Go to college, or eat unlimited meat?

Think of someone you know who just graduated from college. Chances are, they're still hunting hopelessly for an "entry-level" job. Well, you know what would make their job search a lot easier, and land them a job that's much better than entry-level? Taking four years of their life to build job skills.

It's a shame that most people only begin to build job skills after college. They should have been building job skills instead of going to college. 

College isn't worthless. (You'll learn a few things, make a few friends, and get a piece of paper that will make your entry-level job search a little less hopeless.) College is just a bad way to spend four years of your life.

And that's why I'm introducing the All-Meat Lunch for College Avoiders.

The All-Meat Lunch for College Avoiders

If you are of college age, have been accepted to a state or private college, and do one of the following:

• Decide not to go college
• Drop out of college
• Delay college by at least 1 year

I will take you to lunch at Espetus Churrasceria in San Mateo.

Espetus Churrasceria is a high-end Brazilian BBQ restaurant with great food, atmosphere and service. They have an all-you-can-eat lunch with seven types of steak. So ask yourself, do you want to go to college, or eat unlimited meat?

I am guaranteeing the AMLCA for the first 10 college avoiders to claim it. After that, I might stop because of time and money limitations.

To claim this offer, email me (wiseguy@gmail.com) and start your subject line with "[AMLCA]".

3 Reasons to Write Plainly

My friend showed me an essay he wrote for his college application, and I thought it sounded like flowery BS. So this is what I emailed him.

---

You should write more plainly for three reasons:

1. People have bad reading comprehension. People read things and "get the gist" - but it's a pathetically vague gist.
   
   (Readers have no idea how bad their understanding is. They'll think they've understood something they've read, but fail to answer a simple test question about it.)
   
   
2. Readers get bored easily. The more bored they get, the more they skim, and the less they understand.
   
   If you want to be understood, don't wrap your message in a bouquet of flowery words. They won't unwrap it, they'll ignore it.
   
   
3. It's already hard enough to get people to understand your concepts.
   
   Only a few things are easy for everyone to think about: Concrete statements about people, animals, food, war, sex, morality, personality, games, and landscapes. Almost every other concrete thing, and almost every abstract thing, is hard to think about.
   
   So when you're writing about easy things like sex, you can say fancy things like "I am the east, and Juliet is the sun."
   
   And when you're writing about hard things like the theory of relativity, you have to say plain things like "Mass dents spacetime the way a bowling ball would dent a bedsheet."
   
   Most things you'll write about are like the theory of relativity, and not like sex.

So don't write a hard slab of beef jerky that your readers have to chomp on with all their might.

Process your ideas into Gerber weenies.

You can have as much as you want

You like M&Ms, right? So consider this fascinating state of affairs: You can have as many M&Ms as you want.

The fascinating part isn't that you can have nice things -- it's that for some nice things, you can have as much as you want. You can keep eating M&Ms until you completely extinguish your desire to eat more M&Ms, and eat more M&Ms the instant your hunger is rekindled.

If you want to appreciate the luxury of modern life, forget about how awesome our airplanes and cell phones are. Instead, just focus on all the luxuries that are available and affordable to you in unlimited quantities.

• You can eat as many calories as you want.
  
• You can eat as many different kinds of foods as you want.
  
• You can have as many pillows and cushions as you want.
  
• You can read as many books as you want.
  
• You can watch as many movies as you want.
  
• You can watch as much porn as you want.
  
• You can listen to as many varieties of music as you want.
  
• You can take a shower for as long as you want.
  
• You can drink as much of any beverage as you want.
  
• You can get as drunk as you want.
  
• You can make your house as hot or cold as you want.
  
• You can light your house as brightly as you want.
  
• You can plug in as many electrical appliances as you want.
  
• You can drive to as many places as you want.
  
• You can learn as many skills as you want.
  
• You can talk with as many different people as you want.
  

If you want to know what the future will be like, just think of everything you like, and imagine having as much as you want!

Searle's Chinese Room: Slow Motion Intelligence

Imagine if the only books ever written were children's books. People would think books in general were a joke. I think the situation with computers and algorithms today is similar: people don't understand the ridiculous potential power of an algorithm because they only have experience with the "children's algorithms" that are running on their PC today.

Take John Searle's famous Chinese room thought experiment, which goes like this:

A man who doesn't speak Chinese is alone in a room with a big book of rules. The rule book gives detailed procedures for how to write a response in Chinese to any question written in Chinese.

An interlocutor standing outside the room writes a question in Chinese on a strip of paper and slips it under the door. To the man inside, the paper is full of meaningless squiggles. But by painstakingly following the syntactic rules in the rule book, he is able to put together a string of Chinese characters that reply to the interlocutor in perfect Chinese.

Searle claims it's obvious that nothing in the room has a "real understanding" of Chinese, neither the man nor the book. Therefore Searle concludes that "real understanding" is not something a computer could ever have, since a computer is just a rule-following system like the man and the book in the Chinese room.

Searle's Chinese room is a great thought experiment, but it's ultimately a non-insight. I just don't buy that nothing in the room has a "real understanding" of Chinese. Want to know what really understands Chinese? It's quite simply the "rule book".

You have to realize that the "rule book" is not a "rule children's book". You can be sure it has a lot more pages than any actual book could have. Maybe it doesn't have as many pages as a human has neurons (100 billion), but it could easily be a million-pager like the code for Microsoft Word.

And you can be sure the person in the room would be flipping among the pages of instructions a lot slower then the firing rate of neurons. Considering that brains have billions of neurons all firing up to 100 times each second, we're looking at a trillion-fold speed difference between these two language-processing systems.

If you watched an actual Chinese speaker with their brain slowed by a factor of a trillion, you'd see slow and soulless neuron-level computation. When you compare that to watching a man flipping around in a rule book, the Chinese room doesn't necessarily seem like the more mechanical system.

Both systems get their soul back when you zoom out. Imagine zooming out on the Chinese room enough that you can watch a million book-flipping years pass while the interlocutor is waiting for a yes-or-no answer. If you watch that process on fast-forward, you'll see a chamber full of incredibly complex and inscrutable machinery, which is exactly what a Chinese speaker's head is.

The Chinese room is supposed to persuade you that a system made out of mere pages can't "really understand" language. But it doesn't address why a system made out of mere neurons shouldn't have the same limitation. To me it seems clear that the two systems have similar architectures and possess similar powers of understanding.

Are You 1 in 1,000,000?

Basically, I want to make some viral thing before I die.

http://areyou1in1000000.com

Be Impressed

When would you say this to someone?

"Thanks for doing such a great job on this project. I'm happy you're taking on more and more responsibility."

You probably think you'd say this when someone has impressed you with their performance. But what if the person's performance is merely borderline acceptable, and you give some constructive criticism, and yet you still say it? Then you've performed a Jedi mind trick.

To the human subconscious, a statement like that is a powerful command. And I bet you know exactly what I'm talking about, now that I've brought it up: When you tell people they're making a positive impression on you, they automatically turn up the behavior that caused it.

If you want to get more out of the people around you, you need to start the virtuous cycle by noticing when their effect on you is even the slightest bit more positive than usual, and acting pleased.

And if there's someone who never pleases you, maybe part of the reason is that your consistently cold reactions to that person have flattened the reinforcement gradient that would normally amplify their positive behaviors over time.

Be appreciative whenever anyone behaves in what you judge to be the top 20% of their range. And if you want your reaction to cause an even bigger shift in their motivational dynamic, then kick it up a notch: be impressed.

What Is My Purpose?

You've probably asked yourself the question, "What is my purpose?" Most people do, and then they die without ever hearing a satisfying answer. Others latch on to some arbitrary answer and feel like their curiosity has been sated, even though it hasn't really been fed.

It's easy to see that the question can be asked more precisely. You probably want an answer that was determined before you were born, right? By an entity that can be said to have "created" you in some sense? OK, we can work with that.

If you're in the habit of asking such "deep mysterious questions", you'll notice that it usually doesn't make sense to try to answer them as they are posed. Instead, the way to make the mystery go away is to explain what happens in your brain that makes you feel such a question is meaningful to pose.

Your brain generates questions to fill in gaps in your mental model of the world. But sometimes you start with an inaccurate mental model. So when you ask a question that makes sense to you, it doesn't necessarily constitute a meaningful question about the world.

In this case, the inaccurate mental model at fault is the concept of "purpose". Human thoughts are constructed out of building blocks that are hardwired into our brain. Our intuitive ontology includes concepts like "object", "momentum", "mood", and in particular, "purpose".

Our intuitive notion of purpose isn't perfect, as I will explain, but it is tied to meaningful observations. For example, we correctly intuit that a sundial is a lot more "purposeful" than a pile of rocks. That's because, in order to judge "purposefulness", we subconsciously make a distinction about why each thing exists:

• Pile of rocks: Because of a passive physical process.
• Sundial: Because of an optimization process.

If you'd never seen a sundial, and one day you saw one standing next to a pile of rocks, right away you'd subconsciously put it in the second category, because it's too improbable to be in the first. The best hypothesis to explain your observation, the one that most accurately predicts the existence and properties of sundials, posits the existence of a process that tries to "optimize toward a time-telling objective".

Even if you'd never heard of a sundial, and you didn't know about the time-telling objective, you would subconsciously assume that there's some criterion the sundial satisfies, and that some "optimization process" out there only creates things that satisfy that criterion. We're programmed, correctly, to conclude there's an optimization process at work when we see something that looks a lot more improbable than a pile of rocks.

When we detect an optimization process at work, we intuitively model it as if it's like a person who is consciously trying to achieve a goal. This works perfectly when the optimization process at work is, in fact, a person, like in the case of the sundial. But our intuition is completely unprepared to reason about an optimization process that isn't human-like.

A prestigious group of philosophers famously fell victim to their flawed intuition about optimization processes, and all their publications became contaminated with the assumption that optimization can only be performed by a purposeful human-like entity. I am talking about everyone before Darwin.

Before Darwin, people's intuitive purpose-o-meter was well-calibrated when it came to sundials and rocks. But the level of optimization evident in life forms registered off the charts, and people intuited that whatever created them must have had one hell of a purpose. The famous "argument from design", believed by everyone from Socrates to modern creationists, goes like this:

• Boy, life forms sure are optimized to satisfy certain criteria really well.
  [Accurate observation.]
   
• They couldn't have been made by any old process; it had to be an optimization process.
  [Sound intuitive inference.]
   
• Life was created by a process involving a purposeful designer.
  [Unsound intuitive inference.]

Before Darwin, everyone knew about the biological processes of variation, reproduction and death. But all those things were filed under the mental category of "passive physical process". Darwin realized that a combination of those passive physical processes leads to Natural Selection. And Natural Selection is a process that only creates things that satisfy the criterion of reproductive fitness. And that means it belongs in the other mental category: "optimization processes".

But human intuition isn't having any of this. Intuitively, "passive physical process" and "optimization process" are two fundamental mental categories, and it's inconceivable that you could build an optimization processes out of a combination of processes that are not themselves optimization processes.

This is one of the most common patterns in the history of scientific progress. Someone will say "Hey, what if Y is made out of this other thing X, even though X by itself is nothing like Y?" And your intuition will say, "Nope, trust me, Y is ontologically fundamental, so no insights here." For example:

• Your intuition thinks sound is a fundamental thing, and wind is another fundamental thing, but really they are both properties of the movement of air particles.
   
• Your intuition thinks motion and rest are two fundamentally different things, but really the only difference is your choice of reference frame.
   
• Your intuition thinks your hand is made out of special organic matter whose mysterious life force makes it obey your mental commands, while a lump of clay is made out of boring regular matter. But really the only difference is that your brain controls muscles in your hand through a big wire.

A related pattern is that when you don't understand some phenomenon, it often feels like a grand irreducible mystery. Most of your ancestors were completely ignorant about science, so your intuition is only expecting to hear stories that "explain" a phenomenon while keeping the mystery intact, and without actually increasing your ability to make predictions about it. The last thing you expect is for the mystery to be explained in terms of non-mysterious concepts. But that's what Darwin did for the origin of life, and the explanation for your "purpose in life" curiosity will follow as a corollary to Darwin's insight.

Remember that any time you observe optimization, like with the sundial, you immediately make a mental model of an optimizer that possesses human-like purpose. You subconsciously observe lots of optimization in yourself and others, so you conclude you were created by a process with a human-like purpose. You want to complete the analogy: "Sundial is to time-telling as I am to ______".

If you fill in the blank with "perpetuating the relative frequency of certain alleles in the gene pool", then the analogy is a logical one. But even with our post-Darwinian understanding, which enables us to complete the analogy, it still doesn't feel like the mysterious question has been adequately explained away.

Why doesn't anyone actually try that hard to perpetuate their genes? People have a lot of sex, but they use birth control. People have kids, but not that many. And why do sperm banks have to pay men, instead of the other way around?

It's because perpetuating your genes isn't your purpose. It's your creator's optimization criterion, but it's not your purpose. You have your own purposes.

If you were creating an entity, and your purpose was to perpetuate its set of genes, and you were going to make that entity conscious, then wouldn't you make your creation consciously want to perpetuate its genes? That's the smart thing to do.

But the process that created you is pretty stupid. It pushes toward genetic fitness, but it doesn't do it perfectly. In fact, there are all kinds of obvious ways to make its creations more fit, but they're only "obvious" to a smart process like your brain. The only changes that are obvious to natural selection are the ones caused by minor mutations to the alleles in the current gene pool.

You are the product of a creator that did an impressive, yet also pathetically bad, job of optimizing you to perpetuate your genes. If Natural Selection were smart, it would have created you with one single, unshakable purpose: to perpetuate your genes. But it didn't. What purposes did it give you instead?

Well, it was trying its best to program a gene perpetuation purpose into the human brain, but it could only do a little bit in each generation. What we ended up with is a variety of impulses, some contradictory, and none of them explicitly representing the desire to perpetuate genes (although the desire to have kids comes close) -- but all of them unknowingly cooperating to get the job done in our ancestors' environment.

Would you trade the many fragments of your purpose -- curiosity, love, empathy, aesthetic taste, sex drive, ambition -- for a single-minded drive to maximize the number of copies of your genes? You wouldn't, because the fragmented purposes are already hardwired into you as precious values.

Your real purposes are represented in the physical structure of your brain, in its haphazardly optimized design. If Natural Selection had been a more effective optimizer, then we would all agree that donating food to charity is even more foolish than throwing it in the trash, because the recipients would perpetuate their genes in competition with yours, without reciprocating the favor of free food. But instead, that action is universally acknowledged as a noble one, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

It's ironic that, not only do we fail to consciously represent our creator's purpose, we also fail to consciously represent a coherent picture of our own fragmented purposes. We typically act like confused servants to a crowd of waxing and waning drives. If you understand this state of affairs, then you can use the full power of conscious thought and achieve your true purposes better than you otherwise would have. You can strive to be a knowledgeable and effective servant to a crowd of waxing and waning drives.