If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Scope insensitivity — When you don't care enough to use mouthwash.
Availability heuristic — People in open relationships are hotter.
Endowment effect — People with large attributes tend to think size matters more.
Hyperbolic discounting — Black Friday, for instance.
Observer-expectancy effect — Being able to see that someone is pregnant.
Fundamental attribution error — Blaming everything on the Religious Right.
Halo effect — Blaming everything on the Covenant.
Primacy effect — It's easy to remember apes and monkeys.
Availability cascade — When your whole social circle becomes polyamorous.
Curse of knowledge — What you get for reading the Necronomicon.
Denomination effect — Catholics spend more money than Methodists.
Restraint bias — Favoritism shown towards bondage practitioners.
Illusion of transparency — Ignoring the gunk on your windshield.
System justification — When your computer lines up your text for you.
Peak-end rule — The king who stands on the mountaintop will fall.
Reminiscence bump — A feature of phrenology.
Rosy retrospection — Remember how much fun you had with Rose?
Bounded rationality — The logic of kangaroos.
You Must Try, And Then You Must Ask. Note the definition of "try" here is 15 minutes, not the locally-canonical 5. (I think 15 is about right for the context - programming and sysadmin stuff.)
I was discussing recently cryonics with my girlfriend, who is highly uncomfortable with the notion. We identified what may (tentatively) be part of the underlying objection by people, especially loved ones, to cryonics. Essentially, it comes down to a lack of closure. When someone dies, you can usually mourn and move on. But if there' a genuine chance of resurrection, then the ability to more or less move on to some extent goes away.
If this is the case, then one might ask why the same thing doesn't happen with religions that believe in an afterlife. That could be because they believe that everyone will be resurrected. But it may also be that in part, people often don't at some level believe there necessarily will be an afterlife, or if they do, their version of an afterlife is highly abstracted. If that's the case, cryonics may be being hurt by its own plausibility.
He ducked the question, I think, in simply saying that non-marriage was superior and/or in heaven no one is married maybe: Luke 20:27-38:
Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. "Teacher," they said, "Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?"
Jesus replied, "The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God's children, since they are children of the resurrection."
The average human requires some form of mental "Ending" to their inner-narrative's "Story Of My Relationship With This Person", AFAICT. Without some form of mental marker which can be officially labeled in their mind as the "End" of things, the person and their relationship with that person will linger in their subconscious and they will worry, stress and otherwise continue agonizing over the subject as when waiting to see if a disappeared or kidnapped person will come back or turn up dead eventually.
From my viewpoint, the need for "closure" is an extremely selfish desire for some external sign that they are allowed to stop worrying about it. However, for most people, it is a "natural" part of their life and the need for closure is socially accepted and often socially expected. Outside of LW, I would expect that qualifying a need for closure as "selfish" would earn me substantial scorn and negative judgment.
Read the comments and weep-- it's almost as though there are a lot of people who resent specificity.
I wouldn't have been surprised if there were people who said "but randomizing means that half the people aren't getting the obviously valuable help!", but nobody said that.
there is a script tag from "vindicosuite.com" at the bottom, which contains links to specificmedia.com.
Um. That doesn't look nice.
I am also suspicious because the vindicosuite code is very clearly appended to the end of the page, just stuck onto the end. It's not integrated with the page in any way.
YO, ADMINS!! Are you quite sure lesswrong.com hasn't been pwned?
I've been worried that I'm not very good at negotiating about money. Recently, I had evidence to update in that direction. As part of a course, we paired up and did a negotiation roleplay exercise. I was one of two massive outliers out of thirty who agreed an outcome much, much worse than the rest of the group.
The exercise was structured so that there was quite a lot of space between the two negotiator's bottom lines. I was clear of my bottom line. I got everything I had to get. But almost all of the money that was available for negotiation went to the other person. This seems very familiar from other, real-life contexts I've been in.
I don't like the idea that I'm losing money that I could have just by negotiating better. What can I do to get better?
I've read lots and lots of books and articles, and been on lots of courses. I could write a very convincing guide to negotiation skills. I think that I would find doing more of this very interesting, but it wouldn't make me any better at it in practice.
I've explored more training courses, but haven't found any that offer more than a handful of role plays, and none that promise the sort of feedback that would make deliberate practice#Del...
An FBI hostage negotiator buys a car Anecdote starts at 8:30.
I've been thinking about scope insensitivity, and wonder whether it can be mistaken for decreasing marginal value. Suppose a slice of pizza costs $1, and you're willing to buy it for that much. That doesn't mean that you'd be willing to buy a million slices of pizza for a million dollars - in fact, if you're only hungry enough for one slice and don't have a refrigerator handy, you may not want to pay more than $1 for any amount of pizza greater than or equal to once slice. The same can apply to donating to charity to save lives. You may value saving one life for $200, but maybe you're not willing to pay $400 to save two lives.
You may value saving one life for $200, but maybe you're not willing to pay $400 to save two lives
This is what scope insensitivity is. The original paper calls it "purchase of moral satisfaction" -- the revealed preference in these experiments is for an internal state of moral satisfaction as opposed to the actual lives you're saving. Like hunger, the internal state is quickly satiated and so exhibits diminishing returns, but actual lives do not exhibit diminishing returns (in the relevant range, for humans, on reflection).
Someone on Reddit attempted to apply cognitive biases, based on Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks", to Bitcoin: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qua30/cognitive_biases_that_make_people_skeptical/
I don't think I agree with all of it (is 'black swan' really a cognitive bias? and I don't think bystander apathy applies to investments), but still interesting.
A long while ago there was a discussion about helping people write posts, and I seem to remember it ended with a mailing list to which anyone who wanted feedback or help with polishing their draft could send it. At least that's how I remember it, but I can't find that discussion now. Whatever happened to that idea, is it still current?
Maybe there should be a Latest Welcome Thread sidebar in Main, like there already is Latest Rationality Quote in Main and Latest Open Thread and Latest Rationality Diary in Discussion.
So I've been reading Worm ( parahumans.wordpress.com ), and there's this tiny thing that's been growing ever-more annoying, and I can't hold off asking about it any longer.
I keep seeing passages like this: "Realizing the position he had me in, feeling the pressure of his thighs against my hips, his weight resting partially on my lower body, I must’ve blown a synapse. My thought process ground to a halt. It didn’t help that the first place my mind went was interpreting his ‘start’ as being this position leading to something else."
Do people actually think like this? Seems like it would be really inconvenient.
I hope someone makes a movie out of this web novel
God, I hope not, can you imagine trying to cram that thing into a movie? It needs the Game of Thrones treatment.
What Earth-like world would maximize the amount of good a single person could achieve?
This is a question I am struggling to come up with moderately plausible solutions to for a piece of fiction I am slowly poking away at. I'd love some suggestions. Here's a more complete description:
Suppose all the worlds in a huge space of possibilities exist and most ones that could support human life do. You have the ability to pick out one of these worlds by describing it and then to visit it. You happen to be a utilitarian and so with this great power you want to sele...
My best guess is to delay the discovery/acceptance of science. Imagine a world where Descartes never made his clever arguments (the hand etc.) that made it possible to pursue natural philosophy in a way that was compatible with Christianity. Or one in which western Christianity took up a ban on idol-like representations (as Islam has - a friend tells me it very nearly got there, and changing one influential essay would be enough), so art was not pursued the same way, projective geometry didn't arise, and the axiomatic revolution never happened, or happened much later.
Or, being more subtle, what about a world with no islands - that is, no places where heretics could go into exile but continue working on their heretical things. The Netherlands was able to be such a place because of the defensibility of swamplands and its position as a pawn in wider political machinations, right? I'm trying to think of the kind of world that would give rise to a strong, unified government - which then wouldn't even need to be particularly evil, just populist and follow the typical medieval outlook. What about a world where weapons of mass destruction were easily available, where any reasonably compete...
Is there any way (possibly by asking a mod?) to revert a post to a previous version, after it's been saved?
With my post summarizing Feldman's Epistemology textbook, I had a window open with an incomplete draft for some reason and clicked "save" before I realized I was doing. Now the finished version of the post is gone. It wasn't a post I was terribly satisfied with, so if it's gone it's probably not a big loss, but if there's an easy way to fix it, would be nice to know.
Here it is as raw HTML, with markup (copied from feedly), you can paste it using the 'HTML' button in the article editor: http://pastebin.com/HuQiP3AV
(Also, use the original URL, don't create a new article: http://lesswrong.com/lw/j20 )
I created a subreddit "Rozum" for rationalists who would like to have LW-style rationality discussions in Slovak (or Czech) language. Anyone interested, just send me a private message with your username.
Note: I am unfamiliar with the Reddit system; I just assume there are enough similarities with LW system, especially the upvotes and downvotes. And I am completely unfamiliar with the moderator's options, so there is a chance I set something wrong, in which case I will try to fix it later.
At this moment, the subreddit settings are "anyone can...
Anki help needed...
My girlfriend is in nursing school. She had been doing well on here tests until recently, when she marginally failed a rather important exam. Anki came to mind as tool that may help her through the upcoming tests this semester, as it seems many people here at LW speak very highly of it. I'm looking for some general 101 help and suggestions in regard to Anki...
Why does it work? Best practices for optimizing test scores with Anki? Drawbacks or things to avoid? Success stories? Are there people with learning-styles where Anki would not be e...
An interesting idea I had: epistemology sparring. Figure out a way to make model battlefield rationality work, say in some kind of combat-like game - think boffer LARP, paintball, or even lacrosse or dodgeball - just make it immediate and physical. Make success in the game tied directly to the ability to determine the probability of truth of some statement quickly, and more quickly and accurately than your opponents, and make the games short - no more than half an hour each. Do these frequently to allow for averaging out the failures that will definitely result during play, both at the beginning, due to inexperience, and due to bad luck or inconsistent performance. Any suggestions?
Are there any expats in Japan who might be willing to do me a favor and find out the answer to a technology-related question I have? It's something I lack the Japanese skills and on-the-ground experience to answer. It should be pretty easy and take under half an hour. Ping me at gwern@gwern.net if you're willing, and thanks in advance.
They're making a Noah film. It's got Russel Crowe, Emma Watson and Anthony Hopkins. From the trailer, I anticipate that this film will be an immense source of unfortunate implications and horrifying subtext. "You must trust that He will speak in a language you can understand"?! You know, after reading some resources that pattern-match God's behaviour with that of an abusive partner, I just can't unsee it...
Also, amusingly enough, it features a spherical Earth. And I have to wonder how they'll fit "one couple of every species of the Earth&qu...
Standard young-Earther responses, taken from when I was a young-Earth creationist.
Round Earth: Yes. You sort of have to stretch to interpret the Bible as saying the Earth is round or flat, so it's not exactly a contradiction. Things like "the four corners of the Earth" are obvious metaphor.
Animals on the boat: The "kinds" of animals (Hebrew "baramin") don't correspond exactly to what we call species. There are fewer animals in the ark than 2*(number of modern species); this is considered to be a sufficient answer even though it probably isn't. I don't know exactly what level of generality the baramin are supposed to be; I guess it depends on how much evolution the particular creationist is willing to accept. They'll typically use the example of dogs and wolves being the same "kind," but if that's the level of similarity we're talking about then there'll still be an awful lot of kinds.
Amount of water: The Earth used to be a lot smoother. Shallower oceans, lower mountains, etc. So it could be covered with a more reasonable amount of water. We know this because in the genealogies some guy named his son after the fact that "in his day the Ea...
There has been some attempts at categorizing infinite-dimensional quantum physics.
While finite-dimensional quantum physics is pretty much categorized (symmetric monoidal dagger categories, see the works of Coecke and Abramsky), the infinite version is still in its infancy.
If a fully quantum category will be found, and showed to have more than one model, then I think that the idea of reality as an infinite-dimensional configuration space inhabited by an atemporal wave-function should be abandoned.
I have a question about modafinil which I'm well-aware should be addressed to a doctor, but I did ask it to a doctor, and didn't get a meaningful answer. Given that I have a minor (I think?) heart condition (a year ago, for about a week, I had sinus bradycardia at 50bpm, sinus tachycardia at 169bpm, occasional wrenching feelings in my chest accompanying 3 beats salvo premature ventricular contractions and premature atrial contractions, no atrial ventricular block, no sustained ventricular tachycardia), what are the chances that taking modafinil (given that...
Gray, Ward, and Norton, "Paying It Forward: Generalized Reciprocity and the Limits of Generosity ", is a recent study using chained dictator games: each participant is left some amount by the previous (fictitious) player, and chooses how much to leave to the next (also fictitious) player.
Does the search function actually work for people here? It would be nice to find old comments every now and then. For me it just hangs in the loading phase, and very rarely returns anything.
Have tried both Chrome and Firefox.
I was supposed to go to Brazil this past week but I didn't get my visa in time. A few weeks earlier, since I was hurried about getting my visa in time, I contacted one of those companies that attempts to expedite the visa process. In conversations with them, they told me flat out that I might not get my visa in time, but once I put in the order I would not be able to get my money back.
It seemed like the bet on the low odds was worth the trip to Brazil. But, quite obviously, I did not get my visa in time and thus I lost out on both my plane ticket fee and t...
Does searching comments actually work for some people here? I can't find anything these days, and it's a serious limitation.
SiteMeter in the sidebar was the cause of this. It has been removed.
Thank you!