I wrote this for a discussion about why I think politics is the wrong place to focus efforts in order to improve the world:

I have an unusual perspective on this because I think I could work highly effectively in any field on any project if I thought it was best. (Limited to knowledge work, not e.g. being a pro football player or manual laborer.) So I've thought about what the world's most important problems are. Most people don't choose projects in this way for a variety of reasons including that they don't think they are very important (they don't think their life matters much) and they don't think they are a very flexible learner or super smart.

There are a lot of very important and urgent problems. So just finding a good one isn't enough in my view – I'm also interested in prioritizing.

For example, I could work on life extension. Death due to aging is a BIG deal. Seriously fucking massive issue. And there is reasonably hope of significant progress on this in the reasonably near future with a lot less money than goes to many other projects.

Or I could work on AGI, which could really change the world. Or nanotechnology. Or space colonization.

And there's plenty of very broken things that could be improved. E.g. most or all large companies have massive inefficiencies. And people suffer so much from dating and marriage practices. And people are harmed so much by psychiatry (which does things like circumvent the law to imprison people without a trial. it also keeps some criminals out of jail. and did you know they basically still do lobotomies, they just renamed them?).

some people kill themselves because of the counter-productiveness of current anti-suicide efforts.

and i haven't even left the US yet. lots of people lack clean water, basic medical care, adequate food and nutrition, etc, etc, let alone internet access.

there are sooooo many projects to consider.

what's the most important?

my answer is that people are bad at thinking. if they were better at thinking, they would do better on all the projects i listed above!

instead of picking one of these projects, i'd rather pick the meta-project of helping enable people to do projects.

helping people think better also means they can run their own daily lives better and various other good things such as voting in much better political policies. an e.g. 2/3 majority can pretty easily get what it wants politically when there's actual unified opinion about something instead of a variety of kinda similar mixed messages. such majorities would come to exist on many issues if most people were substantially better at thinking.

why are people bad at thinking? some major parts of the answer are:

• current parenting and schooling practices are grossly irrational and destructive. and, especially, so much harm is done at young ages which is hard to fix later. most adults are super alienated from learning, education, improving thinking methods, reason, philosophy, etc, in general (sometimes someone isn't so broken in some narrow area, and then they are regarded as a brilliant genius at the top of their field).

• static memes.

• bad philosophy ideas that are common in our culture. philosophy is the name of the field which includes topics like how to think, how to learn, how to judge ideas. many other ideas are also relevant, like about human capabilities and intelligence.

so those are what i care the most about and try to work on. (btw i actually changed fields, i wasn't always a philosopher. before i found The Fabric of Reality, i liked and was good at stuff like programming, chess, computer games, and math.)

one of the big difficulties with my project is that people largely do not want the help. they largely don't want advice and suggestions, let alone criticism. this difficulty applies both to ideas about how to think better in general, and also if i use my thinking skill to create ideas about what they are already doing.

another difficulty is that, today, popularity is primarily gained by social status games rather than rational idea quality. so should i learn and outcompete people at the social status games? the problem with that is they contradict the kinda stuff i advocate, so they're counter-productive to my project.

I wrote some incomplete tips on writing well and making the writing more suitable for receiving criticism.

1. Clarity – people need to understand what your idea is to criticize it. And avoid hedges and try to boldly stick your neck out. People often make their ideas fuzzier with a bunch of maybes which makes it less clear and harder to criticize.

2. Permalinks – if people can’t find your writing, or can’t link to it on their own site, that really discourages responses.

3. Organizing the writing – use named sections, bullet points, summaries, bold and italics, and links and footnotes to more details. And make different sections more self-contained and independent (like loose coupling in programming. so that e.g. someone can skim ahead, and still understand that section. Lots of writing assumes you read everything and read it in order, and most of the stuff that breaks if you don’t follow that reading pattern is unnecessary.

4. Easy to read – simple sentence and paragraph structure, less punctuation, simple words, short sentences, short paragraphs. Avoid back-references (including limiting pronoun use. and out-of-order content. The easier to skim or read at high speeds with speed reading software or techniques, the better for all readers. Don’t use a thesaurus. Do keep repeating the same word over and over every time you want to refer to the same concept.

5. Most blog comments and forums are moderated. I would provide a lot more feedback and criticism outside my own forums if it would actually show up. Lots of sites simply don’t approve critical comments, or don’t approve comments on old posts, or stop getting new content and don’t bother to approve any comments. Lots of sites also disable comments on old posts. Sites which are different need to clearly communicate this. But you can read the comment policy pages on tons of sites and find stuff like this which I ran into a couple days ago:

http://slatestarcodex.com/comments/

Among other problems, if you write the phrase “fake news” or “gamergate” your comment is automatically deleted. And GregQ got banned for debating gender bias in the tech industry (no reason for the ban was stated, but that was what he did).

So many sites just silently prevent posting that I often don’t even try.

1. Be responsive to questions. Critics often need to ask for some clarifications and sources before they can explain their criticism to you. If you don’t respond to the initial phases of discussion before the critic provides significant value, that often prevents getting to the later phases where they could provide more value.

2. Be clear about when you change your mind/position. State it and say why. And be clear about what you did and didn’t change your mind about. People often partially change their mind in discussions, without giving credit or thanks, and without being clear about what they are and aren’t changing about their position. If you decide you made a mistake, directly acknowledge it instead of trying to divert attention elsewhere.

3. Explain stuff and talk about arguments and reasoning, rather than asserting stuff or appealing to authority.

4. Try to write material that is reusable in the future. E.g. make it more canonical, more high quality so that it’s worth remembering and re-using, more focused on key issues instead of the quirks of a particular discussion, etc

5. Put your ideas in writing. If you have a video or audio recording instead, and you think it’s important and serious and you want criticism, then provide a transcript. Writing has many advantages including being better for critics to quote.

6. write and think in an objective, neutral way, not a biased-for-your-conclusion way.

7. say things you would accept as a refutation of your idea, current unsolved problems, sources of potential error, etc

8. write impersonally about ideas instead of people, especially people you're in a discussion with. talk about "the idea that..." instead of "your idea" or "John's idea". avoid "you".

a good thing to keep in mind for lots of writing is to clearly say:

1. what problem you’re addressing

2. for longer pieces, discuss previous attempts to solve the problem and what’s wrong with them

3. what your idea is and specifically how it solves the problem

Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) wrote all of the following on Twitter:

There's an interesting thread here analyzing ICOs as if they were startups. I'll give the counterpoint: they're investment scams.

Investment scams are big business! $5 billion+ a year in the US. But they receive substantial adversarial attention from regulators.

Scammer problems: you have to recruit marks, successfully transfer their money to a scam vehicle, exfiltrate, and avoid arrest.

Recruitment in traditional scams happens over phone calls (boiler rooms), letters, and every other channel people talk to each other on.

The fundamental innovation of crytocurrency is that it has distributed, self-organizing recruitment through incentive structure for adoptees

Now how do you get money into the scam vehicle? Material amounts of money start in the traditional financial system. This is tricky for you.

As a scammer, you can't just tell Milli Smith to take out a reverse mortgage and wire $800k to an account in the Caymans. Her bank says No.

So your options are e.g. suborning a listed company and wearing it like a skin suit, then having marks purchase shares of that company.

This is dreadfully inconvenient, because marks might not have brokerage accounts, and scaling the scam gets it shut down quickly.

Enter the cryptocurrency ecosystem, which needs one node with plausible deniability and a bank uplink. Controls of other nodes irrelevant.

The cryptocurrency ecosystem has what strikes participants as a surprising difficulty in maintaining one node with a foot in real finance.

This is not surprising because that node's economic justification for existing looks a whole lot like money laundering at scale.

Now for whatever reason this shell game is really successful, and after value is in cryptocurrency ecosystem, it flows from scam to scam.

Exfiltration! How do you justify to the grownup financial system where your $20 million came from? You can't say "Defrauding Milly."

So instead you say "Speculation.", which is just enough for the see-no-evil gatekeepers.

Now how do you avoid going to jail for it? The plan appears to be "Exploit regulatory ambiguity and move as fast as possible."

With varying level of "Make some sort of plausible excuse that there does exist an actual enterprise and it is not just scams all way down."

Economic substance is not a novel innovation for scams. Sometimes e.g. the boiler rooms did pump stocks for companies which had products.

Small company which makes pool cleaners: a possibly high risk investment. Same company implying 1000X returns: scam scam scammity scam.

Here again we see the fundamental innovation of cryptocurrency, where the central actors can mostly truthfully claim to have never said it.

I wrote these comments for the Fallible Ideas discussion group:

Plateauing while learning is an important issue. How do people manage that initial burst of progress? Why does it stop? How can they get going again?

This comes up in other contexts too, e.g. professional gamers talk about it. World class players in e.g. Super Smash Bros. Melee talk about how you have to get through several plateaus to get to the top, and have offered thoughts on how to do that. While they’ve apparently successfully done it themselves, their advice to others is usually not very effective for getting others past plateaus.

One good point I’ve heard skilled gamers say is that plateauing is partly just natural due to learning things with more visible results sometimes, and learning more subtle skills other times. So even if you learn at a constant rate, your game results will appear to have some plateauing anyway. Part of the solution is to be patient and don’t get disheartened and keep trying. Persistence is one of the tools for beating plateaus (and persistence is especially effective when part of the plateau is just learning some stuff with less visible benefits – though if you’re stuck on some key point then mere persistence won’t fix that problem).

When gamers talking about “leveling up” their play, or taking their play “to another level” it implicitly refers to plateaus. If skill increases were just a straight 45 degree line then there’d be no levels, it’d all just blend together. But with plateaus, there are distinguishable different levels you can reach.

It can be really hard to tell how much people plateau because they’re satisfied and don’t care about making further progress vs. they got stuck and rationalize it that way. That applies both to gamers and also to philosophy learners . [A poster] in various ways acted like he was done learning instead of trying to get past his plateau – but was that the cause of him being stuck, or was it a reaction to being stuck?

A while after people plateau, they commonly go downhill. They don’t just stay stable, they fall apart. Elements of this have been seen with many posters. (Often it’s ambiguous because people do things like quit philosophy without explaining why. So one can presume they fell apart in some way, some kind of stress got to them, but who knows, maybe they got hit by a car or got recruited by the CIA.)

In general, stagnation is unstable. This is something BoI talks about. It’s rapid progress or else things fall apart. Why? Problems are inevitable. Either you solve them (progress) or things start falling apart (unsolved problems have harmful consequences).

New problems will come up. If your problem solving abilities are failing, you’re screwed. If your problem solving abilities are working, you’ll make progress. You don’t just get to stand still and nothing happens. There are constantly issues coming up threatening to make things worse, and the only solution is problem solving which actually takes you forward.

So anyway people come to philosophy, make progress, get stuck, then fall apart.

A big part of why this happens is they find some stuff intuitively easy, fun, etc, and they get that far, then get stuck at the part where it requires more “work”, organization, studying books, or whatever else they find hard. People have the same issue in school sometimes – they are smart and coast along and find classes easy, then they eventually run into a class where they find the material hard and it can be a rough transition to deal with that or they can just abruptly fail.

Also people get excited and happy and stuff. Kinda like being infatuated with a new person they are dating. People do that with hobbies too. And that usually only happens once per person per hobby. Usually once their initial burst of energy slows down (even if they didn’t actually get stuck and merely were busy for a month) then they don’t know how to get it back and be super interested again.

After people get stuck, for whatever reason, they have a situation with some unsolved problems. What then happens typically is they try to solve those problems. And fail. Repeatedly. They try to get unstuck a bunch and it doesn’t work (or it does work, and then quite possibly no one even notices what happened or regards it as a plateau or being stuck). Usually if people are going to succeed at solving a problem they do it fast. If you can’t solve a problem within a week, will a month or year help? Often not. If you knew how to solve it, you’d solve it now. So if you’re stuck or plateauing it means all your regular methods of solving problems didn’t work. You had enough time to try everything you know how to do and that still didn’t work. Some significant new idea, new creativity, new method, etc, is needed. And people don’t know how to persistently and consistently pursue that in an organized effective way – they can just wait and hope for a Eureka that usually never comes, or go on with their life and hope somehow, someway, something ends up helping with the problem or they find other stuff to do in life instead.

People will try a bunch of times to solve a problem. They aren’t stuck quietly, passively, inactively. They don’t like the problem(s) they’re stuck on. They try to do something about it. This repeated failure takes a toll on their morale. They start questioning their mental capacity, their prospects for a great life, etc. They get demoralized and pessimistic. Some people last much longer than others, but you can see why this would often happen eventually.

And people who are living with this problem they don’t like, and this recurring failure, often turn to evasion and rationalization. They lie to themselves about it. They say it’s a minor problem, or it’s solved. They find some way not to think about it or not to mind it. But this harms their own integrity, it’s a deviation from reason and it opens the door to many more deviations from reason. This often leads to them falling apart in a big way and getting much worse than they were previously.

And people often want to go do something else where their pre-existing methods of thinking/learning/etc work, so they can have success instead of failure. So they avoid the stuff they are stuck on (after some number of prior failures which varies heavily from just a couple to tons). This is a bad idea when they are stuck on something important to their life and end up avoiding the issue by spending their time on less important stuff.

So there’s a common pattern:

1. Progress. They use their existing methods of making progress and make some progress.

2. Stuck. They run into some problems which can't be solved with their pre-existing methods of thinking, learning, problem solving, etc.

3. Staying stuck. They try to get unstuck a bunch and fail over and over.

4. Dishonesty. They don’t like chronic unsolved problems, being stuck, failing so much, etc. So they find some other way to think about it, other activities to do, etc. And they don’t like the implications (e.g. that they’ve given up on reason and BoI-style progress) so they are dishonest about that too.

5. Falling apart. The dishonesty affects lots of stuff and they get worse than when they started in various ways.

Children (and everyone) need problem-solving skill (strength, power, competence, wisdom) not to be (over) protected (problem-avoidance).

This relates to the idea that problems are inevitable, and problems are soluble from The Beginning of Infinity.

People claim genes influence personality. The meaning of this isn't explained very clearly. Do Walmarts influence people to drive to one location instead of another? Sort of, but that doesn't mean Walmarts are limiting our free will or controlling us, and we can certainly choose not to drive to Walmart ever again.

But I'm going to focus on something else: Why do they think personality even exists at a hardware level or low level of software? I've never seen any genes-influence-personality advocates answer or even discuss this question.

Humans are complicated. They have a lot of mental stuff. A generic word for mental stuff is "ideas". Personality isn't generic, it's a category of mental stuff (category of ideas).

We create categories for our discussions and thinking which help us make sense of people. Instead of just saying "a person is a bunch of ideas" we come up with some organization and structure to help us make sense of it. We want chunks we can deal with, like personality, rather than a hugely complex chaos that we can't work with.

That's fine. Categorizing a personality idea differently than an idea about how to do arithmetic is a reasonably functional distinction. It offers us some way to mentally organize a person into parts and start dealing with them.

But we should keep in mind it's a category we made up to try to make sense of humans. It's a structure we imposed on people, and just because it's useful doesn't mean it's accurate. There are other possible ways to mentally categorize a human intelligence into different parts that don't rely on the concept of personality. Not all reasonable ways of categorizing complex stuff are the way the complex stuff is actually internally organized. They can't be, since there's a bunch of categorization options and only one actual internal structure.

How are human minds actually structured internally? The claims of some "scientists" notwithstanding, we don't really know a lot about that. Most of what we know is that it has to be a structure which is compatible with stuff humans do, such as use math and language, do science and chess, play football and soccer, enjoy art and music, write poems and prose. That rules out minds being a totally disorganized chaos. And it indicates humans can create new knowledge, which means evolution of ideas is taking place.

The approach people use is like looking at web browser software and assuming its written in object oriented programming with webpages, links, paragraphs, words, letters and buttons as objects. It could be. That's a possible way to organize a browser. But it doesn't have to be. The code for a browser could also be structured with a different hierarchy of objects, or with a different style of programming entirely that doesn't even use objects.

You can't easily tell how complex software is programmed by looking at what it does. You can mentally categorize a browser into parts like the menus, the URL bar, the status bar, and the webpage which has sub-parts like paragraphs, links, buttons, etc. That's fine as a way to think about it. But it doesn't mean that's how the software is organized internally. This applies to any sort of complex stuff with unseen internal structure, whether it's software or not. It's really hard to look at functionality and think you know internal structure because there's many structures which achieve the same or similar functional results.

For another example, suppose you have a machine which does multiplication (I previously discussed this example, and knowledge structure). Do you know what's going on internally? No. There's many different ways multiplication can be done, such as with a lookup table, a loop with repeated addition, recursion with repeated addition, or sending a text message to an employee in India and relaying his answer. It's great that you have a mental model of how to multiply. And your model will be useful for thinking about this machine. But that doesn't mean the machine's internal structure actually has anything to do with your mental model of one way that multiplication can be done.

So to recap, we don't know much of the details of how minds are structured internally. "Personality" is an organizational concept we find reasonably useful for thinking about minds. But that doesn't mean minds are actually organized that way – personality could just be an emergent property, an implication of some sort, or an approximate fudge which is similar to some other thing that actually exists. Or personality could be part of minds, but only at high levels of abstraction, not at the hardware level and the low-abstraction software level where genes could potentially influence or control things. It's unsafe to assume the actual structure of minds matches the mental categories we've created to help us deal with people.

People think it's uncontroversial and basically settled that genes influence personality. But we don't know that, and they might not, and personality might not even be part of the actual structure of human minds at all.

IQ is static because teachers literally can't teach anything. Their inability to raise IQ is because their teaching methods are awful, not because IQ is genetically determined. When students learn stuff, it's primarily because they manage to figure it out themselves.

Broadly, teaching methods are authoritarian and non-Popperian, among other critical flaws.

Concretely, math teachers don't know how to explain division and don't really even know how to teach counting. Lots of kids just figure out counting on their own. Like consider a group of 20 marbles. How do you count them? You need an organized method such as lining them up then counting along the line while keeping your place with your finger, or moving them into a second pile as you count them. Teachers routinely can't and don't even teach that much. You can read textbooks, curriculums, lessons, etc, and it's so bad in every field (not just math).

I already knew teachers sucked and stuff about IQ was wrong. Today I put those together. The failure of teachers to raise IQs is evidence that they are bad teachers. (It's not, as people normally claim, evidence that IQ is super hard to increase. Of course teachers who can't teach basic reading/writing/math also can't increase IQs with their teaching.)

Adding 5+5 is an example of a computation. Why? By definition. "Computation" is a word which refers to calculating stuff like sums, matrix multiplication, binary logic operations, derivatives, etc.

Are all computations math? Sorta. Consider this computation:

(concatenate "cat" "dog")

Which outputs: "catdog"

The format I used is: (function data-1 data-2). That's the best format programmers have invented so far. There can be any number of pieces of data including zero. Quotes indicate a string. And for data you can also put a function which returns data. That's nesting, e.g:

(concatenate "meow" (concatenate "cat" "dog"))

Which outputs: "meowcatdog"

Is that math? It can be done by math. E.g. you can assign each letter a number and manipulate lists of numbers, which is what a Mac or PC would do to deal with this. If you're interested in this topic, you might like reading Godel, Escher, Bach which discusses numeric representations.

But a human might calculate string concatenation in a different way, e.g. by writing each string on a piece of paper and then computing concatenations by taping pieces of paper together.

Humans have a lot of ways to do sums too. E.g. you can compute 5+5 using groups of marbles. If you want to know more about this, you should read David Deutsch's discussion of roman numerals in The Beginning of Infinity, as well as the rest of his books.

Moving on, computation is sorta like math but not exactly. You can think of computation as math or stuff that could be done with math.

A computer is a physical object which can do computations.

We can see that human intelligence involves computation because I can ask you "what is 5+5?" and you can tell me without even using a tool like a calculator. You can do it mentally. So either brains are computers or brains contain computers plus something else. There has to be a computer there somewhere because anything that can add 5+5 is a computer.

But we don't really care about an object which can add 5+5 but which can't compute anything else.

We're interested in computers which can do many different computations. Add lots of different numbers, multiply any matrices, find primes, and even do whatever math or math-equivalent it takes to write and send emails!

We want a general purpose computer. And human intelligence has that too. Humans can mentally compute all sorts of stuff like integrals, factoring, finding the area of shapes, or logic operations like AND, NOT, OR, XOR.

When we say "computer" we normally refer to general purpose computers. Specifically, universal classical computers.

A universal computer is a computer than can compute anything that can be computed. "Classical" refers to computers which don't use quantum physics. Quantum physics allows some additional computations if you build a special quantum computer.

A universal computer sounds really amazing and difficult to create. It sounds really special. But there's something really interesting. All general purpose computers are universal. It only takes a tiny bit of basic functionality to reach universality.

Every iPhone, Android phone, Mac, or PC is a universal computer. Even microwaves and dishwashers use universal computers to control them. The computer in a microwave can do any computation that a $100,000 supercomputer can do. (The microwave computer would take longer and you'd have to plug in extra disks periodically for computations that deal with a lot of data.)

All it takes to be a universal computer is being able to compute one single function: NAND. NAND takes two inputs, each of which is a 1 or 0, and it computes one output, a 1 or 0. NAND stands for "not and" and the rule is: return a 1 if not both inputs are 1.

That's it. You can use NAND to do addition, matrix multiplication, and send emails. You just have to build up the complexity step by step.

There are many other ways to achieve universality. For example, a computer which can compute AND and NOT, individually, is also universal. Being able to do NOT and OR also works. (Again these are simple functions which only have 1's and 0's as inputs and outputs.) If you want to see how they work, there are "truth tables" here which show lists of what the outputs are for all possible inputs: Wikipedia Link.

We can see that the computer aspect of humans is universal because humans can mentally compute NAND, AND and NOT. That's more than enough to indicate universal computation.

To make this more concrete, you can ask me what (AND 1 1) is and I can tell you 1. You can ask me (NOT 0) and I can tell you 1. You can ask me (NAND 1 1) and I can tell you 0. I can do that in my head, no problem. You could too (at least if you learned how). You're capable.

So human thinking works by either:

1. Universal classical computation; or

2. Universal classical computation as well as something else.

I don't think there's a something else because there's nothing humans do, think, say, etc, which requires something else to explain how it's possible. And because no one has proposed any something else that makes sense. I don't believe in magical souls, and I'm certainly not going to start believing in them in order to say, "Humans have a universal classical computer plus a soul, which lets them do exactly the same things a universal classical computer with no soul can do.". That'd be silly. And I don't think an iPhone has a soul in the silicon.

The brains of dogs, cats, parrots and monkeys are also universal classical computers. Remember, that's a low bar. It's actually really hard to make a computer do much of anything without making it universal. You can read about Universal Cellular Automata and how little it takes to get universality if you're interested. How easy universality is to achieve, and how there's an abrupt jump to it (rather than there being half-universal computers) is also explained in The Beginning of Infinity.

I won't go into arguing that cat brains are universal computers here. What I will say, briefly, is in what way humans are different than cats. It's kinda like how a PC is different than an iPhone. It has a different operating system and different apps. That's the basic difference between a person and a cat: different software. The hardware is different too, but the hardware fundamentally has the same capabilities, just like iPhones and PCs have different hardware with the same fundamental capabilities: they can do exactly the same computations. Humans have intelligence software of some sort – software which does intelligent thinking. Cats don't.