March 2015 Media Thread

ArisKatsaris

LESSWRONG
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March 2015 Media Thread — LessWrong

10 March 2015 Media Thread

by ArisKatsaris

2nd Mar 2015

1 min read

10

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
Please post only under one of the already created subthreads, and never directly under the parent media thread.
Use the "Other Media" thread if you believe the piece of media you want to discuss doesn't fit under any of the established categories.
Use the "Meta" thread if you want to discuss about the monthly media thread itself (e.g. to propose adding/removing/splitting/merging subthreads, or to discuss the type of content properly belonging to each subthread) or for any other question or issue you may have about the thread or the rules.

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[-]ArisKatsaris11y20

Nonfiction Books Thread

[-]DanB11y100

I just finished Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston, cofounder of YCombinator. I strongly recommend it for anyone who is thinking about doing a startup. The book consists of a collection of interviews with company founders. Some of the interviewees were extremely successful; others achieved a good modest success quickly, followed by a buyout; and others seemed like they were on a path to success but then failed.

One clear message from the book is that taking VC money is very decidedly not always a good thing.

Another depressing trend was how many companies startup, expand, and do very well, then are bought out by BigCorp, which then fails to manage them correctly, so the product effectively disappears.

7passive_fist11y

Buying out is often done for this exact purpose.

5Vaniver11y

I immediately thought of the last footnote (and accompanying text) of Growth.

6passive_fist11y

Yes that's indeed a big part of it, and there are other issues to consider as well: * smallCo's product may be directly competing against a product that BigCorp has invested a lot of money in; pursuing smallCo's product seriously could imply abandoning that large investment. * By taking over the product and having it fail, BigCorp can try to make it look as if the product was destined to fail all along, justifying to investors why it wasn't the first to produce that product.

3advancedatheist11y

Reading Humans 3.0, by Peter Nowak. He plays around with recent social trends made possible by new digital technologies. It reminds me of Glenn Reynolds's book a few year back titled An Army of Davids. I guess I would characterize it as an exit ramp from regular thinking to the borders of transhumanism.

3gwern11y

* Life in Our Phage World (review) * Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities (website; review) * Peopleware * Japanese Love Hotels: A Cultural History (review) * Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams * Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't, Slone (review) * Japan Edge: The Insider's Guide to Japanese Pop Subculture

[-]ArisKatsaris11y20

Fiction Books Thread

3[anonymous]11y

The tale of Hodja Nasreddin by Leonid Solovyov, translated into English and available on Amazon. Based on folk tales. A story about a man who falls in love, saves people from being sold into slavery, rehabilitates the Thief of Baghdad and never ever surrenders, no matter the odds. And he said he'd live forever. And there's a Beast called Cat in it.

1Locaha11y

I second this one, I read the original, it is great. The first book was written before author's 8 years bout in GULAG, and the second after. How this influenced the difference between the books is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

0[anonymous]11y

Why, it made the second part grow into its full potential. Consider Hodja finding his own greatest belief. I always regretted there are only two books:)

1Locaha11y

Do you have a link to the translation? In amazon maybe?

0[anonymous]11y

Disturber of the Peace http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0034G663C/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1425813458&sr=1-1&keywords=Leonid+Solovyov&dpPl=1&dpID=41748wkTmhL&ref=plSrch&pi=AC_SY200_QL40 And the Enchanted Prince can be found under the same author.

2[anonymous]11y

Lammas Night by Katherine Kurtz Never judge a book from its trashy-ass cover. This one shines inside. The story is about a bunch of magick-users, wiccans, witches, neopagans using magic to keep Hitler from invading Britain in 1940. The point is, the author presents all these occult practices so logically, so believably, such a down-to-earth way that I almost started to doubt if it this kind of stuff may even really work. For a non-fiction work that would be considered a dark art, but for a fiction work, it is just being truly excellent at creating a suspension of disbelief. Highly recommended for Eliezer as it can give ideas for HPMOR.

1ArisKatsaris11y

Uh, HPMOR is ending in a week or so... :-)

2lmm11y

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Near-future that felt very plausible, I think because it avoids being overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. And the plot threads converged very nicely.

1gwern11y

* Palimpsests, Scholz & Harcourt (meh; Scholz's bits are good, Harcourt's are bad, and the whole is less than the sum of it parts, as interesting as some parts of the final section are)

1Alicorn11y

Floornight is an original work in progress by nostalgebraist. It reminds me of Fine Structure in some ways.

[-]ArisKatsaris11y20

TV and Movies (Live Action) Thread

1gwern11y

* Dead Birds * A State of Mind

0sixes_and_sevens11y

I recently watched After The Dark, which has a very neat storytelling premise, but isn't actually that good. It features a philosophy teacher running a thought experiment with his class of 18-year-olds on the last day of term, in which they're all given an identity and have to argue for their inclusion in a bunker to survive a nuclear holocaust and repopulate the human race. We cut between their classroom discussions and cinematic depictions of the scenarios they're role-playing. It's not brilliantly done, and the sentiment it ends up pushing would give most LW readers an apoplexy, but it's an example of a film which I'd like to see done well.

[-]ArisKatsaris11y10

Short Online Texts Thread

[-]advancedatheist11y120

Death Is Optional A Conversation: Yuval Noah Harari, Daniel Kahneman [3.4.15]

http://edge.org/conversation/yuval_noah_harari-daniel_kahneman-death-is-optional

The money quote:

KAHNEMAN: You seem to be describing this as something that is already happening. Are you referring to developments such as the plans to do away with death? That absolutely would not be a mass project. But could you elaborate on that?
.HARARI: Yes, the attitude now towards disease and old age and death is that they are basically technical problems. It is a huge revolution in human thinking. Throughout history, old age and death were always treated as metaphysical problems, as something that the gods decreed, as something fundamental to what defines humans, what defines the human condition and reality.
Even a few years ago, very few doctors or scientists would seriously say that they are trying to overcome old age and death. They would say no, I am trying to overcome this particular disease, whether it's tuberculosis or cancer or Alzheimers. Defeating disease and death, this is nonsense, this is science fiction.
But, the new attitude is to treat old age and death as technical problems, no different in essence than

... (read more)

1Vaniver11y

The conversation is very nice, and Harari's book is fantastic so far (I'm about a fifth of the way through).

[-]gwern11y120

Everything is heritable:

"Genetic contributions to variation in general cognitive function: a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in the CHARGE consortium (n=53949)", Davies et al 2015 (excerpts)
"Genetic influence on family socioeconomic status and children's intelligence", Trzaskowski et al 2014 (excerpts)
"Comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome reveals genetic signatures underlying feline biology and domestication", Montague et al 2014 (commentary; complex behavioral traits can be modified by relatively small shifts in many genes)

Politics/religion:

"What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents: Asymmetric Misperceptions and Prospects for Constituency Control" (excerpts)
"The Deflationist: How Paul Krugman found politics"/"Paul Krugman Is Brilliant, but Is He Meta-Rational?"
"Father, Son and the Double Helix" (Gender politics of maternity/paternity DNA testing in India.)
Wittgenstein's "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough"
"North Korean border guards prefer married women?" (commentary)

Statistics/AI/meta-science:

"50 Years of Deep Learning and Beyond: an I

... (read more)

9advancedatheist11y

"Reed Richards Is Useless": The TV Tropes article points out the absurdity of fictional situations where the characters invent supertechnologies to solve really hard problems in the plot, and then they put these new tools back in the box and you never see them again, even when these tools could solve other problems in the rest of the world. I've noticed this in the Star Trek franchise, which tempers my nerd grieving over Leonard Nimoy's True Death. The various series have shown transhumanism in general, and radical life extension in particular, in a bad light. And in the original series, the Spock character, seconded by Dr. McCoy, often said that they had to stop the enhanced bad guy, or keep him from living forever, no matter what it takes. Yet when a main character, other than a Redshirt or a walk-on, needs revival or rejuvenation, why, the ship's doctor can figure out how to do that. Yet these successful techniques mysteriously don't become part of Starfleet medical practice.

5James_Miller11y

Does "Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory" have any validity?

6gwern11y

I'm not sure. It has a lot of problems with timing and its global claims, but I could believe something like it is true since that would explain a number of otherwise puzzling things like the apparent extreme literality of religious beliefs in the distant past.

0DanArmak11y

What evidence do we have about that? First-hand, Homeric or earlier historical evidence is very scant and selective to begin with. We don't have philosophical treaties written by the ancients of what they themselves believed and how literally they took it. The Homeric epics are also describing people who from to the writer were already old, different, and also heroic and not representative of the average man.

0Lumifer11y

The very widespread practice of non-symbolic sacrifices, for example.

0DanArmak11y

What sacrifices count as non-symbolic? Animal sacrifice? Human? Why is this interpreted as taking (similar) religious beliefs more literally, rather than just having different beliefs? Is there a quantitative argument to be made that more beliefs were more literal in older times, apart from some examples?

0Lumifer11y

Because if you don't literally believe that the ritual will win you useful-in-real-life god's favor, each sacrifice reduces your chances to survive and prosper. If you want to get numbers involved, you first need to specify (with numbers) what does "more literal" mean.

1DanArmak11y

The same could be said about most religious rituals. There are various theories of signalling honesty, in-group commitment, and riches though costly sacrifices. Why ascribe the change in sacrifices, for example, to a less literal modern religious belief, rather than to a less central role for modern religion, or sacrifice becoming less important compared to other religious behaviors? I don't know - gwern talked about more literal ancient beliefs, I only asked what he meant and how he knew it.

0Lumifer11y

I don't think this is true. Take contemporary mainstream Christianity or Judaism, as the religions most familiar to LW. Do most rituals meaningfully reduce the chances to survive and prosper? "Less literal" belief and "less central" role are correlated :-)

3DanArmak11y

The rituals require money (tithe and other church collections), time (church attendance) and effort (e.g. kashrut and ritual cleanliness). They also forbid some useful things like contraceptives. Whether this reduces prosperity depends on how you define that, I guess. As for survival, I'm not well familiar with the form modern Christianity takes in places where survival is a real concern, like some African countries. Anyway, there are some good arguments that especially for the poor and weak, modern social religious organizations improve the chances to survive, because the locally big religions also tend to provide most of the private social and welfare services, and help organize smaller-scale social networks. Is this very different from ancient practice? Does it matter if a farmer brings an ox to the Jewish Temple for sacrifice, or pays tithe and other taxes and fees to the Catholic Church? In both cases he discharges a mostly-mandatory religious obligation by paying a significant sum of money, or an object that can be bought for money. Yes, but something being more or less central is very weak evidence for it being taken more or less literally.

4g_pepper11y

In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong suggests that what Jaynes attributes to the bicameral mind might be explainable by pre-literacy. He points out that Jaynes places the time for the breakdown of bicamerality around the time that the phonetic alphabet was developed, and that many of the characteristics that Jaynes attributes to bicamerality, e.g.: are characteristics of oral cultures, including contemporary oral cultures.

3JoshuaZ11y

I'm not sure how I feel about this. A lot of it seems on-point but it seems unfair to take what may be complicated or subtle ideas and take paragraphs out of context to show that they are nonsense. If I took a random paragraph from a category-theory paper it might sound just as nonsensical to someone who didn't have the context. Heck, I strongly suspect that if on used a Markov generator with math terms, telling the difference between real and actual material would be difficult if one restricted to small segments. The author is correct that these things are meaningless (by and large) but simply quoting them in this way doesn't really establish it.

0DanArmak11y

In your excerpt of "Intelligence: Is it the epidemiologists' elusive 'fundamental cause' of social class inequalities in health?": IOW, as environments get better, they become more uniform (in their effect). Is this saying that environments contribute mostly negative factors, not positive ones, to development, so the best environments affect outcomes least? And if so, how well established is it?

4Pfft11y

subjectively, an octopus is probably something like an unruly parliament of snakes ruled by a dog.

3Stefan_Schubert11y

Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links ...

4seer11y

I'm guessing that in practice means ranking websites by the popularity of their delusions. The problem is that you can't distinguish facts from fictions without reference to the external world. Furthermore, given how bad wikipedia is at getting its "facts" wright about any vaguely controversial topic, I don't have a lot of confidence in the ability of the internet to settle on the truth. Edit: speaking of bad sources of "facts", why are you treating New Scientist as a reasonable source?

2moonshadow11y

...wait, what? ...I guess they don't actually mean "unanimously"...

0[anonymous]11y

J. E. Farnham. Unusual methods of antigen transport. - Grana. - 1986. - 25 (1):89-92. Available online. Not a conprehensive review, just a couple case studies, but (subjectively) beautiful. I wish TV medical shows were based on this kind of stuff.

-7advancedatheist11y

[-]ArisKatsaris11y10

Online Videos Thread

0NancyLebovitz11y

Tiesto at the Bellagio Exultant music and fountains

[-]ArisKatsaris11y10

Fanfiction Thread

1Leonhart11y

Every rational!Naruto fic I encounter keeps topping the preceding ones - I suspect my head will implode if I ever attempt to read the canon story at this point. The best one yet is The Waves Arisen. Everyone is very sensible, shadow cloning is more broken than ever, and patiently listening to giant slugs pays off in the end.

1Baughn11y

The only other one that springs to mind is the one with the Nine-Brained Kyuubi. Got any more?

1Leonhart11y

Rathanel's The Empty Cage (previously recommended on LW) and OmgImPwned's In Fire Forged. Can't remember if the first is finished, the second certainly isn't. Waves Arisen is in a class by itself as regards sweet sweet ingroup jargon, however :)

[-]ArisKatsaris11y10

TV and Movies (Animation) Thread

6lmm11y

Yurikuma Arashi (8 episodes in). From the creator of Utena and Penguindrum[1]; romance/drama with a lot of... weirdness. And bears. Has this repetitive structure where a lot of it calls back to itself; the first three episodes are slow but after that it becomes very gripping, with some really clever surprises that seem obvious in retrospect. Has just the right level of pretentiousness; lots of "what is love?" themes and a lot of what I'm told is metaphor but have no problem enjoying on the object level. Lots of fanservice but it usually manages to seem artistic about it. [1] Though I'm not sure how much stock to put in that; I disliked Penguindrum, my friend liked it, and we both like Yurikuma Arashi.

5ShardPhoenix11y

Mushishi. A relaxing and atmospheric anime series consisting of episodic, folk-tale-esque stories set in a slightly mystical old Japan where a man travels the countryside dealing with problems caused by insect-like spirits. The stories are generally really tightly written and satisfying with an above-average level of rationality for the subject matter. Several times I felt that the story was going somewhere dumb, only to be pleasantly surprised by the actual outcome. Also quite unpredictable in the sense that good, bad, and ambiguous outcomes are all common. Touches on horror tropes often but I didn't find it scary (and I'm quite sensitive to horror). Also suitable for those who don't like typical anime tropes - it's quite serious and doesn't feature boob-falling reaction-face type shenanigans.

1lmm11y

Watched it with a group not so long ago. Started very well but it felt repetitive by the end of the first series; this is a very strictly episodic show, nothing is learnt or changes from episode to episode. And it's often quite grim - not the scary kind of horror, but remorseless fate crushing humans who stray from the path. It became a running joke for us that characters we saw early on would die by the end of the episode. Rational for the subject matter perhaps, but these are still fundamentally folktales; there is no logic to what constraints any given mushi will have, and so you can't use reason to predict what will happen in a given episode (storytelling logic, and the idea that the ending is at absolute best going to be bittersweet, yield much more reliable predictions).

1ShardPhoenix11y

I see where you're coming from and I usually wouldn't particularly like this kind of show myself, but I found the execution here to be unusually strong, so for me the stories continued to feel fresh and smart despite the somewhat repetitive structure.

5gwern11y

* Cowboy Bebop (no attempt at a review because come on, I'm not that arrogant)

6ShardPhoenix11y

Fortunately I am so I'll do one in brief :P. It's a story about a rag-tag ship of space-bounty-hunters in a Used Future. Each of them has a non-trivial backstory that sees development over the course of the series. The animation, direction and dialogue are superb, feeling far more naturalistic and movie-like than the talking heads of typical anime. On the downside, most of the episodes are standalone and I personally wasn't impressed with most of the plots, and while the characters are well-developed they were also lukewarm in terms of their personal appeal to me. Nonetheless it's not surprising that it's considered a classic. (If you wanted a more positive review, should have been more arrogant!).

1moonshadow11y

Finally got around to watching Tatami Galaxy. Found it a very pleasing take on the Groundhog Day closed timelike curve genre; a nice exploration of the idea that blaming external circumstances and even individual seemingly pivotal decisions is not enough to explain poor outcomes.

1lmm11y

I didn't like that; I felt it relied very heavily on authorial fiat for the conclusion, and the ultimate message seemed to be equivalent to wireheading.

0Baughn11y

Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata. It's an anime about... making a game... that appears fully congruent with the contents of the anime... In short, it seems to be a metacircular anime. It's worth watching because of the way it plays with tropes, and the origin of those tropes; it's marginally annoying in that many of the tropes it plays with are of the harem genre. There may be something more going on in the background, but I haven't watched enough to tell. It may be especially interesting to people who have long experience with japanese animation. The first episode is fully representative, so I'd recommend having a look if the above appeals.

[-]ArisKatsaris11y10

Music Thread

2[anonymous]11y

Artists I've been listening to recently: * Tycho - "See" * Funkadelic - "Maggot Brain" * Owsey - "She Who is Afraid to Explore Potential" * Bonobo - "Terrapin" * Animal Collective - "My Girls"

1gwern11y

Misc: * "Lufthan" (Magyar Posse; We Will Carry You Over The Mountains) [postrock] * "Sobe(Original Mix)" (Jordan F) [electronic] Doujin: * "秋桜の終わりの季節によせる抒情詩〜ピアノとオーケストラのために〜" (masaki kawasaki; AD:PIANOⅢ {C87}) [electronic/instrumental] * "Too much for a nightcap" (Casket; Musicatlas P. II {M3-34}) [Celtic] * "Home" (Kaname Shigeyoshi; AD:PIANOⅢ {C87}) [instrumental] * "Sicureada" (ジャージと愉快な仲間たち; Musicatlas P. II {M3-34}) [folk] * "満たされた時" (もふ@ feat. In The Blue; merrow -in the blue Vocal Collection- {M3-34}) [vocal] Touhou: * "Wanna be free" (Rei Shimizu; Cafe de Touhou 6 {C87}) [jazz] * "Brilliant Girls" (Okawa Tomoya; Cafe de Touhou 6 {C87}) [jazz] * "地獄でお茶を" (sisimai-3go; Cafe de Touhou 6 {C87}) [jazz] * "The Eternal Steam Engine" (あきやまうに; Thermonuclear Titan Hisoutensoku ~ Touhou Hisoutensoku ORIGINAL SOUND TRACK {C77}) [orchestral] * "The Eternal Steam Engine" (Kou Ogata; 東方Projectごちゃまぜアイリッシュ風プレ版楽曲CD {R10}) [folk] * "Temperature Difference" (deitarabotchi feat. senya; The time my thoughts turned into history {C87}) [electronic] * "Viva Evolution Introduction" (sumijun feat. 長尾ちえみ; Viva Evolution {C87}) [Jpop/electronic] * "Don't let you down" (sumijun feat. 長尾ちえみ; Viva Evolution {C87}) [Jpop/electronic]

0[anonymous]11y

Steelwing - Point of Singularity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2exXBdU-6a4 I'm honestly surprised the band (I did not search for the song) was never mentioned here.