If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
I know this comes up from time to time, but how soon until we split into more subreddits? Discussion is a bit of firehose lately, and has changed drastically from its earlier role as a place to clean up your post and get it ready for main. We get all kinds of meetup stuff, philosophical issues, and so forth which mostly lack relevance to me. Not knocking the topics (they are valuable to the people they serve) but it isn't helpful for me.
Mostly I am interested in scientific/technological stuff, especially if it is fairly speculative and in need of advocacy. Cryonics, satellite-based computing, cryptocurrency, open source software. Assessing probability and/or optimal development paths with statistics and clean epistemology is great, but I'm not super enthused about probability theory or philosophy for its own sake.
Simply having more threads in the techno-transhumanist category could increase the level of fun for me. But there also needs to be more of a space for long-term discussions. Initial reactions often aren't as useful as considered reactions a few days later. When they get bumped off the list in only a few days, that makes it harder to come back with considered responses, and it makes for fewer considered counter-responses. Ultimately the discussion is shallower as a result.
Also, the recent comments bar on the right is less immediately useful because you have to click to the Recent Comments page and scroll back to see anything more than a few hours in the past.
I guess instead of complaining publicly, it would be better to send a private message to a person who can do something about it, preferably with a specific suggestion, and a link to a discussion which proves that many people want it.
Long-term threads separately seems to be a very popular idea... there were even some polls in the past to prove it.
MIRI's strategy for 2013 involves more strongly focusing on math research, which I think is probably the right move, even though it leaves them with less use for me. (Math isn't my weakest suit, but not my strongest, either.)
My current understanding of how hypnosis works is:
The overwhelming majority of our actions happen automatically, unconsciously, in response to triggers. Those can be external stimuli, or internal stimuli at the end of a trigger-response chain started by an external stimulus. Stimulus-response mapping are learnt through reinforcement. Examples: walking somewhere without thinking about your route (and sometimes arriving and noticing you intended to go someplace else), unthinkingly drinking from a cup in front of you. (Finding and exploiting those triggers is incredibly useful if you have executive function issues.)
In the waking state, responses are sometimes vetted consciously. This causes awareness of intent to act. Example: those studies where you can predict when someone will press a button before they can.
This "free won't" isn't very reliable. In particular, there's very little you can do about imagery ("Don't think of a purple elephant"). Examples: advertising, priming effects, conformity.
Conscious processes can't multitask much, so by focusing attention elsewhere, stimuli cause responses more reliably and less consciously. See any study on cognitive
The Linear Interpolation Fallacy: that if a lot of something is very bad, a little of it must be a little bad.
Most common in politics, where people describe the unpleasantness of Somalia or North Korea when arguing for more or less government regulation as if it had some kind of relevance. Silliest is when people try to argue over which of the two is worse. Establishing the silliness of this is easy. Somalia beats assimilation by the borg, so government power is bad. North Korea beats the Infinite Layers of the Abyss, so government power is good. Surely no universal principle of government can be changed by which contrived example I pick.
And, with a little thought, it seems clear that there is some intermediate amount of goverment that supports the most eudaemonia. Figuring out what that amount is and which side of it any given goverment lies on are important and hard questions. But looking at the extremes doesn't tell us anything about them.
(Treating "government power" as a scalar can be another fallacy, but I'll leave that for another post.)
What is the smartest group/cluster/sect/activity/clade/clan that is mostly composed of women? Related to the other thread on how to get more women into rationality besides HPMOR.
Ashkenazi dancing groups? Veterinarian College students? Linguistics students? Lilly Allen admirers?
No seriously, name guesses of really smart groups, identity labels etc... that you are nearly certain have more women than men.
Academic psychologists are mostly female. That would seem to be a pretty good target audience for LW. There are a few other academic areas that are mostly female now, but keep in mind that many academic fields are still mostly male even though most new undergraduates are female in the area.
There are lists online of academic specialty by average GRE scores. Averaging the verbal and quantitative scores, and then determining which majority-female discipline has the highest average would probably get you close to your answer.
How much difference can nootropics make to one's studying performance / habits? The problems are with motivation (the impulse to learn useful stuff winning out over the impulse to waste your time) and concentration (not losing interest / closing the book as soon as the first equation appears -- or, to be more clear, as soon as I anticipate a difficult task laying ahead). There are no other factors (to my knowledge) that have a negative impact on my studying habits.
Or, to put it differently: if a defective motivational system is the only thing standing between me and success, can I turn into an uber-nerd that studies 10 h/day by popping the right pills?
EDIT: Never messed with my neurochemistry before. Not depressed, not hyperactive... not ruling out some ADD though. My sleep "schedule" is messed up beyond belief; in truth, I don't think I've even tried to sleep like a normal person since childhood. Externally imposed schedules always result in chronic sleep deprivation; I habitually push myself to stay awake till a later hour than I had gone to sleep at the previous night (/morning/afternoon) -- all of this meaning, I don't trust myself to further mess with my sleeping habits. Of what I've read so far, selegiline seems closest to the effects I'm looking for, but then again all I know about nootropics I've learned in the past 6 hours. I can't guarantee I can find most substances in my country.
... Bad or insufficient sleep can cause catastrophic levels of akrasia. Fix that, then if you still have trouble, consider other options. Results should be apparent in days, so it is not a very hard experiment to carry out - set alarms on your phone or something for when to go to bed, and make your bedroom actually dark (this causes deeper sleep) you should get more done overall because you will waste less of your waking hours.
... I don't know, I'm just hopeless. Not just lazy, but... meta-lazy too? Sometimes I worry that I was born with exactly the wrong kind of brain for succeeding (in my weird definition of the word); like utter lack of conscientiousness is embedded inextricably into the very tissues of my brain. That's why nootropics are kind of a last resort for me.
I could have easily written this exact same post two years ago. I used to be incredibly akratic. For example, at one point in high school I concluded that I was simply incapable of doing any schoolwork at home. I started a sort of anti-system where I would do all the homework and studying I could during my free period the day it was due, and simply not do the rest. This was my "solution" to procrastination.
Starting in January, however, I made a very conscious effort to combat akrasia in my life. I made slow, frustrating progress until about a week and a half ago where something "clicked" and now I spend probably 80% of my free time working on personal projects (and enjoying it). I know, I know, this could very easily be a temporary peak, but I have very high hopes for continuing to improve.
So, keep your head up, I...
I've been reading Atlas Shrugged and seem to have caught a case of Randianism. Can anyone recommend treatment?
My own deconversion was prompted by realizing that Rand sucked at psychology. Most of her ideas about how humans should think and behave fail repeatedly and embarrassingly as you try to apply it to your life and the lives of those around you. In this way, the disease gradually cures itself, and you eventually feel like a fool.
It might also help to find a more powerful thing to call yourself, such as Empiricist. Seize onto the impulse that it is not virtuous to adhere to any dogma for its own sake. If part of Objectivism makes sense, and seems to work, great. Otherwise, hold nothing holy.
Michael Huemer explains why he isn't an Objectivist here and this blog is almost nothing but critiques of Rand's doctrines. Also, keep in mind that you are essentially asking for help engaging in motivated cognition. I'm not saying you shouldn't in this case, but don't forget that is what you are doing.
With that said, I enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. The idea that you shouldn't be ashamed for doing something awesome was (for me, at the time I read it) incredibly refreshing.
It's been done to me, too, and as I recall, it didn't do all that much good. The major good effect that I can remember is indirect-- it was something to be able to talk about the inside of my head with someone who found it all interesting and a possibly useful tool for untangling problems-- this helped pull me away from my usual feeling that there's something wrong/defective/shameful about a lot of it.
What did you get out of Connection Theory?
Edit: We reached our deadline on May 1st. Site is live.
Some of you may recall the previous announcement of the blog. I envisioned it as a site that discusses right wing ideas. Sanity but not value checking them. Steelmanning both the ideas themselves and the counterarguments. Most of the authors should be sympathetic to them, but a competent loyal opposition should be sought out. In sum a kind of inversion of the LessWrong demographics (see Alternative Politics Question). Outreach will not be a priority, mutual aid on an epistemically tricky path of knowledge seeking is.
The current core group working on making the site a reality consists of me, ErikM, Athrelon, KarmaKaiser and MichaelAnissimov and Abudhabi. As we approach launch time I've just sent out an email update to other contributors and those who haven't yet contributed but have contacted me. If you are interested in the hard to discuss subjects or the politics and want to join as a coauthor or approved commenter (we are seeking more) send me a PM with an email adress or comment here.
I have a super dumb question.
So, if you allow me to divide by zero, I can derive a contradiction from the basic rules of arithmetic to the effect that any two numbers are equal. But there's a rule that I cannot divide by zero. In any other case, it seems like if I can derive a contradiction from basic operations of a system of, say, logic, then the logician is not allowed to say "Well...don't do that".
So there must be some other reason for the rule, 'don't divide by zero.' What is it?
We don't divide by zero because it's boring.
You can totally divide by zero, but the ring you get when you do that is the zero ring, and it only has one element. When you start with the integers and try dividing by nonzero stuff, you can say "you can't do that" or you can move out of the integers and into the rationals, into which the integers embed (or you can restrict yourself to only dividing by some nonzero things - that's called localization - which is also interesting). The difference between doing that and dividing by zero is that nothing embeds into the zero ring (except the zero ring). It's not that we can't study it, but that we don't want to.
Also, in the future, if you want to ask math questions, ask them on math.stackexchange.com (I've answered a version of this question there already, I think).
I mean if you localize a ring at zero you get the zero ring. Equivalently, the unique ring in which zero is invertible is the zero ring. (Some textbooks will tell you that you can't localize at zero. They are haters who don't like the zero ring for some reason.)
The theorems work out nicer if you don't. A field should be a ring with exactly two ideals (the zero ideal and the unit deal), and the zero ring has one ideal.
The rule isn't that you cannot divide by zero. You need a rule to allow you to divide by a number, and the rule happens to only allow you to divide by nonzero numbers.
There are also lots of things logicians can tell you that you're not allowed to do. For example, you might prove that (A or B) is equivalent to (A or C). You cannot proceed to cancel the A's to prove that B and C are equivalent, unless A happens to be false. This is completely analogous to going from AB = AC to B = C, which is only allowed when A is nonzero.
For the real numbers, the equation a x = b has infinitely many solutions if a = b = 0, no solutions if a = 0 but b ≠ 0, and exactly one solution whenever a ≠ 0. Because there's nearly always exactly one solution, it's convenient to have a symbol for "the one solution to the equation a x = b" and that symbol is b / a; b but you can't write that if a = 0 because then there isn't exactly one solution.
This is true of any field, almost by definition.
Today, I finally took a racial/sexual Implicit Association Test.
I had always more or less accepted that it was, if not perfect, at least a fairly meaningful indicator of some sort of bias in the testing population. Now, I'm rather less confident in that conclusion.
According to the test, in terms of positive associations, I rank black women above black men above white women above white men. I do not think this is accurate.
Obviously, this is an atypical result, but I believe that I received it due to confounding factors which prevented the test from being a...
Academic research tends to randomize everything that can be randomized, including the orders of the different IAT phases, so your first concern shouldn't be an issue in published research. (The keyword for this is "order effect.")
The IAT is one of several different measures of implicit attitudes which are used in research. When taking the IAT it is transparent to the participant what is being tested in each phase, so people could try harder on some trials than on others, but that is not the case with many of the other tests (many use subliminal priming, e.g. flashing either a black man's face or a white man's face on the screen for 20ms immediately before showing the stimulus that participants are instructed to respond to). The different measures tend to produce relatively similar results, which suggests that effort doesn't have that big of an effect (at least for most people). I suspect that this transparency is part of the reason why the IAT has caught on in popular culture - many people taking the test have the experience of it getting harder when they're doing a "mismatched" pairing; they don't need to rely solely on the website's report of their results.
The survey that you took is not part of the IAT. It is probably a separate, explicit measure of attitudes about race and/or gender (do any of these questions look familiar?).
Yet another fake number of sex partners self-reported:
Men report having more partners than women (15 partners versus an average of 9 partners for women).
Unless, of course, Canadian men tap the border.
Note: it basically evens out if you remove the 20+ partners boasters.
I keep accidentally accumulating small trinkets as presents or souvenirs from well-meaning relatives! Can anyone suggest a compact unit of furniture for storing/displaying these objects? Preferably in a way that is scalable, minimizes dustiness and falling-off and has pretty good ease of packing/unpacking. Surely there's a lifehack for this!
Or maybe I would appreciate suggestions on how to deal with this social phenomenon in general! I find that I appreciate the individual objects when I receive them, but after that initial moment, they just turn into ... stuff.
The Girl Scouts currently offer a badge in the "science of happiness." I don't have a daughter, but if you do, perhaps you should look into the "science of style" badge as well.
So far, I haven't found a good way to compare organizations for the blind other than reading their wikipedia pages.
And, well, blindness organizations are frankly a political issue. Finding unbiased information on them is horribly difficult. Add to this my relatively weak Google-fu, and I haven't found much.
Conclusions:
I would like to recommend Nick Winter's book, The Motivation Hacker. From an announcement posted recently to the Minicamp Graduates mailing list:
"The book takes Luke's post about the Motivation Equation and tries to answer the question, how far can you go? How much motivation can you create with these hacks? (Turns out, a lot.) Using the example of eighteen missions I pursued over three months, it goes over in more detail how to get yourself to want to do what you always wanted to want to do."
(Disclaimer: I hadn't heard of Nick Winter until a fri...
Sex. I have a problem with it and would like to solve it. I get seriously anxious every time I'm about to have sex for the first time with a new partner. Further times are great and awesome. But the first time leaves me very anxious; which makes me delay it as much as I can. This is not optimal. I don't know how to fix it, if anyone can help I'd be greatly grateful
--
I notice I'm confused: I always tried to keep a healthy life: sleeping many hours, no alcohol, no smoke. I've just been living 5 days in a different country with some friends. We sleep 7 hour...
Re: sex... is there anyone with whom you're already having great awesome sex who would be willing to help out with some desensitization? For example, adding role-playing "our first time" to your repertoire? If not, how would you feel about hiring sex workers for this purpose?
Re: lifestyle... list the novel factors (dancing 4 hrs/night, spending time with people rather than alone, sleeping <7 hrs/night, diet changes, etc. etc. etc.). When you're back home, identify the ones that are easy to introduce and experiment with introducing them, one at a time, for a week. If you don't see a benefit, move on to the next one. If none of them work, try them all at once. If that doesn't work, move on to the difficult-to-introduce ones and repeat the process.
Personally, I would guess that several hours of sustained exercise and a different diet are the primary factors, but that's just a guess.
Spend enough time in a third (and possibly a fourth) place to see whether your mood improves.
In re anxiety: have you tried tracking exactly what you think before first time sex?
A few of you may know I have a blog called Greatplay.net, located at... surprise... http://www.greatplay.net. I’ve heard some people that discovered my site much later than they otherwise would because the name of the site didn’t communicate what it was about well and sounded unprofessional.
Why Greatplay.net in the first place? I picked it when I was 12, because it was (1) short, (2) pronounceable, (3) communicable without any risk of the other person misspelling it, and (4) did not communicate any information about what the site would be about, so I coul...
Does anyone have any real-world, object-level examples of degenerate cases)?
I think degeneracy has some mileage in terms of explaining certain types of category error, (eg. "atheism is a religion"), but a lot of people just switch off when they start hearing a mathematical example. So far, the only example I've come up with is a platform pass at a train station, which is a degenerate case of a train ticket. It gets you on the platform and lets you travel a certain number of stops (zero) down the train line.
Anyone want to propose any others?
There's a phenomenon I'd like more research done on. Specifically, the ability to sense solid objects nonvisually without direct physical contact.
I suspect that there might be some association with the human echolocation phenomenon. I've found evidence that there is definitely an audio component; I entirely by accident simulated it in a wav file (It was a long time before I could listen to that all the way through, for the strong sense that something was reaching for my head; system2 had little say in the matter).
I've also done my own experiments involving...
In chapter 1 of his book Reasoning about Rational Agents, Michael Wooldridge identifies some of the reasons for trying to build rational AI agents in logic:
...There are some in the AI research community who believe that logic is (to put it crudely) the work of the devil, and that the effort devoted to such problems as logical knowledge representation and theorem proving over the years has been, at best, a waste of time. At least a brief justification for the use of logic therefore seems necessary.
First, by fixing on a structured, well-defined artificial lan
I started following DavidM's meditation technique Is there anything that I should know? Any advice or reasons on why I should choose a different type of meditation?
Sometimes, success is the first step towards a specific kind of failure.
I heard that the most difficult moment for a company is the moment it starts making decent money. Until then, the partners shared a common dream and worked together against the rest of the world. Suddenly, the profit is getting close to one million, and each partner becomes aware that he made the most important contributions, while the others did less critical things which technically could be done by employees, so having to share the whole million with them equally is completely stupi...
Does anybody on here use at-home EEG monitors? (Something like http://www.emotiv.com/store/hardware/epoc-bci-eeg/developer-neuroheadset/ although that one looks rather expensive)
If you do, do you get any utility out of them?
Cal Newport and Scott H. Young are collobarating to form a start deliberate practice course by email. Here's an excerpt from on Cal's emails to inquiring people:
...The goal of the course is simple: to teach you how to apply the principles of deliberate practice to become a stand out in your job.
Why is this important? The Career Capital Theory I teach in my latest book and on Study Hacks maintains that the skills that make you remarkable are also your leverage for taking control of your working life, and transforming it into a source of passion.
The goal for
Errh
On an uncharitable reading, this sounds like two wide-eyed broscientist prophets who found The One Right Way To Have A Successful Career (because by doing this their career got successful, of course), and are now preaching The Good Word by running an uncontrolled, unblinded experiment for which you pay 100$ just to be one of the lucky test subjects.
Note that this is from someone who's never heard of "Cal Newport" or "Scott H. Young" before now, or perhaps just doesn't recognize the names. The facts that they've sold popular books with "get better" in the description and that they are socially-recognized as scientists are rather impressive, but doesn't substantially raise my priors of this working or not.
So if you've already tried some of their advice in enough quantity that your updated belief that any given advice from them will work is high enough and stable enough, this seems more than worth 100$.
Just the possible monetary benefits probably outweigh the upfront costs if it works, and even without that, depending on the kind of career you're in, the VoI and RoI here might be quite high, so depending on one's career situation this might need only a 30% to 50% probability of being useful for it to be worth the time and money.
In a few places — possibly here! — I've recently seen people refer to governments as being agents, in an economic or optimizing sense. But when I reflect on the idea that humans are only kinda-sorta agents, it seems obvious to me that organizations generally are not. (And governments are a sort of organization.)
People often refer to governments, political parties, charities, or corporations as having goals ... and even as having specific goals which are written down here in this constitution, party platform, or mission statement. They express dismay and ou...
[link] XKCD on saving time; http://xkcd.com/1205/ Image URL (for hotlinking/embedding): http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/is_it_wor Though it will probably be mostly unseen as the month is about to end.
I encountered this cute summary of priming findings, thought you guys might like it, too:
...You are walking into a room. There is a man sitting behind a table. You sit down across from him. The man sits higher than you, which makes you feel relatively powerless. But he gives you a mug of hot coffee. The warm mug makes you like the man a little more. You warm to him so to speak. He asks you about your relationship with your significant other. You lean on the table. It is wobbly, so you say that your relationship is very stable. You take a sip from the coffee
Amanda Knox and evolutionary psychology - two of LessWrong's favorite topics, together in one news article / opinion piece.
The author explains the anti-Knox reaction as essentially a spandrel of an ev. psych reaction. Money quote:
In our evolutionary past, small groups of hunter-gatherers needed enforcers, individuals who took it upon themselves to punish slackers and transgressors to maintain group cohesion. We evolved this way. As a result, some people are born to be punishers. They are hard-wired for it.
I'm skeptical of the ev. psych because it...
I am aware that there have been several discussions over to what extent x-rationality translates to actual improved outcomes, at least outside of certain very hard problems like metaethics. It seems to me that one of the best ways to translate epistemic rationality directly into actual utility is through financial investment/speculation, and so this would be a good subject for discussion (I assume it probably has been discussed before, but I've read most of this website and cannot remember any in depth-thread about this, except for the mention of markets b...
I wonder if many people are putting off buying a bitcoin to hang onto, due more to trivial inconvenience than calculation of expected value. There's a bit of work involved in buying bitcoins, either getting your funds into mtgox or finding someone willing to accept paypal/other convenient internet money sources.
1) I am not at all convinced that investing in bitcoins is positive expected value, 2) they seem high-variance and I'm wary about increasing the variance of my money too much, 3) I am not a domain expert in finance and would strongly prefer to learn more about finance in general before making investment decisions of any kind, and 4) your initial comment rubbed me the wrong way because it took as a standing assumption that bitcoins are obviously a sensible investment and didn't take into account the possibility that this isn't a universally shared opinion. (Your initial follow-up comment read to me like "okay, then you're obviously an idiot," and that also rubbed me the wrong way.)
If the bitcoin situation is so clear to you, I would appreciate a Discussion post making the case for bitcoin investment in more detail.
Request for a textbook (or similar) followup to The Selfish Gene and/or The Moral Animal. Preferably with some math, but it's not necessary.
I have noticed an inconsistency between the number of comments actually present on a post and the number declared at the beginning of its comments section, the former often being one less than the latter.
For example, of the seven discussion posts starting at "Pascal's wager" and working back, the "Pascal's wager" post at the moment has 10 comments and says there are 10, but the previous six all show a count one more than the actual number of visible comments. Two of them say there is 1 comment, yet there are no comments and the text &qu...
This has most likely been mentioned in various places, but is it possible to make new meetup posts (via the "Add new meetup" button) to only show up under "Nearest Meetups", and not be in Discussion? Also, renaming the link to "Upcoming Meetups" to match the title on that page, and listing more than two - perhaps a rolling schedule of the next 7 days.
Is there a nice way of being notified about new comments on posts I found interesting / commented on / etc? I know there is a "comments" RSS feed, but it's hard to filter out interesting stuff from there.
... or a "number of green posts" indicator near the post titles when listing them? (I know it's a) takes someone to code it b) my gut feeling is that it would take a little more than usual resources, but maybe someone knows of an easier way of the same effect.)
Is there anyone going to the April CFAR Workshop that could pick me up from the airport? I'll be arriving at San Francisco International at 5 PM if anyone can help me get out there. (I think I have a ride back to the airport after the workshop covered, but if I don't I'll ask that seperately.)
Hey; we (CFAR) are actually going to be running a shuttles from SFO Thursday evening, since the public transit time / drive time ratio is so high for the April venue. So we'll be happy to come pick you up, assuming you're willing to hang out at the airport for up to ~45 min after you get in. Feel free to ping me over email if you want to confirm details.
Who is the best pro-feminist blogger still active? In the past I enjoyed reading Ozy Frantz, Clarisse Thorn, Julia Wise and Yvain, but none of them post regularly anymore. Who's left?
I wrote something on Facebook recently that may interest people, so I'll cross-post it here.
Cem Sertoglu of Earlybird Venture Capital asked me: "will traders be able to look at their algorithms, and adjust them to prevent what happened yesterday from recurring?
My reply was:
...I wouldn't be surprised if traders will be able to update their algorithms so that this particular problem doesn't re-occur, but traders have very little incentive to write their algorithms such that those algorithms would be significantly more robust in general. The approaches th
Considering making my livejournal into something resembling the rationality diaries (I'd keep the horrible rambling/stupid posts for honesty/archival purposes). I can't tell if this is a good idea or not; the probability that it'd end like everything else I do (quietly stewing where only I bother going) seems absurdly high. On the other hand, trying to draw this kind of attention to it and adding structure would probably help spawn success spirals. Perhaps I should try posting on a schedule (Sunday/Tuesday/Thursday seems good, since weekends typically suck...
I started browsing under Google Chrome for Android on a tablet recently. Since there's no tablet equivalent of mouse hovering, to see where a link points without opening it I have to press and hold on it. For off-site links in posts and comments, though, LW passes them through api.viglink.com, so I can't see the original URL through press-and-hold. Is there a way to turn that function off, or an Android-compatible browser plugin to reverse it?
(Edit: Posted and discussed here.)
Some folks here might want to know that the Center for Effective Altruism is recruiting for a Finance & Fundraising Manager:
Would you like to gain experience in non-profit operations by working for the Centre for Effective Altruism, a young and rapidly expanding charity based in Oxford? If so, we encourage you to apply to join our Graduate Volunteer Scheme as Finance and Fundraising Manager
I've always felt that Atlas Shrugged was mostly an annoying ad nauseum attack on the same strawman over and over, but given the recent critique of Google, Amazon and others working to minimize their tax payments, I may have underestimated human idiocy:
the Public Accounts Committee, whose general verdict was that while companies weren't doing anything legally wrong when they shifted profits around the world to lower their total tax bill, the practice was "immoral".
On the other hand, these are people wearing their MP hats, they probably sing a...
Is there anyway to see authors classified by h-index? Google scholar seems not to have that functionality. And online lists only exist of some topics...
Lewis Dennett and Pinker for instance have nearly the same h-index.
Ed Witten's is much larger than Stephen Hawkings..... etc........
If you know where to find listings of top h-indexes, please let me know!
Art Carden, guest blogger at Econlog, advocates Bayes theorem as a strategy for maintaining serenity here.
I remember seeing a post (or more than one?) where Yudkowsky exhorts smart people (e.g. hedge fund managers) to conquer mismanaged countries, but I can't find it by googling.
Does anyone have a link?
Then again, in the Muggle world, all of the extremely intelligent people Harry knew about from history had not become evil dictators or terrorists. The closest thing to that in the Muggle world was hedge-fund managers, and none of them had tried to take over so much as a third-world country, a point which put upper bounds on both their possible evil and possible goodness.
If you had something more specific in mind, I can't recall it offhand.
I heard a speaker claim that the frequency of names in the Gospels matches the list of most popular names in the time and place they are set, not the time and place they are accepted to have been written in. I hadn't heard this argument before and couldn't think of a refutation. Assuming his facts are accurate, is this a problem?
Toying around with the Kelly criterion I get that the amount I should spend on insurance increases with my income though my intuition says that the higher your income is the less you should insure. Can someone less confused about the Kelly criterion provide some kind of calculation?
For anyone asking, I wondered if, given income and savings rate how much should be invested in bonds, stocks, etc. and how much should be put into insurance, e.g. health, fire, car, etc. from a purely monetary perspective.
Jimmy Kimmel's show has no trouble finding people on the street to give a confident answer to a nonsensical question. (Happily, not all the interviewees do this.)
Here's something I think should exist, but don't know if it does: a list of interesting mental / neurological disorders, referencing the subjects they have bearing on.
Does this exist already?
So, I have a primitive system for keeping track of my weight: I weigh myself daily and put the number in a log file. Every so often I make a plot. Here is the current one. I have been diligent about writing down the numbers, but I have not made the plot for at least a year, so while I was aware that I'm heavier now than during last summer, I had no idea of the visual impact of that weight loss and regain. My immediate thought: Now what the devil was I doing in May of 2012, and can I repeat it this year and avoid whatever happened in July-August?
Hmm... com...
North Korea is threatening to start a nuclear war. The rest of the world seems to be dismissing this threat, claiming it's being done for domestic political reasons. It's true that North Korea has in the past made what have turned out to be false threats, and the North Korean leadership would almost certainly be made much worse off if they started an all out war.
But imagine that North Korea does launch a first strike nuclear attack, and later investigations reveal that the North Korean leadership truly believed that it was about to be attacked and so mad...
Hitler's professed intentions were not taken seriously by many.
Taken seriously... when? Back when he was a crazy failed artist imprisoned after a beer hall putsch, sure; up to the mid-1930s people took him seriously but were more interested in accommodationism. After he took Austria, I imagine pretty much everyone started taking him seriously, with Chamberlain conceding Czechoslovakia but then deciding to go to war if Poland was invaded (hardly a decision to make if you didn't take the possibilities seriously). Which it then was. And after that...
If we were to analogize North Korea to Hitler's career, we're not at the conquest of France, or Poland, or Czechoslovakia; we're at maybe breaking treaties & remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936 (Un claiming to abandon the cease-fire and closing down Kaesŏng).
One thing that hopefully the future historians will notice is that when North Korea attacks, it doesn't give warnings. There were no warnings or buildups of tension or propaganda crescendos before bombing & hijacking & kidnapping of Korean airliners, the DMZ ax murders, the commando assault on the Blue House, the sinking of the Cheonan, kidnapping Korean or Japanese c...
I want to change the stylesheets on a wordpress blog so the default font is Baskerville. I'm not too experienced with editing CSS files, anyone here good at that? I know how to manually make each paragraph Baskerville.
Are you a guy that wants more social interaction? Do you wish you could get complimented on your appearance?
Grow a beard! For some reason, it seems to be socially acceptable to compliment guys on a full, >1", neatly trimmed beard. I've gotten compliments on mine from both men and women, although requests to touch it come mostly from the latter (but aren't always sexual--women with no sexual attraction to men also like it). Getting the compliments pretty much invariably improves my mood; so I highly recommend it if you have the follicular support.
How feasible is it for a private individual in a western developed country to conduct or commission their own brain scan?
Howdy - comment to some person I haven't identified but will probably read this:
I appreciate the upvotes, but please only upvote my comments if you agree with them/like them/find them interesting/whatever. I'm trying to calibrate what the Less Wrong community wants/doesn't want, and straight-ticket upvoting messes with that calibration, which is already dealing with extremely noisy and conflicting data.
Now that school's out for the summer, I have an additional 40 hours per week or so of free time.
How would you use that?
Anybody on here ever sold eggs (female human gametes)? Experiences? Advice on how best to do it?
It's an old point, probably made by Robin Hanson, that if you want to donate to charity you should actually boast about it as much as possible to get your friends to do the same, rather than doing the status-preserving, humble saint act.
I think it might be worth making an app on facebook, say, that would allow people to boast anonymously. Let's say your offered the chance to see if your friends are donating. Hopefully people bite - curiousity makes them accept (no obligation to do anything after all). But now they know that their friends are giving and the...
I found this blog post on the commensurate wage fallacy, and am wondering if there are any glaring errors (you know, besides the lack of citations).
Help me get matrix multiplication? (Intuitively understand.) I've asked google and read through http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/31725/what-does-matrix-multiplication-actually-mean and similar pages&articles , and I get what linear functions mean. I've had it explained in terms of transformation matrices and I get how those work and I'm somewhat familiar with them from opengl. But it's always seemed like additional complexity that happens to work (and sometimes happens to work in a cute way) because it's this combination of multiplication and ad...
Just got bitten again by the silent -5 karma bug that happens when a post upthread from the one you're replying to gets downvoted below the threshold while you're writing your reply. If we can spare the developer resources, which I expect we can't, it would be nice if that didn't happen.
Overheard this on the bus: “If Christians are opposed to abortion because they think fetuses are people, how comes they don't hold funerals for miscarriages?”
That's based on the unstated but incorrect premise that souls are indivisible and only distributed in whole number amounts. Anyone who's spent time around identical twins can tell that they only have half a soul each.
This article is fascinating: http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-build-its-very-first-warp-drive
A NASA physicist called Harold White suggests that if he tweaks the design of an 'Alcubierre Drive', extremely fast space travel is possible. It bends spacetime around itself, apparently. I don't know enough about physics to be able to call 'shenanigans' - what do other people think?
All (90%) of rationalist women who would not otherwise have become rationalist women became so because of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Thus, we need 50 shades of Grey Matter.
As well as good marketing designs of things that attract women into rationality.
Which are the bestselling books if you only consider women? What about the best movies for women?
All (90%) of rationalist women who would not otherwise have become rationalist women became so because of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
I'm not sure that's true. When I looked in the 2012 survey, I didn't see any striking gender disparity based on MoR: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/8bms - something like 31% of the women found LW via MoR vs 21% of the men, but there are just not that many women in the survey...
Your Strength As A Rationalist [LINK]
This site is filled with examples, but this one is particularly noteworthy because they're completely unsurprised and, indeed, claim it as confirming evidence for their beliefs.
Is anyone here skilled at avoiding strawmanning and categorizing people's views? We could do with some tricks for this, kind of like the opposite of "feminist bingo".
I've tried similar approaches. From that opening line and with sane priors, you can probably get a pretty good idea of what the results were.
For me, and I suspect many others for whom all self-help and motivational techniques and hacks just "inexplicably" fail and which "they must be doing wrong", the problem is almost entirely within one single, simple assumption that seems to work naturally for the authors, but which is for me a massive amount of cognitive workload that is continuously taxing on my mental energy.
And said assumption that I refer to is precisely here:
The question I shall ask, to illustrate my point, is: If you were programming a computer to do this (e.g. open a chat window with someone posing as a Manager for the appropriate discussion), how would you go about it?
More importantly, how does the program know when to open the window?
Suppose the program has access to your brain and can read what you're thinking, and also has access to a clock.
Well, there are three most obvious, simple answers, in order of code complexity:
See, while I was writing this, I had forgotten about a specific work-related thing I was supposed to do at a certain condition. It's only when I wrote point 3 above that my brain actually connected this to "checking for events", which led to "I have events to check for!" which led to "Oh, right, that person got back, I should go ask them X".
The key point being that the very thought of even checking for conditions upon which to act is something that does not occur naturally or on its own for me - it has to come about by being linked to from another thought and brought to my conscious attention. Any technique that relies on consciously doing X inevitably stumbles on this key factor for me.
Running computations on every single thought all the time is extremely tiring and mentally exhausting. It's much more daunting than any task I would usually need "motivation" for. It means I stop after every few thoughts and think of the thing I have to remember to do. And then remember to think that I have to think about this again in a few more thoughts. And then try to resume whatever other thoughts I had. It's pretty much impossible to focus and concentrate on anything while doing this.
Which means whenever the set of conditions for talking to the Manager are met, I will not automatically open the chat window. It just won't detect the conditions. The conditions won't, on their own, open the chat window - the conditions themselves (I'm tabsploding on wikipedia) were not designed such that they always open the chat window with the Manager each time they happen.
So the tabsploding process happens, without ever calling on the remote parts of my brain that have little bits of code to open chat windows when tabsplosions happen, and so those remote parts of my brain keep on sleeping, and so chat windows do not open, and so tabsplosions go on merrily uninterrupted for hours until I read an article about business management, and the word management triggers me to remember the Manager process, and then I suddenly realize that I've been procrastinating all this time and need to get back to work (Note: I get back to work without even needing said Manager chat window, by this point, so the problem is clearly not "motivation" in this case).
And all that is the hidden assumption, the obvious thing that no one mentions in "making a habit of doing X" or "using GTD" or "using pomodoro". It's the single most brain-computationally-intensive process I can think of that people have ever actually seriously implied I should use. My subconscious, unfortunately, doesn't do it for me. It seems like most other people have it easier. Well, good for them. I'm still stuck here unable to realize that I need to do the dishes, and so I keep on reading forums, and my forum-reading thoughts don't have any bits dedicated to remembering whether or not dishes need to be done, so the forum-reading begets more forum-reading and tabsploding, and my mind never brings up the issue of having something to do.
And yes, this applies to meta concerns. So training myself to be more mindful and conscientious of these things fails because I fail to think of applying techniques to make myself more mindful and conscientious. Everything I've tried has failed to produce the amazing results others report.
I have no idea of how common this problem is, or whether nootropics might be a solution.
Am I correct in ascertaining that your issue is less making the right decisions, and more trying to remember to consciously make decisions at all?