told me it was not possible to cognitively change my mood. Moods correspond to thoughts, and while it can be hard to avoid thinking about things, I can decide to think about whatever I want. A decade of assorted antidepressants had wreaked no discernible change on my affect, which constituted strong evidence that chemicals were not my problem. And it was easy to see that my mood varied on a small scale with things under my complete or partial control, like sleep, diet, and activity. It did not seem outrageous that long-term, large-scale interventions could have similar effects on my overall mood. I had to decide, and act on the decision, that my happiness was important and worth my time and attention. I had to pay attention, and note what helped and what hurt. I had to put increasing the helping factors and decreasing the hurting factors at the top of my list whenever it was remotely feasible, and relax my standards around "remote feasibility" to prevent self-sabotage. And I had to commit to abandoning counterproductive projects or interactions, at least until I'd developed the stability to deal with the emotions they generated without suffering permanent setbacks. 2. I re-labeled my moods, so that identifying them in the moment prompted the right actions. When a given point on the unhappy-happy spectrum - let's call it "2" on a scale of 1 to 10 - was labeled "normal" or "set point", then when I was feeling "2", I didn't assume that meant anything; that was the default state. That left me feeling "2" a lot of the time, and when things went wrong, I dipped lower, and I waited for things outside of myself to go right before I went higher. The p...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 14: A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness, published by Alicorn. tl;dr: Sometimes, people don't try as hard as they could to be nice. If being nice is not a terminal value for you, here are some other things to think about which might induce you to be nice anyway. There is a prevailing ethos in communities similar to ours - atheistic, intellectual groupings, who congregate around a topic rather than simply to congregate - and this ethos says that it is not necessary to be nice. I'm drawing on a commonsense notion of "niceness" here, which I hope won't confuse anyone (another feature of communities like this is that it's very easy to find people who claim to be confused by monosyllables). I do not merely mean "polite", which can be superficially like niceness when the person to whom the politeness is directed is in earshot but tends to be far more superficial. I claim that this ethos is mistaken and harmful. In so claiming, I do not also claim that I am always perfectly nice; I claim merely that I and others have good reasons to try to be. The dispensing with niceness probably springs in large part from an extreme rejection of the ad hominem fallacy and of emotionally-based reasoning. Of course someone may be entirely miserable company and still have brilliant, cogent ideas; to reject communication with someone who just happens to be miserable company, in spite of their brilliant, cogent ideas, is to miss out on the (valuable) latter because of a silly emotional reaction to the (irrelevant) former. Since the point of the community is ideas; and the person's ideas are good; and how much fun they are to be around is irrelevant - well, bringing up that they are just terribly mean seems trivial at best, and perhaps an invocation of the aforementioned fallacy. We are here to talk about ideas! (Interestingly, this same courtesy is rarely extended to appalling spelling.) The ad hominem fallacy is a fallacy, so this is a useful norm up to a point, but not up to the point where people who are perfectly capable of being nice, or learning to be nice, neglect to do so because it's apparently been rendered locally worthless. I submit that there are still good, pragmatic reasons to be nice, as follows. (These are claims about how to behave around real human-type persons. Many of them would likely be obsolete if we were all perfect Bayesians.) It provides good incentives for others. It's easy enough to develop purely subconscious aversions to things that are unpleasant. If you are miserable company, people may stop talking to you without even knowing they're doing it, and some of these people may have ideas that would have benefited you. It helps you hold off on proposing diagnoses. As tempting as it may be to dismiss people as crazy or stupid, this is a dangerous label for us biased creatures. Fewer people than you are tempted to call these things are genuinely worth writing off as thoroughly as this kind of name-calling may tempt you to do. Conveniently, both these words (as applied to people, more than ideas) and closely related ones are culturally considered mean, and a general niceness policy will exclude them. It lets you exist in a cognitively diverse environment. Meanness is more tempting as an earlier resort when there's some kind of miscommunication, and miscommunication is more likely when you and your interlocutor think differently. Per #1, not making a conscious effort to be nice will tend to drive off the people with the greatest ratio of interesting new contributions to old rehashed repetitions. It is a cooperative behavior. It's obvious that it's nicer to live in a world where everybody is nice than in a world where everyone is a jerk. What's less obvious, but still, I think, true, is that the cost of cooperatively being nice ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 15: On Enjoying Disagreeable Company, published by Alicorn. Bears resemblance to: Ureshiku Naritai; A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations In Favor of Niceness In this comment, I mentioned that I can like people on purpose. At the behest of the recipients of my presentation on how to do so, I've written up in post form my tips on the subject. I have not included, and will not include, any specific real-life examples (everything below is made up), because I am concerned that people who I like on purpose will be upset to find that this is the case, in spite of the fact that the liking (once generated) is entirely sincere. If anyone would find more concreteness helpful, I'm willing to come up with brief fictional stories to cover this gap. It is useful to like people. For one thing, if you have to be around them, liking them makes this far more pleasant. For another, well, they can often tell, and if they know you to like them this will often be instrumentally useful to you. As such, it's very handy to be able to like someone you want to like deliberately when it doesn't happen by itself. There are three basic components to liking someone on purpose. First, reduce salience of the disliked traits by separating, recasting, and downplaying them; second, increase salience of positive traits by identifying, investigating, and admiring them; and third, behave in such a way as to reap consistency effects. 1. Reduce salience of disliked traits. Identify the traits you don't like about the person - this might be a handful of irksome habits or a list as long as your arm of deep character flaws, but make sure you know what they are. Notice that however immense a set of characteristics you generate, it's not the entire person. ("Everything!!!!" is not an acceptable entry in this step.) No person can be fully described by a list of things you have noticed about them. Note, accordingly, that you dislike these things about the person; but that this does not logically entail disliking the person. Put the list in a "box" - separate from how you will eventually evaluate the person. When the person exhibits a characteristic, habit, or tendency you have on your list (or, probably just to aggravate you, turns out to have a new one), be on your guard immediately for the fundamental attribution error. It is especially insidious when you already dislike the person, and so it's important to compensate consciously and directly for its influence. Elevate to conscious thought an "attribution story", in which you consider a circumstance - not a character trait - which would explain this most recent example of bad behavior.1 This should be the most likely story you can come up with that doesn't resort to grumbling about how dreadful the person is - that is, don't resort to "Well, maybe he was brainwashed by Martians, but sheesh, how likely is that?" Better would be "I know she was up late last night, and she does look a bit tired," or "Maybe that three-hour phone call he ended just now was about something terribly stressful." Reach a little farther if you don't have this kind of information - "I'd probably act that way if I were coming down with a cold; I wonder if she's sick?" is an acceptable speculation even absent the least sniffle. If you can, it's also a good idea to ask (earnestly, curiously, respectfully, kindly! not accusatively, rudely, intrusively, belligerently!) why the person did whatever they did. Rest assured that if their psyche is fairly normal, an explanation exists in their minds that doesn't boil down to "I'm a lousy excuse for a person who intrinsically does evil things just because it is my nature." (Note, however, that not everyone can produce verbal self-justifications on demand.) Whether you believe them or not, make sure you are aware of at least one cir...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 16: Seven Shiny Stories, published by Alicorn. It has come to my attention that the contents of the luminosity sequence were too abstract, to the point where explicitly fictional stories illustrating the use of the concepts would be helpful. Accordingly, there follow some such stories. 1. Words (an idea from Let There Be Light, in which I advise harvesting priors about yourself from outside feedback) Maria likes compliments. She loves compliments. And when she doesn't get enough of them to suit her, she starts fishing, asking plaintive questions, making doe eyes to draw them out. It's starting to annoy people. Lately, instead of compliments, she's getting barbs and criticism and snappish remarks. It hurts - and it seems to hurt her more than it hurts others when they hear similar things. Maria wants to know what it is about her that would explain all of this. So she starts taking personality tests and looking for different styles of maintaining and thinking about relationships, looking for something that describes her. Eventually, she runs into a concept called "love languages" and realizes at once that she's a "words" person. Her friends aren't trying to hurt her - they don't realize how much she thrives on compliments, or how deeply insults can cut when they're dealing with someone who transmits affection verbally. Armed with this concept, she has a lens through which to interpret patterns of her own behavior; she also has a way to explain herself to her loved ones and get the wordy boosts she needs. 2. Widgets (an idea from The ABC's of Luminosity, in which I explain the value of correlating affect, behavior, and circumstance) Tony's performance at work is suffering. Not every day, but most days, he's too drained and distracted to perform the tasks that go into making widgets. He's in serious danger of falling behind his widget quota and needs to figure out why. Having just read a fascinating and brilliantly written post on Less Wrong about luminosity, he decides to keep track of where he is and what he's doing when he does and doesn't feel the drainedness. After a week, he's got a fairly robust correlation: he feels worst on days when he doesn't eat breakfast, which reliably occurs when he's stayed up too late, hit the snooze button four times, and had to dash out the door. Awkwardly enough, having been distracted all day tends to make him work more slowly at making widgets, which makes him less physically exhausted by the time he gets home and enables him to stay up later. To deal with that, he starts going for long runs on days when his work hasn't been very tiring, and pops melatonin; he easily drops off to sleep when his head hits the pillow at a reasonable hour, gets sounder sleep, scarfs down a bowl of Cheerios, and arrives at the widget factory energized and focused. 3. Text (an idea from Lights, Camera, Action!, in which I advocate aggressive and frequent introspection to collect as much data as possible) Dot reads about an experiment in which the subjects receive phone calls at random times and must tell researchers how happy they feel. Apparently the experiment turned up some really suboptimal patterns of behavior, and Dot's curious about what she'd learn that she could use to improve her life. She gets a friend to arrange delayed text messages to be sent to her phone at intervals supplied by a random number generator, and promises herself that she'll note what she's doing, thinking, and feeling at the moment she receives the text. She soon finds that she doesn't enjoy watching TV as much as she thinks she does; that it's probably worth the time to cook dinner rather than heating up something in the microwave because it's considerably tastier; that she can't really stand her cubicle neighbor; and that she thinks about her ex more t...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 11: City of Lights, published by Alicorn. Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: Highlights and Shadows Next in Sequence: Lampshading Pretending to be multiple agents is a useful way to represent your psychology and uncover hidden complexities. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the sixth story from Seven Shiny Stories. When grappling with the complex web of traits and patterns that is you, you are reasonably likely to find yourself less than completely uniform. You might have several competing perspectives, possess the ability to code-switch between different styles of thought, or even believe outright contradictions. It's bound to make it harder to think about yourself when you find this kind of convolution. Unfortunately, we don't have the vocabulary or even the mental architecture to easily think of or describe ourselves (nor other people) as containing such multitudes. The closest we come in typical conversation more resembles descriptions of superficial, vague ambivalence ("I'm sorta happy about it, but kind of sad at the same time! Weird!") than the sort of deep-level muddle and conflict that can occupy a brain. The models of the human psyche that have come closest to approximating this mess are what I call "multi-agent models". (Note: I have no idea how what I am about to describe interacts with actual psychiatric conditions involving multiple personalities, voices in one's head, or other potentially similar-sounding phenomena. I describe multi-agent models as employed by psychiatrically singular persons.) Multi-agent models have been around for a long time: in Plato's Republic, he talks about appetite (itself imperfectly self-consistent), spirit, and reason, forming a tripartite soul. He discusses their functions as though each has its own agency and could perceive, desire, plan, and act given the chance (plus the possibility of one forcing down the other two to rule the soul unopposed). Not too far off in structure is the Freudian id/superego/ego model. The notion of the multi-agent self even appears in fiction (warning: TV Tropes). It appears to be a surprisingly prevalent and natural method for conceptualizing the complicated mind of the average human being. Of course, talking about it as something to do rather than as a way to push your psychological theories or your notion of the ideal city structure or a dramatization of a moral conflict makes you sound like an insane person. Bear with me - I have data on the usefulness of the practice from more than one outside source. There is no reason to limit yourself to traditional multi-agent models endorsed by dead philosophers, psychologists, or cartoonists if you find you break down more naturally along some other arrangement. You can have two of you, or five, or twelve. (More than you can keep track of and differentiate is not a recommended strategy - if you're very tempted to go with this many it may be a sign of something unhealthful going on. If a group of them form a reliable coalition it may be best to fold them back into each other and call them one sub-agent, not several.) Stick with a core ensemble or encourage brief cameos of peripheral aspects. Name them descriptively or after structures of the brain or for the colors of the rainbow, as long as you can tell them apart. Talk to yourselves aloud or in writing, or just think through the interaction if you think you'll get enough out of it that way. Some examples of things that could get their own sub-agents include: Desires or clusters of desires, be they complex and lofty ("desire for the well being of all living things") or simple and reptilian ("desire for cake") "Inner child" or similar role-like groupings of traits ("professional me", "family-oriented me", "hobb...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 4: Living Luminously, published by Alicorn. The following posts may be useful background material: Sorting Out Sticky Brains; Mental Crystallography; Generalizing From One Example I took the word "luminosity" from "Knowledge and its Limits" by Timothy Williamson, although I'm using it in a different sense than he did. (He referred to "being in a position to know" rather than actually knowing, and in his definition, he doesn't quite restrict himself to mental states and events.) The original ordinary-language sense of "luminous" means "emitting light, especially self-generated light; easily comprehended; clear", which should put the titles into context. Luminosity, as I'll use the term, is self-awareness. A luminous mental state is one that you have and know that you have. It could be an emotion, a belief or alief, a disposition, a quale, a memory - anything that might happen or be stored in your brain. What's going on in your head? What you come up with when you ponder that question - assuming, nontrivially, that you are accurate - is what's luminous to you. Perhaps surprisingly, it's hard for a lot of people to tell. Even if they can identify the occurrence of individual mental events, they have tremendous difficulty modeling their cognition over time, explaining why it unfolds as it does, or observing ways in which it's changed. With sufficient luminosity, you can inspect your own experiences, opinions, and stored thoughts. You can watch them interact, and discern patterns in how they do that. This lets you predict what you'll think - and in turn, what you'll do - in the future under various possible circumstances. I've made it a project to increase my luminosity as much as possible over the past several years. While I am not (yet) perfectly luminous, I have already realized considerable improvements in such subsidiary skills like managing my mood, hacking into some of the systems that cause akrasia and other non-endorsed behavior, and simply being less confused about why I do and feel the things I do and feel. I have some reason to believe that I am substantially more luminous than average, because I can ask people what seem to me to be perfectly easy questions about what they're thinking and find them unable to answer. Meanwhile, I'm not trusting my mere impression that I'm generally right when I come to conclusions about myself. My models of myself, after I stop tweaking and toying with them and decide they're probably about right, are borne out a majority of the time by my ongoing behavior. Typically, they'll also match what other people conclude about me, at least on some level. In this sequence, I hope to share some of the techniques for improving luminosity that I've used. I'm optimistic that at least some of them will be useful to at least some people. However, I may be a walking, talking "results not typical". My prior attempts at improving luminosity in others consist of me asking individually-designed questions in real time, and that's gone fairly well; it remains to be seen if I can distill the basic idea into a format that's generally accessible. I've divided up the sequence into eight posts, not including this one, which serves as introduction and index. (I'll update the titles in the list below with links as each post goes up.) You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue. Why do you want to be luminous? What good does it do, and how does it do it? Let There Be Light. How do you get your priors when you start to model yourself, when your existing models are probably full of biases? The ABC's of Luminosity. The most fundamental step in learning to be luminous is correlating your affect, behavior, and circumstance. Lights, Camera, Action! Luminosity won't happen by itself - you need to practice, and watch out for key mental items. The Spo...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 12: Lampshading, published by Alicorn. Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: City of Lights You can use luminosity to help you effectively change yourself into someone you'd more like to be. Accomplish this by fixing your self-tests so they get good results. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the seventh story from Seven Shiny Stories. When you have coherent models of yourself, it only makes good empirical sense to put them to the test. Thing is, when you run a test on yourself, you know what test you're running, and what data would support which hypothesis. All that and you're the subject generating the data, too. It's kind of hard to have good scientific controls around this sort of experiment. Luckily, it turns out that for this purpose they're unnecessary! Remember, you're not just trying to determine what's going on in a static part of yourself. You're also evaluating and changing the things you repudiate when you can. You don't just have the chance to let knowledge of your self-observation nudge your behavior - you can outright rig your tests. Suppose that your model of yourself predicts that you will do something you don't think you should do - for instance, suppose it predicts that you will yell at your cousin the next time she drops by and tracks mud on your carpet, or something, and you think you ought not to yell. Well, you can falsify that model which says you'll yell by not yelling: clearly, if you do not yell at her, then you cannot be accurately described by any model that predicts that you'll yell. By refraining from yelling you push the nearest accurate model towards something like "may yell if not careful to think before speaking" or "used to yell, but has since grown past that". And if you'd rather be accurately described by one of those models than by the "yells" model... you can not yell. (Note, of course, that falsifying the model "yells" by silently picking up your cousin and defenestrating her is not an improvement. You want to replace the disliked model with a more likable one. If it turns out that you cannot do that - if controlling your scream means that you itch so badly to fling your cousin out a window that you're likely to actually do it - then you should postpone your model falsification until a later time.) Now, of course figuring out how to not yell (let us not forget akrasia, after all) will be easier once you have an understanding of what would make you do it in the first place. Armed with that, you can determine how to control your circumstances to prevent yelling-triggers from manifesting themselves. Or, you can attempt the more difficult but more stable psychic surgery that interrupts the process from circumstance to behavior. Sadly, I can't be as specific as would be ideal here because so much depends on the exact habits of your brain as opposed to any other brains, including mine. You may need to go through various strategies before you hit on one that works for you to change what you need to change. You could find that successful strategies eventually "wear off" and need replacing and their edifices rebuilding. You might find listening to what other people do helpful (post techniques below!) - or you might not. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 6: Let There Be Light, published by Alicorn. Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue Next in sequence: The ABC's of Luminosity You can start from psych studies, personality tests, and feedback from people you know when you're learning about yourself. Then you can throw out the stuff that sounds off, keep what sounds good, and move on. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the first story from Seven Shiny Stories. Where do you get your priors, when you start modeling yourself seriously instead of doing it by halfhearted intuition? Well, one thing's for sure: not with the caliber of introspection you're most likely starting with. If you've spent any time on this site at all, you know people are riddled with biases and mechanisms for self-deception that systematically confound us about who we are. ("I'm splendid and brilliant! The last five hundred times I did non-splendid non-brilliant things were outrageous flukes!") Humans suck at most things, and obeying the edict "Know thyself!" is not a special case. The outside view has gotten a bit of a bad rap, but I'm going to defend it - as a jumping-off point, anyway - when I fill our luminosity toolbox. There's a major body of literature designed to figure out just what the hell happens inside our skulls: it's called psychology, and they have a rather impressive track record. For instance, learning about heuristics and biases may let you detect them in action in yourself. I can often tell when I'm about to be subject to the bystander effect ("There is someone sitting in the middle of the road. Should I call 911? I mean, she's sitting up and everything and there are non-alarmed people looking at her - but gosh, I probably don't look alarmed either..."), have made some progress in reducing the extent to which I generalize from one example ("How are you not all driven insane by the spatters of oil all over the stove?!"), and am suspicious when I think I might be above average in some way and have no hard data to back it up ("Now I can be confident that I am in fact good at this sort of problem: I answered all of these questions and most people can't, according to someone who has no motivation to lie!"). Now, even if you are a standard psych study subject, of course you aren't going to align with every psychological finding ever. They don't even align perfectly with each other. But - controlling for some huge, obvious factors, like if you have a mental illness - it's a good place to start. For narrowing things down beyond what's been turned up as typical human reactions to things, you can try personality tests like Myers-Briggs or Big Five. These are not fantastically reliable sources. However, some of them have some ability to track with some parts of reality. Accordingly, saturate with all the test data you can stand. Filter it for what sounds right ("gosh, I guess I do tend to be rather bothered by things out of place in my environment, compared to others") and dump the rest ("huh? I'm not open to experience at all! I won't even try escargot!") - these are rough, first-approximation priors, not posteriors you should actually act on, and you can afford a clumsy process this early in the game. While you're at it, give some thought to your intelligence types, categorize your love language1 - anything that carves up person-space and puts you in a bit of it. Additionally, if you have honest friends or relatives, you can ask for their help. Note that even honest ones will probably have a rosy picture of you: they can stand to be around you, so they probably aren't paying excruciatingly close attention to your flaws, and may exaggerate the importance of your virtues relative to a neutral observer's hypothetical opi...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 7: The ABC's of Luminosity, published by Alicorn. Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: Let There Be Light Next in sequence: Lights, Camera, Action! Affect, behavior, and circumstance interact with each other. These interactions constitute informative patterns that you should identify and use in your luminosity project. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the second story from Seven Shiny Stories. The single most effective thing you can do when seeking luminosity is to learn to correlate your ABC's, collecting data about how three interrelated items interact and appear together or separately. A stands for "affect". Affect is how you feel and what's on your mind. It can be far more complicated than "enh, I'm fine" or "today I'm sad". You have room for plenty of simultaneous emotions, and different ones can be directed at different things - being on a generally even keel about two different things isn't the same as being nervous about one and cheerful about the other, and neither state is the same as being entirely focused on one subject that thrills you to pieces. If you're nervous about your performance evaluation but tickled pink that you just bought a shiny new consumer good and looking forward to visiting your cousin next week yet irritated that you just stubbed your toe, all while being amused by the funny song on the radio, that's this. For the sake of the alphabet, I'm lumping in less emotionally laden cognition here, too - what thoughts occur to you, what chains of reasoning you follow, what parts of the environment catch your attention. B stands for "behavior". Behavior here means what you actually do. Include as a dramatically lower-weighted category those things that you fully intended to do, and actually moved to do, but were then prevented from without from doing, or changed your mind about due to new, unanticipated information. This is critical. Fleeting designs and intentions cross our minds continually, and if you don't firmly and definitively place your evidential weight on the things that ultimately result in action, you will get subconsciously cherry-picked subsets of those incomplete plan-wisps. This is particularly problematic because weaker intentions will be dissuaded by minor environmental complications at a much higher rate. Don't worry overmuch about "real" plans that this filtering process discards. You're trying to know yourself in toto, not yourself at your best time-slices when you valiantly meant to do good thing X and were buffetted by circumstance: if those dismissed real plans represent typical dispositions you have, then they'll have their share of the cohort of actual behavior. Trust the law of averages. C stands for "circumstance". This is what's going on around you (what time is it? what's going on in your life now and recently and in the near future - major events, minor upheavals, plans for later, what people say to you? where are you: is it warm, cold, bright, dim, windy, calm, quiet, noisy, aromatic, odorless, featureless, busy, colorful, drab, natural, artificial, pretty, ugly, spacious, cozy, damp, dry, deserted, crowded, formal, informal, familiar, new, cluttered, or tidy?). It also covers what you're doing and things inside you that are generally conceptualized as merely physical (are you exhausted, jetlagged, drugged, thirsty, hungry, sore, ill, drunk, energetic, itchy, limber, wired, shivering? are you draped over a recliner, hiding in a cellar, hangliding or dancing or hiking or drumming or hoeing or diving?) Circumstances are a bit easier to observe than affect and behavior. If you have trouble telling where you are and what you're up to, your first priority shouldn't be luminosity. And while we often have some trouble distinguishing ...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 8: Lights, Camera, Action!, published by Alicorn. Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: The ABC's of Luminosity Next in sequence: The Spotlight You should pay attention to key mental events, on a regular and frequent basis, because important thoughts can happen very briefly or very occasionally and you need to catch them. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the third story from Seven Shiny Stories. Luminosity is hard and you are complicated. You can't meditate on yourself for ten minutes over a smoothie and then announce your self-transparency. You have to keep working at it over a long period of time, not least because some effects don't work over the short term. If your affect varies with the seasons, or with major life events, then you'll need to keep up the first phase of work through a full year or a major life event, and it turns out those don't happen every alternate Thursday. Additionally, you can't cobble together the best quality models from snippets of introspection that are each five seconds long; extended strings of cognition are important, too, and can take quite a long time to unravel fully. Sadly, looking at what you are thinking inevitably changes it. With enough introspection, this wouldn't influence your accuracy about your overall self - there's no reason in principle why you couldn't spend all your waking hours noting your own thoughts and forming meta-thoughts in real time - but practically speaking that's not going to happen. Therefore, some of your data will have to come from memory. To minimize the error introduction that comes of retrieving things from storage, it's best to arrange to reflect on very recent thoughts. It may be worth your while to set up an external reminder system to periodically prompt you to look inward, both in the moment and retrospectively over the last brief segment of time. This can be a specifically purposed system (i.e. set a timer to go off every half hour or so), or you can tie it to convenient promptings from the world as-is, like being asked "What's up?" or "Penny for your thoughts". When you introspect, there is a lot to keep track of. For instance, consider the following: What were you thinking about? (This could be more than one thing. You are a massively parallel system.) Was it a concept, image, sensation, desire, belief, person, object, word, place, emotion, plan, memory...? How tightly were you focused on it? (Is the topic itself narrow or disparate?) What other items (sensory, cognitive, emotional) seemed to intrude on your concentration, if any, and how did you react to this incursion? How did you feel about the subject of the thought? This includes not only emotional reactions like "this is depressing" or "yay!", but also what you felt inclined to do about the topic (if anything), and how important or interesting your thought seemed. How does thinking, in general, feel to you? (I conducted an informal survey of this and got no two answers the same. Anecdotally, it may be rather key to determining how you are different from others, and so in refining your model of yourself relative to the fairly generic priors we're starting with.) Coming up with a good way to conceptualize your style of thinking can help you interpret introspective data, although be sure to abandon a metaphor that looks about to snap. You might have different answers when you're "actively" thinking something through - i.e. when novel information is generated in your mind - and when you're thinking "passively", as when you read or listen to some information and absorb its content as it comes. What memories did the thought dredge up, if any - parallel situations from the past, apparently unrelated anecdotes that floated by for no reason, events where yo...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 9: The Spotlight, published by Alicorn. Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: Lights, Camera, Action Next in sequence: Highlights and Shadows Inspecting thoughts is easier and more accurate if they aren't in your head. Look at them in another form from the outside, like they belonged to someone else. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the fourth story from Seven Shiny Stories. One problem with introspection is that the conclusions you draw about your thoughts are themselves thoughts. Thoughts, of course, can change or disappear before you can extract information about yourself from them. If a flash of unreasonable anger crosses my mind, this might stick around long enough to make me lash out, but then vanish before I discover how unreasonable it was. If thoughts weren't slippery like this, luminosity wouldn't be much of a project. So of course, if you're serious about luminosity, you need a way to pin down your thoughts into a concrete format that will hold still. You have to pry your thoughts out of your brain. Writing is the obvious way to do this - for me, anyway. You don't have to publicize what you extract, so it doesn't have to be aesthetic or skillful, just serviceable for your own reference. The key is to get it down in a form that you can look at without having to continue to introspect. Whether this means sketching or scribing or singing, dump your brain out into the environment and have a peek. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that a given idea makes sense; it's harder to fool someone else. Writing down an idea automatically engages the mechanisms we use to communicate to others, helping you hold your self-analysis to a higher standard. To turn your thoughts into non-thoughts, use labels to represent them. Put them in reference classes, so that you can notice when the same quale, habit of inference, or thread of cognition repeats. That way, you can detect patterns: "Hey, the last time I felt like this, I said something I really regretted; I'd better watch it." If you can tell when something has happened twice, you can tell when it hasn't - and new moods or dispositions are potentially very important. They mean that you or something around you has changed, and that could be a valuable resource or a tricky hazard. Your labels can map onto traditional terms or not - if you want to call the feeling of having just dropped your ice cream on the sidewalk "blortrath", no one will stop you. (It can be useful, later when you're trying to share your conclusions about yourself with others, to have a vocabulary of emotion that overlaps significantly with theirs; but you can always set up an idiolect-to-dialect dictionary later.) I do recommend identifying labeled items as being more or less similar to each other (e.g. annoyance is more like fury than it is like glee) and having a way to account for that in your symbolism. Similarities like that will make it more obvious how you can generalize strategies from one thing to another. Especially if you don't think in words, you might find it challenging to turn your thoughts into something in the world that represents them. Maybe, for instance, you think in pictures but aren't at all good at drawing. This is one of the steps in luminosity that I think is potentially dispensible, so if you honestly cannot think of any way to jot down the dance of your mind for later inspection, you can just work on thinking very carefully such that if something were to be out of place the next time you came back to your thought, you'd notice it. I do recommend spending at least five to ten minutes trying to write, diagram, draw, mutter, or interpretive-dance your mental activity before you give it up as untenable for you, however. Once you have pro...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 11: City of Lights, published by Alicorn. Sequence index: Living Luminously Previously in sequence: Highlights and Shadows Next in Sequence: Lampshading Pretending to be multiple agents is a useful way to represent your psychology and uncover hidden complexities. You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the sixth story from Seven Shiny Stories. When grappling with the complex web of traits and patterns that is you, you are reasonably likely to find yourself less than completely uniform. You might have several competing perspectives, possess the ability to code-switch between different styles of thought, or even believe outright contradictions. It's bound to make it harder to think about yourself when you find this kind of convolution. Unfortunately, we don't have the vocabulary or even the mental architecture to easily think of or describe ourselves (nor other people) as containing such multitudes. The closest we come in typical conversation more resembles descriptions of superficial, vague ambivalence ("I'm sorta happy about it, but kind of sad at the same time! Weird!") than the sort of deep-level muddle and conflict that can occupy a brain. The models of the human psyche that have come closest to approximating this mess are what I call "multi-agent models". (Note: I have no idea how what I am about to describe interacts with actual psychiatric conditions involving multiple personalities, voices in one's head, or other potentially similar-sounding phenomena. I describe multi-agent models as employed by psychiatrically singular persons.) Multi-agent models have been around for a long time: in Plato's Republic, he talks about appetite (itself imperfectly self-consistent), spirit, and reason, forming a tripartite soul. He discusses their functions as though each has its own agency and could perceive, desire, plan, and act given the chance (plus the possibility of one forcing down the other two to rule the soul unopposed). Not too far off in structure is the Freudian id/superego/ego model. The notion of the multi-agent self even appears in fiction (warning: TV Tropes). It appears to be a surprisingly prevalent and natural method for conceptualizing the complicated mind of the average human being. Of course, talking about it as something to do rather than as a way to push your psychological theories or your notion of the ideal city structure or a dramatization of a moral conflict makes you sound like an insane person. Bear with me - I have data on the usefulness of the practice from more than one outside source. There is no reason to limit yourself to traditional multi-agent models endorsed by dead philosophers, psychologists, or cartoonists if you find you break down more naturally along some other arrangement. You can have two of you, or five, or twelve. (More than you can keep track of and differentiate is not a recommended strategy - if you're very tempted to go with this many it may be a sign of something unhealthful going on. If a group of them form a reliable coalition it may be best to fold them back into each other and call them one sub-agent, not several.) Stick with a core ensemble or encourage brief cameos of peripheral aspects. Name them descriptively or after structures of the brain or for the colors of the rainbow, as long as you can tell them apart. Talk to yourselves aloud or in writing, or just think through the interaction if you think you'll get enough out of it that way. Some examples of things that could get their own sub-agents include: Desires or clusters of desires, be they complex and lofty ("desire for the well being of all living things") or simple and reptilian ("desire for cake") "Inner child" or similar role-like groupings of traits ("professional me", "family-oriented me", "hobb...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 16: Seven Shiny Stories, published by Alicorn. It has come to my attention that the contents of the luminosity sequence were too abstract, to the point where explicitly fictional stories illustrating the use of the concepts would be helpful. Accordingly, there follow some such stories. 1. Words (an idea from Let There Be Light, in which I advise harvesting priors about yourself from outside feedback) Maria likes compliments. She loves compliments. And when she doesn't get enough of them to suit her, she starts fishing, asking plaintive questions, making doe eyes to draw them out. It's starting to annoy people. Lately, instead of compliments, she's getting barbs and criticism and snappish remarks. It hurts - and it seems to hurt her more than it hurts others when they hear similar things. Maria wants to know what it is about her that would explain all of this. So she starts taking personality tests and looking for different styles of maintaining and thinking about relationships, looking for something that describes her. Eventually, she runs into a concept called "love languages" and realizes at once that she's a "words" person. Her friends aren't trying to hurt her - they don't realize how much she thrives on compliments, or how deeply insults can cut when they're dealing with someone who transmits affection verbally. Armed with this concept, she has a lens through which to interpret patterns of her own behavior; she also has a way to explain herself to her loved ones and get the wordy boosts she needs. 2. Widgets (an idea from The ABC's of Luminosity, in which I explain the value of correlating affect, behavior, and circumstance) Tony's performance at work is suffering. Not every day, but most days, he's too drained and distracted to perform the tasks that go into making widgets. He's in serious danger of falling behind his widget quota and needs to figure out why. Having just read a fascinating and brilliantly written post on Less Wrong about luminosity, he decides to keep track of where he is and what he's doing when he does and doesn't feel the drainedness. After a week, he's got a fairly robust correlation: he feels worst on days when he doesn't eat breakfast, which reliably occurs when he's stayed up too late, hit the snooze button four times, and had to dash out the door. Awkwardly enough, having been distracted all day tends to make him work more slowly at making widgets, which makes him less physically exhausted by the time he gets home and enables him to stay up later. To deal with that, he starts going for long runs on days when his work hasn't been very tiring, and pops melatonin; he easily drops off to sleep when his head hits the pillow at a reasonable hour, gets sounder sleep, scarfs down a bowl of Cheerios, and arrives at the widget factory energized and focused. 3. Text (an idea from Lights, Camera, Action!, in which I advocate aggressive and frequent introspection to collect as much data as possible) Dot reads about an experiment in which the subjects receive phone calls at random times and must tell researchers how happy they feel. Apparently the experiment turned up some really suboptimal patterns of behavior, and Dot's curious about what she'd learn that she could use to improve her life. She gets a friend to arrange delayed text messages to be sent to her phone at intervals supplied by a random number generator, and promises herself that she'll note what she's doing, thinking, and feeling at the moment she receives the text. She soon finds that she doesn't enjoy watching TV as much as she thinks she does; that it's probably worth the time to cook dinner rather than heating up something in the microwave because it's considerably tastier; that she can't really stand her cubicle neighbor; and that she thinks about her ex more t...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 13: Ureshiku Naritai, published by Alicorn. This is a supplement to the luminosity sequence. In this comment, I mentioned that I have raised my happiness set point (among other things), and this declaration was met with some interest. Some of the details are lost to memory, but below, I reconstruct for your analysis what I can of the process. It contains lots of gooey self-disclosure; skip if that's not your thing. In summary: I decided that I had to and wanted to become happier; I re-labeled my moods and approached their management accordingly; and I consistently treated my mood maintenance and its support behaviors (including discovering new techniques) as immensely important. The steps in more detail: 1. I came to understand the necessity of becoming happier. Being unhappy was not just unpleasant. It was dangerous: I had a history of suicidal ideation. This hadn't resulted in actual attempts at killing myself, largely because I attached hopes for improvement to concrete external milestones (various academic progressions) and therefore imagined myself a magical healing when I got the next diploma (the next one, the next one.) Once I noticed I was doing that, it was unsustainable. If I wanted to live, I had to find a safe emotional place on which to stand. It had to be my top priority. This required several sub-projects: I had to eliminate the baggage that told me it was appropriate or accurate to feel bad most of the time. I endorse my ability to react emotionally to my environment; but this should be acute, not chronic. Reacting emotionally is about feeling worse when things get worse, not feeling bad when things are bad for months or years on end. (Especially not when feeling bad reduces the ability to make things less bad.) Further, having a lower set point did not affect my emotional range except to shrink it; it reduced the possible impact of real grief, and wasn't compatible with the "react emotionally" plan. The low set point also compromised my ability to react emotionally to positive input, because it was attached to a systematic discounting of such positivity. I had to eliminate the baggage that told me it was not possible to cognitively change my mood. Moods correspond to thoughts, and while it can be hard to avoid thinking about things, I can decide to think about whatever I want. A decade of assorted antidepressants had wreaked no discernible change on my affect, which constituted strong evidence that chemicals were not my problem. And it was easy to see that my mood varied on a small scale with things under my complete or partial control, like sleep, diet, and activity. It did not seem outrageous that long-term, large-scale interventions could have similar effects on my overall mood. I had to decide, and act on the decision, that my happiness was important and worth my time and attention. I had to pay attention, and note what helped and what hurt. I had to put increasing the helping factors and decreasing the hurting factors at the top of my list whenever it was remotely feasible, and relax my standards around "remote feasibility" to prevent self-sabotage. And I had to commit to abandoning counterproductive projects or interactions, at least until I'd developed the stability to deal with the emotions they generated without suffering permanent setbacks. 2. I re-labeled my moods, so that identifying them in the moment prompted the right actions. When a given point on the unhappy-happy spectrum - let's call it "2" on a scale of 1 to 10 - was labeled "normal" or "set point", then when I was feeling "2", I didn't assume that meant anything; that was the default state. That left me feeling "2" a lot of the time, and when things went wrong, I dipped lower, and I waited for things outside of myself to go right before I went higher. The p...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 14: A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness, published by Alicorn. tl;dr: Sometimes, people don't try as hard as they could to be nice. If being nice is not a terminal value for you, here are some other things to think about which might induce you to be nice anyway. There is a prevailing ethos in communities similar to ours - atheistic, intellectual groupings, who congregate around a topic rather than simply to congregate - and this ethos says that it is not necessary to be nice. I'm drawing on a commonsense notion of "niceness" here, which I hope won't confuse anyone (another feature of communities like this is that it's very easy to find people who claim to be confused by monosyllables). I do not merely mean "polite", which can be superficially like niceness when the person to whom the politeness is directed is in earshot but tends to be far more superficial. I claim that this ethos is mistaken and harmful. In so claiming, I do not also claim that I am always perfectly nice; I claim merely that I and others have good reasons to try to be. The dispensing with niceness probably springs in large part from an extreme rejection of the ad hominem fallacy and of emotionally-based reasoning. Of course someone may be entirely miserable company and still have brilliant, cogent ideas; to reject communication with someone who just happens to be miserable company, in spite of their brilliant, cogent ideas, is to miss out on the (valuable) latter because of a silly emotional reaction to the (irrelevant) former. Since the point of the community is ideas; and the person's ideas are good; and how much fun they are to be around is irrelevant - well, bringing up that they are just terribly mean seems trivial at best, and perhaps an invocation of the aforementioned fallacy. We are here to talk about ideas! (Interestingly, this same courtesy is rarely extended to appalling spelling.) The ad hominem fallacy is a fallacy, so this is a useful norm up to a point, but not up to the point where people who are perfectly capable of being nice, or learning to be nice, neglect to do so because it's apparently been rendered locally worthless. I submit that there are still good, pragmatic reasons to be nice, as follows. (These are claims about how to behave around real human-type persons. Many of them would likely be obsolete if we were all perfect Bayesians.) It provides good incentives for others. It's easy enough to develop purely subconscious aversions to things that are unpleasant. If you are miserable company, people may stop talking to you without even knowing they're doing it, and some of these people may have ideas that would have benefited you. It helps you hold off on proposing diagnoses. As tempting as it may be to dismiss people as crazy or stupid, this is a dangerous label for us biased creatures. Fewer people than you are tempted to call these things are genuinely worth writing off as thoroughly as this kind of name-calling may tempt you to do. Conveniently, both these words (as applied to people, more than ideas) and closely related ones are culturally considered mean, and a general niceness policy will exclude them. It lets you exist in a cognitively diverse environment. Meanness is more tempting as an earlier resort when there's some kind of miscommunication, and miscommunication is more likely when you and your interlocutor think differently. Per #1, not making a conscious effort to be nice will tend to drive off the people with the greatest ratio of interesting new contributions to old rehashed repetitions. It is a cooperative behavior. It's obvious that it's nicer to live in a world where everybody is nice than in a world where everyone is a jerk. What's less obvious, but still, I think, true, is that the cost of cooperatively being nice ...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 15: On Enjoying Disagreeable Company, published by Alicorn. Bears resemblance to: Ureshiku Naritai; A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations In Favor of Niceness In this comment, I mentioned that I can like people on purpose. At the behest of the recipients of my presentation on how to do so, I've written up in post form my tips on the subject. I have not included, and will not include, any specific real-life examples (everything below is made up), because I am concerned that people who I like on purpose will be upset to find that this is the case, in spite of the fact that the liking (once generated) is entirely sincere. If anyone would find more concreteness helpful, I'm willing to come up with brief fictional stories to cover this gap. It is useful to like people. For one thing, if you have to be around them, liking them makes this far more pleasant. For another, well, they can often tell, and if they know you to like them this will often be instrumentally useful to you. As such, it's very handy to be able to like someone you want to like deliberately when it doesn't happen by itself. There are three basic components to liking someone on purpose. First, reduce salience of the disliked traits by separating, recasting, and downplaying them; second, increase salience of positive traits by identifying, investigating, and admiring them; and third, behave in such a way as to reap consistency effects. 1. Reduce salience of disliked traits. Identify the traits you don't like about the person - this might be a handful of irksome habits or a list as long as your arm of deep character flaws, but make sure you know what they are. Notice that however immense a set of characteristics you generate, it's not the entire person. ("Everything!!!!" is not an acceptable entry in this step.) No person can be fully described by a list of things you have noticed about them. Note, accordingly, that you dislike these things about the person; but that this does not logically entail disliking the person. Put the list in a "box" - separate from how you will eventually evaluate the person. When the person exhibits a characteristic, habit, or tendency you have on your list (or, probably just to aggravate you, turns out to have a new one), be on your guard immediately for the fundamental attribution error. It is especially insidious when you already dislike the person, and so it's important to compensate consciously and directly for its influence. Elevate to conscious thought an "attribution story", in which you consider a circumstance - not a character trait - which would explain this most recent example of bad behavior.1 This should be the most likely story you can come up with that doesn't resort to grumbling about how dreadful the person is - that is, don't resort to "Well, maybe he was brainwashed by Martians, but sheesh, how likely is that?" Better would be "I know she was up late last night, and she does look a bit tired," or "Maybe that three-hour phone call he ended just now was about something terribly stressful." Reach a little farther if you don't have this kind of information - "I'd probably act that way if I were coming down with a cold; I wonder if she's sick?" is an acceptable speculation even absent the least sniffle. If you can, it's also a good idea to ask (earnestly, curiously, respectfully, kindly! not accusatively, rudely, intrusively, belligerently!) why the person did whatever they did. Rest assured that if their psyche is fairly normal, an explanation exists in their minds that doesn't boil down to "I'm a lousy excuse for a person who intrinsically does evil things just because it is my nature." (Note, however, that not everyone can produce verbal self-justifications on demand.) Whether you believe them or not, make sure you are aware of at least one cir...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 3: Generalizing From One Example, published by Alicorn. Related to: The Psychological Unity of Humankind, Instrumental vs. Epistemic: A Bardic Perspective "Everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do." -- Vlad Taltos (Issola, Steven Brust) My old professor, David Berman, liked to talk about what he called the "typical mind fallacy", which he illustrated through the following example: There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like? Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed. The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery1 to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images2. Dr. Berman dubbed this the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one's own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else's. He kind of took this idea and ran with it. He interpreted certain passages in George Berkeley's biography to mean that Berkeley was an eidetic imager, and that this was why the idea of the universe as sense-perception held such interest to him. He also suggested that experience of consciousness and qualia were as variable as imaging, and that philosophers who deny their existence (Ryle? Dennett? Behaviorists?) were simply people whose mind lacked the ability to easily experience qualia. In general, he believed philosophy of mind was littered with examples of philosophers taking their own mental experiences and building theories on them, and other philosophers with different mental experiences critiquing them and wondering why they disagreed. The formal typical mind fallacy is about serious matters of mental structure. But I've also run into something similar with something more like the psyche than the mind: a tendency to generalize from our personalities and behaviors. For example, I'm about as introverted a person as you're ever likely to meet - anyone more introverted than I am doesn't communicate with anyone. All through elementary and middle school, I suspected that the other children were out to get me. They kept on grabbing me when I was busy with something and trying to drag me off to do some rough activity with them and their friends. When I protested, they counter-protested and told me I really needed to stop whatever I was doing and come join them. I figured they were bullies who were trying to annoy me, and found ways to hide from them and scare them off. Eventually I realized that it was a double misunderstanding. They figured I must be like them, and the only thing keeping me from playing their fun games was that I was too shy. I figured they must be like me, and that the onl...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 1: Sorting Out Sticky Brains, published by Alicorn. tl;dr: Just because it doesn't seem like we should be able to have beliefs we acknowledge to be irrational, doesn't mean we don't have them. If this happens to you, here's a tool to help conceptualize and work around that phenomenon. There's a general feeling that by the time you've acknowledged that some belief you hold is not based on rational evidence, it has already evaporated. The very act of realizing it's not something you should believe makes it go away. If that's your experience, I applaud your well-organized mind! It's serving you well. This is exactly as it should be. If only we were all so lucky. Brains are sticky things. They will hang onto comfortable beliefs that don't make sense anymore, view the world through familiar filters that should have been discarded long ago, see significances and patterns and illusions even if they're known by the rest of the brain to be irrelevant. Beliefs should be formed on the basis of sound evidence. But that's not the only mechanism we have in our skulls to form them. We're equipped to come by them in other ways, too. It's been observed1 that believing contradictions is only bad because it entails believing falsehoods. If you can't get rid of one belief in a contradiction, and that's the false one, then believing a contradiction is the best you can do, because then at least you have the true belief too. The mechanism I use to deal with this is to label my beliefs "official" and "unofficial". My official beliefs have a second-order stamp of approval. I believe them, and I believe that I should believe them. Meanwhile, the "unofficial" beliefs are those I can't get rid of, or am not motivated to try really hard to get rid of because they aren't problematic enough to be worth the trouble. They might or might not outright contradict an official belief, but regardless, I try not to act on them. To those of you with well-ordered minds (for such lucky people seem to exist, if we believe some of the self-reports on this very site), this probably sounds outrageous. If I know they're probably not true... And I do. But they still make me expect things. They make me surprised when those expectations are flouted. If I'm asked about their subjects when tired, or not prepared for the question, they'll leap out of my mouth before I can stop them, and they won't feel like lies - because they're not. They're beliefs. I just don't like them very much. I'll supply an example. I have a rather dreadful phobia of guns, and accordingly, I think they should be illegal. The phobia is a terrible reason to believe in the appropriateness of such a ban: said phobia doesn't even stand in for an informative real experience, since I haven't lost a family member to a stray bullet or anything of the kind. I certainly don't assent to the general proposition "anything that scares me should be illegal". I have no other reasons, except for a vague affection for a cluster of political opinions which includes something along those lines, to believe this belief. Neither the fear nor the affection are reasons I endorse for believing things in general, or this in particular. So this is an unofficial belief. Whenever I can, I avoid acting on it. Until I locate some good reasons to believe something about the topic, I officially have no opinion. I avoid putting myself in situations where I might act on the unofficial belief in the same way I might avoid a store with contents for which I have an unendorsed desire, like a candy shop. For instance, when I read about political candidates' stances on issues, I avoid whatever section talks about gun control. Because I know my brain collects junk like this, I try to avoid making up my mind until I do have a pretty good idea of what's going on. Once...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 2: Mental Crystallography, published by Alicorn. Brains organize things into familiar patterns, which are different for different people. This can make communication tricky, so it's useful to conceptualize these patterns and use them to help translation efforts. Crystals are nifty things! The same sort of crystal will reliably organize in the same pattern, and always break the same way under stress. Brains are also nifty things! The same person's brain will typically view everything through a favorite lens (or two), and will need to work hard to translate input that comes in through another channel or in different terms. When a brain acquires new concepts - even really vital ones - the new idea will result in recognizeably-shaped brain-bits. Different brains, therefore, handle concepts differently, and this can make it hard for us to talk to each other. This works on a number of levels, although perhaps the most obvious is the divide between styles of thought on the order of "visual thinker", "verbal thinker", etc. People who differ here have to constantly reinterpret everything they say to one another, moving from non-native mode to native mode and back with every bit of data exchanged. People also store and retrieve memories differently, form first-approximation hypotheses and models differently, prioritize sensory input differently, have different levels of introspective luminosity1, and experience different affect around concepts and propositions. Over time, we accumulate different skills, knowledge, cognitive habits, shortcuts, and mental filing debris. Intuitions differ - appeals to intuition will only convert people who share the premises natively. We have lots in common, but high enough variance that it's impressive how much we do manage to communicate over not only inferential distances, but also fundamentally diverse brain plans. Basically, you can hit two crystals the same way with the same hammer, but they can still break along different cleavage planes. This phenomenon is a little like man-with-a-hammer syndrome, which is why I chose that extension of my crystal metaphor. But a person's dependence on their mental crystallography, unlike their wanton use of their hammer, rarely seems to diminish with time. (In fact, youth probably confers some increased flexibility - it seems that you can probably train children to have different crystalline structures to some degree, but much less so with adults). MWaH is actually partially explained by the brain's crystallographic regularities. A hammer-idea will only be compelling to you if it aligns with the crystals in your head. Having "useful" mental crystallography - which lets you comprehend, synthesize, and apply ideas in their most accurate, valuable form - is a type of epistemic luck about the things you can best understand. If you're intrinsically oriented towards mathematical explanations, for instance, and this lets you promptly apprehend the truth and falsity of strings of numbers that would leave my head swimming, you're epistemically lucky about math (while I'm rather likely to be led astray if someone takes the time to put together a plausible verbal explanation that may not match up to the numbers). Some brain structures can use more notions than others, although I'm skeptical that any human has a pure generalist crystal pattern that can make great use of every sort of concept interchangeably without some native mode to touch base with regularly. When you're trying to communicate facts, opinions, and concepts - most especially concepts - it is a useful investment of effort to try to categorize both your audience's crystallography and your own. With only one of these pieces of information, you can't optimize your message for its recipient, because you need to know what you're trans...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is Cartesian Frames, Part 5: You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue, published by Alicorn. Previously in sequence/sequence index: Living Luminously Next in sequence: Let There Be Light Luminosity is fun, useful to others, and important in self-improvement. You should learn about it with this sequence. Luminosity? Pah! Who needs it? It's a legitimate question. The typical human gets through life with astonishingly little introspection, much less careful, accurate introspection. Our models of ourselves are sometimes even worse than our models of each other - we have more data, but also more biases loading up our reflection with noise. Most of the time, most people act on their emotions and beliefs directly, without the interposition of self-aware deliberation. And this doesn't usually seem to get anyone maimed or killed - when was the last time a gravestone read "Here Lies Our Dear Taylor, Who Might Be Alive Today With More Internal Clarity About The Nature Of Memory Retrieval"? Nonsense. If Taylor needs to remember something, it'll present itself, or not, and if there's a chronic problem with the latter then Taylor can export memories to the environment. Figuring out how the memories are stored in the first place and tweaking that is not high on the to-do list. Still, I think it's worth investing considerable time and effort into improving your luminosity. I submit three reasons why this is so. First, you are a fascinating creature. It's just plain fun and rewarding to delve into your own mind. People in general are among the most complex, intriguing things in the world. You're no less so. You have lived a fair number of observer-moments. Starting with a native architecture that is pretty special all by itself, you've accumulated a complex set of filters by which you interpret your input - remembered past, experienced present, and anticipated future. You like things; you want things; you believe things; you expect things; you feel things. There's a lot of stuff rolled up and tucked into the fissures of your brain. Wouldn't you like to know what it is? Particularly because it's you. Many people find themselves to be their favorite topics. Are you an exception? (There's one way to find out...) Second, an accurate model of yourself can help you help others deal with you in the best possible way. Right now, they're probably using kludgey agglomerations of self-projection, stereotype, and automatically generated guesses that they may not bother to update as they learn more about you. I'm assuming you don't surround yourself with hostile people who would use accurate data about you to hurt and manipulate you, but if you do, certainly be judicious with whatever information your quest for luminosity supplies. As for everyone else, their having a better model of you will avoid a lot of headaches on everyone's parts. I'll present myself as an example: I hate surprises. Knowing this, and being able to tell a complete and credible story about how this works, I can explain to people who might wish to exchange gifts why they should not spring unknown wrapped items on me, and avoid that source of irritation. Most of the people around me choose not to take actions that they know will irritate me; but without a detailed explanation of exactly how my preferences are uncommon, they'll all too easily revert to their base model of a generic person. Third, and most germane to the remaining posts in this sequence: with a better picture of who you are and what your brain is up to, you can find the best low-hanging fruit in terms of hacks to change yourself. If you keep going from point A to point Z, but know nothing about the route in between, then the only way you can avoid a disliked Z is to try to come to a screeching halt right before it happens. If you could monitor the process from the start...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is The Science of Winning at Life, Part 6: The Power of Reinforcement, published by lukeprog. Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life Also see: Basics of Animal Reinforcement, Basics of Human Reinforcement, Physical and Mental Behavior, Wanting vs. Liking Revisited, Approving reinforces low-effort behaviors, Applying Behavioral Psychology on Myself. Story 1: On Skype with Eliezer, I said: "Eliezer, you've been unusually pleasant these past three weeks. I'm really happy to see that, and moreover, it increases my probability than an Eliezer-led FAI research team will work. What caused this change, do you think?" Eliezer replied: "Well, three weeks ago I was working with Anna and Alicorn, and every time I said something nice they fed me an M&M." Story 2: I once witnessed a worker who hated keeping a work log because it was only used "against" him. His supervisor would call to say "Why did you spend so much time on that?" or "Why isn't this done yet?" but never "I saw you handled X, great job!" Not surprisingly, he often "forgot" to fill out his worklog. Ever since I got everyone at the Singularity Institute to keep work logs, I've tried to avoid connections between "concerned" feedback and staff work logs, and instead take time to comment positively on things I see in those work logs. Story 3: Chatting with Eliezer, I said, "Eliezer, I get the sense that I've inadvertently caused you to be slightly averse to talking to me. Maybe because we disagree on so many things, or something?" Eliezer's reply was: "No, it's much simpler. Our conversations usually run longer than our previously set deadline, so whenever I finish talking with you I feel drained and slightly cranky." Now I finish our conversations on time. Story 4: A major Singularity Institute donor recently said to me: "By the way, I decided that every time I donate to the Singularity Institute, I'll set aside an additional 5% for myself to do fun things with, as a motivation to donate." The power of reinforcement It's amazing to me how consistently we fail to take advantage of the power of reinforcement. Maybe it's because behaviorist techniques like reinforcement feel like they don't respect human agency enough. But if you aren't treating humans more like animals than most people are, then you're modeling humans poorly. You are not an agenty homunculus "corrupted" by heuristics and biases. You just are heuristics and biases. And you respond to reinforcement, because most of your motivation systems still work like the motivation systems of other animals. A quick reminder of what you learned in high school A reinforcer is anything that, when it occurs in conjunction with an act, increases the probability that the act will occur again. A positive reinforcer is something the subject wants, such as food, petting, or praise. Positive reinforcement occurs when a target behavior is followed by something the subject wants, and this increases the probability that the behavior will occur again. A negative reinforcer is something the subject wants to avoid, such as a blow, a frown, or an unpleasant sound. Negative reinforcement occurs when a target behavior is followed by some relief from something the subject doesn't want, and this increases the probability that the behavior will happen again. What works Small reinforcers are fine, as long as there is a strong correlation between the behavior and the reinforcer (Schneider 1973; Todorov et al. 1984). All else equal, a large reinforcer is more effective than a small one (Christopher 1988; Ludvig et al. 2007; Wolfe 1936), but the more you increase the reinforcer magnitude, the less benefit you get from the increase (Frisch & Dickinson 1990). The reinforcer should immediately follow the target behavior (Escobar & Bruner 2007; Schlinger & Blakely 1994; Schneider 1990). P...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is The Science of Winning at Life, Part 6: The Power of Reinforcement, published by lukeprog. Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life Also see: Basics of Animal Reinforcement, Basics of Human Reinforcement, Physical and Mental Behavior, Wanting vs. Liking Revisited, Approving reinforces low-effort behaviors, Applying Behavioral Psychology on Myself. Story 1: On Skype with Eliezer, I said: "Eliezer, you've been unusually pleasant these past three weeks. I'm really happy to see that, and moreover, it increases my probability than an Eliezer-led FAI research team will work. What caused this change, do you think?" Eliezer replied: "Well, three weeks ago I was working with Anna and Alicorn, and every time I said something nice they fed me an M&M." Story 2: I once witnessed a worker who hated keeping a work log because it was only used "against" him. His supervisor would call to say "Why did you spend so much time on that?" or "Why isn't this done yet?" but never "I saw you handled X, great job!" Not surprisingly, he often "forgot" to fill out his worklog. Ever since I got everyone at the Singularity Institute to keep work logs, I've tried to avoid connections between "concerned" feedback and staff work logs, and instead take time to comment positively on things I see in those work logs. Story 3: Chatting with Eliezer, I said, "Eliezer, I get the sense that I've inadvertently caused you to be slightly averse to talking to me. Maybe because we disagree on so many things, or something?" Eliezer's reply was: "No, it's much simpler. Our conversations usually run longer than our previously set deadline, so whenever I finish talking with you I feel drained and slightly cranky." Now I finish our conversations on time. Story 4: A major Singularity Institute donor recently said to me: "By the way, I decided that every time I donate to the Singularity Institute, I'll set aside an additional 5% for myself to do fun things with, as a motivation to donate." The power of reinforcement It's amazing to me how consistently we fail to take advantage of the power of reinforcement. Maybe it's because behaviorist techniques like reinforcement feel like they don't respect human agency enough. But if you aren't treating humans more like animals than most people are, then you're modeling humans poorly. You are not an agenty homunculus "corrupted" by heuristics and biases. You just are heuristics and biases. And you respond to reinforcement, because most of your motivation systems still work like the motivation systems of other animals. A quick reminder of what you learned in high school A reinforcer is anything that, when it occurs in conjunction with an act, increases the probability that the act will occur again. A positive reinforcer is something the subject wants, such as food, petting, or praise. Positive reinforcement occurs when a target behavior is followed by something the subject wants, and this increases the probability that the behavior will occur again. A negative reinforcer is something the subject wants to avoid, such as a blow, a frown, or an unpleasant sound. Negative reinforcement occurs when a target behavior is followed by some relief from something the subject doesn't want, and this increases the probability that the behavior will happen again. What works Small reinforcers are fine, as long as there is a strong correlation between the behavior and the reinforcer (Schneider 1973; Todorov et al. 1984). All else equal, a large reinforcer is more effective than a small one (Christopher 1988; Ludvig et al. 2007; Wolfe 1936), but the more you increase the reinforcer magnitude, the less benefit you get from the increase (Frisch & Dickinson 1990). The reinforcer should immediately follow the target behavior (Escobar & Bruner 2007; Schlinger & Blakely 1994; Schneider 1990). P...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Procedural Knowledge Gaps, published by Alicorn on the LessWrong. I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.) This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form. (And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?) Thanks for listening. to help us out with the nonlinear library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Nature of Offense, published by Wei_Dai on the AI Alignment Forum. Recently, an extended discussion has taken place over the fact that a portion of comments here were found to be offensive by some members of this community, while others denied their offensive nature or professed to be puzzled by why they are considered offensive. Several possible explanations for why the comments are offensive have been advanced, and solutions offered based on them: to be thought of, talked about as, or treated like a non-person (Alicorn) analysis of behavior that puts the reader in the group being analyzed, and the speaker outside it (orthonormal) exclusion from the intended audience (Eliezer) Each of these explanations seems to have an element of truth, and each solution seems to have a chance of ameliorating the problem. But even though the discussion has mostly died down, we appear far from reaching an agreement, and I think one reason may be the lack of a general theory of the phenomenon of "offense", in the sense of giving and taking offense, that we can use to explain what has happened, so all of the proposed explanations and solutions feel somewhat arbitrary and unfair. (I think this article has it mostly right, but I'll give a much shorter account since I can skip the background evo psych info, and I'm not being paid by the word. :) Let's consider what other behavior are often considered offensive and see if we can find a pattern: use of vulgar language (where it's not customarily used) failing to address someone by their honorary titles not affording someone their customary privileges to impugn someone's beauty, intelligence, talent, morality, honor, ancestry, etc. making a joke at someone's expense What do all these have in common? Hint: the answer is quite ironic, given the comment that first triggered this whole fracas. most people here don't value social status enough and (especially the men) don't value having sex with extremely attractive women that money and status would get them As you may have guessed by now, I think the answer is status. Specifically, to give offense is to imply that a person or group has or should have low status. Taking offense then becomes easy to explain: it's to defend someone's status from such an implication, out of a sense of either fairness or self-interest. Let's go back to the three hypotheses I collected and see if this theory can cover them as special cases. “to be thought of, talked about as, or treated like a non-person” Well, to be like a non-person is clearly to have low status. “analysis of behavior that puts the reader in the group being analyzed, and the speaker outside it” A typical situation in which one group analyzes the behavior of another is a scientific study. In such a study, the researchers usually have higher status than the subjects being studied. But even to offer a casual analysis of someone else's behavior is to presume more intelligence, insight, or wisdom than that person. “exclusion from the intended audience” To be excluded from the intended audience is to be labeled an outsider by implication, and outsiders typically have lower status than insiders. But to fully understand why this particular comment is especially offensive, I think we have to consider that it (as well as many PUA discussions) specifically advocates (or appears to advocate) treating women as sex objects instead of potential romantic partners. Now think of the status difference between a sex object and a romantic partner... Ethical Implications Usually, one avoids giving offense by minding one's audience and taking care not to use any language that might cause offense to any audience member. This is very easy to do one-on-one, pretty easy in a small group, hard in front of a large audience (case in point: Larry Summers's infamous speech), ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Power of Reinforcement, published by The Power of Reinforcement on the LessWrong. Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life Also see: Basics of Animal Reinforcement, Basics of Human Reinforcement, Physical and Mental Behavior, Wanting vs. Liking Revisited, Approving reinforces low-effort behaviors, Applying Behavioral Psychology on Myself. Story 1: On Skype with Eliezer, I said: "Eliezer, you've been unusually pleasant these past three weeks. I'm really happy to see that, and moreover, it increases my probability than an Eliezer-led FAI research team will work. What caused this change, do you think?" Eliezer replied: "Well, three weeks ago I was working with Anna and Alicorn, and every time I said something nice they fed me an M&M." Story 2: I once witnessed a worker who hated keeping a work log because it was only used "against" him. His supervisor would call to say "Why did you spend so much time on that?" or "Why isn't this done yet?" but never "I saw you handled X, great job!" Not surprisingly, he often "forgot" to fill out his worklog. Ever since I got everyone at the Singularity Institute to keep work logs, I've tried to avoid connections between "concerned" feedback and staff work logs, and instead take time to comment positively on things I see in those work logs. Story 3: Chatting with Eliezer, I said, "Eliezer, I get the sense that I've inadvertently caused you to be slightly averse to talking to me. Maybe because we disagree on so many things, or something?" Eliezer's reply was: "No, it's much simpler. Our conversations usually run longer than our previously set deadline, so whenever I finish talking with you I feel drained and slightly cranky." Now I finish our conversations on time. Story 4: A major Singularity Institute donor recently said to me: "By the way, I decided that every time I donate to the Singularity Institute, I'll set aside an additional 5% for myself to do fun things with, as a motivation to donate." The power of reinforcement It's amazing to me how consistently we fail to take advantage of the power of reinforcement. Maybe it's because behaviorist techniques like reinforcement feel like they don't respect human agency enough. But if you aren't treating humans more like animals than most people are, then you're modeling humans poorly. You are not an agenty homunculus "corrupted" by heuristics and biases. You just are heuristics and biases. And you respond to reinforcement, because most of your motivation systems still work like the motivation systems of other animals. A quick reminder of what you learned in high school A reinforcer is anything that, when it occurs in conjunction with an act, increases the probability that the act will occur again. A positive reinforcer is something the subject wants, such as food, petting, or praise. Positive reinforcement occurs when a target behavior is followed by something the subject wants, and this increases the probability that the behavior will occur again. A negative reinforcer is something the subject wants to avoid, such as a blow, a frown, or an unpleasant sound. Negative reinforcement occurs when a target behavior is followed by some relief from something the subject doesn't want, and this increases the probability that the behavior will happen again. What works Small reinforcers are fine, as long as there is a strong correlation between the behavior and the reinforcer (Schneider 1973; Todorov et al. 1984). All else equal, a large reinforcer is more effective than a small one (Christopher 1988; Ludvig et al. 2007; Wolfe 1936), but the more you increase the reinforcer magnitude, the less benefit you get from the increase (Frisch & Dickinson 1990). The reinforcer should immediately follow the target behavior (Escobar & Bruner 2007; Schlinger & Blakely 1994; Schneider 1990). Pryor...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Power of Reinforcement, published by lukeprog on the LessWrong. Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life Also see: Basics of Animal Reinforcement, Basics of Human Reinforcement, Physical and Mental Behavior, Wanting vs. Liking Revisited, Approving reinforces low-effort behaviors, Applying Behavioral Psychology on Myself. Story 1: On Skype with Eliezer, I said: "Eliezer, you've been unusually pleasant these past three weeks. I'm really happy to see that, and moreover, it increases my probability than an Eliezer-led FAI research team will work. What caused this change, do you think?" Eliezer replied: "Well, three weeks ago I was working with Anna and Alicorn, and every time I said something nice they fed me an M&M." Story 2: I once witnessed a worker who hated keeping a work log because it was only used "against" him. His supervisor would call to say "Why did you spend so much time on that?" or "Why isn't this done yet?" but never "I saw you handled X, great job!" Not surprisingly, he often "forgot" to fill out his worklog. Ever since I got everyone at the Singularity Institute to keep work logs, I've tried to avoid connections between "concerned" feedback and staff work logs, and instead take time to comment positively on things I see in those work logs. Story 3: Chatting with Eliezer, I said, "Eliezer, I get the sense that I've inadvertently caused you to be slightly averse to talking to me. Maybe because we disagree on so many things, or something?" Eliezer's reply was: "No, it's much simpler. Our conversations usually run longer than our previously set deadline, so whenever I finish talking with you I feel drained and slightly cranky." Now I finish our conversations on time. Story 4: A major Singularity Institute donor recently said to me: "By the way, I decided that every time I donate to the Singularity Institute, I'll set aside an additional 5% for myself to do fun things with, as a motivation to donate." The power of reinforcement It's amazing to me how consistently we fail to take advantage of the power of reinforcement. Maybe it's because behaviorist techniques like reinforcement feel like they don't respect human agency enough. But if you aren't treating humans more like animals than most people are, then you're modeling humans poorly. You are not an agenty homunculus "corrupted" by heuristics and biases. You just are heuristics and biases. And you respond to reinforcement, because most of your motivation systems still work like the motivation systems of other animals. A quick reminder of what you learned in high school A reinforcer is anything that, when it occurs in conjunction with an act, increases the probability that the act will occur again. A positive reinforcer is something the subject wants, such as food, petting, or praise. Positive reinforcement occurs when a target behavior is followed by something the subject wants, and this increases the probability that the behavior will occur again. A negative reinforcer is something the subject wants to avoid, such as a blow, a frown, or an unpleasant sound. Negative reinforcement occurs when a target behavior is followed by some relief from something the subject doesn't want, and this increases the probability that the behavior will happen again. What works Small reinforcers are fine, as long as there is a strong correlation between the behavior and the reinforcer (Schneider 1973; Todorov et al. 1984). All else equal, a large reinforcer is more effective than a small one (Christopher 1988; Ludvig et al. 2007; Wolfe 1936), but the more you increase the reinforcer magnitude, the less benefit you get from the increase (Frisch & Dickinson 1990). The reinforcer should immediately follow the target behavior (Escobar & Bruner 2007; Schlinger & Blakely 1994; Schneider 1990). Pryor (2007) notes that...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Seven Shiny Stories, published by Alicorn on the LessWrong. It has come to my attention that the contents of the luminosity sequence were too abstract, to the point where explicitly fictional stories illustrating the use of the concepts would be helpful. Accordingly, there follow some such stories. 1. Words (an idea from Let There Be Light, in which I advise harvesting priors about yourself from outside feedback) Maria likes compliments. She loves compliments. And when she doesn't get enough of them to suit her, she starts fishing, asking plaintive questions, making doe eyes to draw them out. It's starting to annoy people. Lately, instead of compliments, she's getting barbs and criticism and snappish remarks. It hurts - and it seems to hurt her more than it hurts others when they hear similar things. Maria wants to know what it is about her that would explain all of this. So she starts taking personality tests and looking for different styles of maintaining and thinking about relationships, looking for something that describes her. Eventually, she runs into a concept called "love languages" and realizes at once that she's a "words" person. Her friends aren't trying to hurt her - they don't realize how much she thrives on compliments, or how deeply insults can cut when they're dealing with someone who transmits affection verbally. Armed with this concept, she has a lens through which to interpret patterns of her own behavior; she also has a way to explain herself to her loved ones and get the wordy boosts she needs. 2. Widgets (an idea from The ABC's of Luminosity, in which I explain the value of correlating affect, behavior, and circumstance) Tony's performance at work is suffering. Not every day, but most days, he's too drained and distracted to perform the tasks that go into making widgets. He's in serious danger of falling behind his widget quota and needs to figure out why. Having just read a fascinating and brilliantly written post on Less Wrong about luminosity, he decides to keep track of where he is and what he's doing when he does and doesn't feel the drainedness. After a week, he's got a fairly robust correlation: he feels worst on days when he doesn't eat breakfast, which reliably occurs when he's stayed up too late, hit the snooze button four times, and had to dash out the door. Awkwardly enough, having been distracted all day tends to make him work more slowly at making widgets, which makes him less physically exhausted by the time he gets home and enables him to stay up later. To deal with that, he starts going for long runs on days when his work hasn't been very tiring, and pops melatonin; he easily drops off to sleep when his head hits the pillow at a reasonable hour, gets sounder sleep, scarfs down a bowl of Cheerios, and arrives at the widget factory energized and focused. 3. Text (an idea from Lights, Camera, Action!, in which I advocate aggressive and frequent introspection to collect as much data as possible) Dot reads about an experiment in which the subjects receive phone calls at random times and must tell researchers how happy they feel. Apparently the experiment turned up some really suboptimal patterns of behavior, and Dot's curious about what she'd learn that she could use to improve her life. She gets a friend to arrange delayed text messages to be sent to her phone at intervals supplied by a random number generator, and promises herself that she'll note what she's doing, thinking, and feeling at the moment she receives the text. She soon finds that she doesn't enjoy watching TV as much as she thinks she does; that it's probably worth the time to cook dinner rather than heating up something in the microwave because it's considerably tastier; that she can't really stand her cubicle neighbor; and that she thinks about her ex more than she'd...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Expressive Vocabulary, published by Alicorn on the AI Alignment Forum. "Thou shalt not strike terms from others' expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement." - me Suppose your friend says: "I don't buy that brand of dip. It's full of chemicals." Reasonable answer: "I'm skeptical that any of them are harmful in these quantities; we don't have much reason to believe that." Reasonable answer: "Yellow 5? Are you allergic?" Reasonable answer: "Okay, let's get the kind with four easily recognizable ingredients." No: "Technically, everything is chemicals. Dihydrogen monoxide!" Pedantry is seldom a way to make friends and influence people, but this example particularly gets my goat because there doesn't seem to actually exist a word in English for the thing you know perfectly well people mean when they say "chemicals". When I tried to find one on Twitter, the closest options were "toxins" and "additives". But neither is right. "Toxins" excludes yellow 5 - or, whether it does or not might be a point of contention; but it isn't the thing originally expressed with the word "chemicals". People may want to avoid - or otherwise discuss - "chemicals" for reasons other than thinking they're literally toxic; if I tell a maid I'm sensitive to chemical smells but vinegar is okay this is useful information. "Additives" includes, say, added sugar, which, while a plausible complaint, is a separate complaint. Suppose your grandma says, "Okay, no technology at the dinner table." Reasonable answer: "I'll put the laptop away to make room for the potatoes, but I need the phone because I get anxious without it." Reasonable answer: "Sure, Grandma." Reasonable answer: "We can try that until Uncle Bill starts making easily falsified claims about Flat Earth." No: "Technically, the dinner table is a technology. And so are your glasses, Grandma." In this case a more precise word exists - "electronics" ambiguously includes the chandelier but at least firmly sets aside the question of whether your grandma wants you to eat naked and with your bare hands. But refusing to know what she meant because she could have gotten closer to saying it, not even literally (she isn't being metaphorical), but technically, pedantically, definitionally? This is both a bad social move and a bad epistemic one; you're having the conversation on a level that is wholly about verbal wallpaper. Do you prefer to say "electronics" or dip into synechdoche with "screens" or spend nine syllables on "internet enabled devices"? Are you actually unsure if your grandmother wants you to set aside your smart watch, dumb phone, or electric blanket of intermediate intellect? Use your own words, ask your own questions, but don't enforce an inadequate prescriptivism with feigned incomprehension while your interlocutor only wants you to pass the peas. Thou shalt not strike terms from others' expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement. It's a pet issue of mine; it's my pinned tweet. "Suitable replacement" means suitable across the board, Pareto improvement as seen by the user along every axis a word can have. I think people are within their rights to reject a proposed replacement for not meaning the right thing, sounding ugly, being one syllable longer, being hard to spell, not rhyming in a poem they're trying to write, and vague gut feeling that you're just trying to control them. I extend this as far as "gypsy" and "Eskimo", at least (and with slightly less fervor to a slur beyond that if you really don't have another term for Brazil nuts). Suitable replacement is a very high standard. It has to be. If you take someone's words away - and refusing to understand them when the problem is not in fact in your understanding does that, since words are tools to communicate - they are very direly crippled. Many people think communicati...

Paco Fiori i Carla Emma, de la comparsa Sinhus Sport han visitat Cobertura Carnaval 2021 recordant el triomf de la temàtica de l’Alicorn amb que van guanyar la Disfressa d’Or 2016 per primera vegada en la seva trajectòria. Quin balanç en fan de tot plegat i com encaren l’edició atípica d’enguany? No us ho perdeu! I si considereu que és […] L'entrada Sinhus Sport, Disfressa d’Or 2016 amb l’Alicorn ha aparegut primer a Ràdio Ciutat de Tarragona.

It is believed that the first Unicorn image was recorded by the Indus Valley Civilization on the Unicorn Seal found at the archaeological site Mohenjo-daro, but it was the Greeks that popularized the creature. Greeks did not think that Unicorns were myths, they recorded them in their history books. Then they became popular during the middle ages, due to a poor translation of the bible, and from the rediscovery of Greek writings. But how did they go from a symbol of religion in the Middle Ages to our modern pop culture icon? And how did they become so ingrained in our culture? Learn more in this week's episode of Better Than Human. Note: Jennifer meant Plato not Aristotle at the beginning of the episode, and Amber was right, it was Robot Chicken. (Amber is always right ;p)Visit our website betterthanhumanpodcast.comFollow us on Twitter @betterthanhuma1on Facebook @betterthanhumanpodcaston Instagram @betterthanhumanpodcastEmail us at betterthanhumanpodcast@gmail.comWe look forward to hearing from you, and we look forward to you joining our cult of weirdness!#betterthanhuman #cultofweirdness

Lynn reads an mlp Fanfiction about the royal sisters- Celestia and Luna- having a sister that they believed was dead, magically appear in an old castle. This story belongs to Extreme_Fangirl16 but the Characters mentioned belong to Hasbro.

Sammie, Sam, and Lee begin the second book, EXILE, and discuss Silveny, Stina Heks, and sparkly alicorn poop.

Hannah & Justin welcome Challenger Luis Sayo & End Boss Dennis Yumul (“2 Fanboys & 1 Filthy Casual” podcast) as they travel to the city of Equestria and get quizzed on all things “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic”! Who will be worthy Alicorn and who will be forced to clean the stables? Listen to...

Sam turns to our theme song for inspiration this week. That's right! Sam tackles the illusive unicorn! And it's more intriguing than you might expect! Sam delves into uses for their magical horns as well as some history of the fantastical monster, including how to set a unicorn trap. Hint: It involves virgins. (And no, we aren't making that up.) Curious how long a unicorn's horn is in ax-handles? Find out in this week's episode! Show notes, reference images, and links here: http://probablyimprobable.libsyn.com/episode-21-unicorn-and-a-chinese-giraffe-named-karen

The guys record live at Mr Smalls with the production manager of mrbonesknows before talking to the beautiful singer/songwriter Carrie Collins and her adorable daughter. We learn the difference between a Unicorn, Pegasus, and an Alicorn then get a taste her talented voice! https://www.reverbnation.com/carriecollins1/shows https://mrbonesknows.wordpress.com/

Friendship is Magic but how does My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) rate amongst fans and newbies? Chelsea and Morgan let you know in this fun podcast! Highlights  Nerdy Couch Discussion: Welcome Leigh-Ann Cruz! Catch ‘n’ Fire! “I am a product of the Disney Renaissance (yay!), so I am curious about how that impacts how you feel about animation today and how that compares with how the kids of this era feel about animation.” Main discussion: My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) What is a “brony?” Who is your favorite pony? Chelsea’s 20 questions about the MLP universe Taye Diggs as the Capper the Cat Kristen Chenowith as Princess Skystar  Sia as Songbird Serenade What’s up with the pearl? “It’s Time to Be Awesome!” My Little Pony: The Movie soundtrack discussion. Chelsea’s high expectations Major renovations with every new princess! We love the villain, Tempest! We rate it! Traditional animation! Voicemail: Morgan’s new rating Full show notes: rotoscopers.com/157 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recorded on September 1 2012We will get to know the man behind Alicorn Radio Ethan Pow. Listen to him tell his story of how he started Alicorn Radio and where he will be taking it for the future.==========CreditsIntro MusicTitle: Chrysalis RevealedArtist: William AndersonOutro MusicTitle: The Beginning of OrderArtist: StormWolf

Proud member of The Omega Nerds Network   Check out Skin Crawling Comics   Follow the show on Twitter @hvpodcast   E-mail the show: laundryroombruce@gmail.com   This week Rachel joins me to discuss Twilight Sparkle from My Little Ponys: Friendship is Magic. We talk about how a toy created in 1983 has evolved into a phenomenon that has sent waves throughout pop culture. We also discuss how this unicorn pony grew from a book worm into an Alicorn princess. Bronies and Pegasisters rejoice, this episode is for you.

It’s not about people in 2026, or skinks, or Martians. And the dog does NOT talk. Original Text Earthfic was written by Alicorn. It can be found at her website, alicorn.elcenia.com, which contains quite a few works by Alicorn, all freely available. They include Luminosity a rationalist Twillight fanfic, and Elcenia an original fantasy fiction… Continue reading

Big week this week for the fandom, and Nemesis and LordFunkyFist are going to talk about it. But first, they go over some quick hits. It's almost entirely about cons and merchandise. Strange, that. But of course, they talk about the biggest news this week. So big, it shook the fandom to the core: Alicorn princess Twilight Sparkle being confirmed. Their discussion includes whether or not it will be permanent, what this means for the future, and the fandom's reaction. Oh, and the toys. Of course. Finally, Funky brings fan art back, with 5 pieces to talk about, including a few that pertain to our main topic. Nemesis also has a fanfic to talk about, that once again involves Twilight. Tune in later this week for a special episode consisting solely of Artfan's interview with Journey of the Spark director, Eric Ridenour. Episode links: http://pony411.libsyn.com/episode-25-links