Hi, I just successfully
Great! Why all that? I consider forking the LW reddit codebase for my own blog - mainly because I didn't find a commenting system that suited me. I may push back improvements into the main trunk. We will see. Just one question: What do I have to respect when using the codebase? Are there any licenses I have to take care of beside CPAL? http://opensource.org/licenses/CPAL-1.0 Does anybody know?
I'm playing around with writing a Chrome extension that identifies countries of the world in the browser and marks them up with expandable, at-a-glance summary data for that country, like GDP per capita, composite index scores (HDI, MPI, etc.), literacy rate, principal exports and so on. I find myself regularly looking this up on Wikipedia anyway, and figured I'd remove the inconvenience of doing so.
This example probably isn't that useful for everyone, but it got me wondering what other sets of things could be marked up in the browser in this way. Another example that occurred to me was legislature voting records, where a similar plugin would provide easy visibility of how elected representatives voted on legislation. Again, not useful for everyone, but I could imagine political junkies getting some use out of it.
Such a set of mark-uppable entities would have to be either identifiable by format (like an ISBN) where the data could be fetched from a remote source, or a finite list of a few hundred items (like countries), where the data could be stored locally. What kinds of things would you like this sort of visibility on in the browser? Is there a set of entities you find yourself tiresomely looking up data for over and over again?
(Partly inspired by the Dictionary of Numbers)
The Elon Musk biography that just came out is quite entertaining, but I didn't any significant actionable knowledge in it.
There's an interesting turn at the end. The author thought at the beginning of the project that Musk was particularly terrible with people. At the end, he says he thinks he gets it: Musk has basically just calculated the work of his companies to be more important that the feelings of its employees, and to go against that calculation would be illogical, which for Musk makes it kind of physically painful. So he'd rather put someone down i...
I have my genome data from both 23andMe and BGI. I am wondering what to make of it. BGI reports about thirty times as many SNPs as 23andMe. 23andMe: 598897, BGI: 19695817.
Of these, 475801 are reported by both. I looked to see how well they agree with each other, and summarised the results as a count, for each occurring pair of results, of how often that pair occurred. In descending numerical order, and classifying them by type of match or mismatch, this is what I get. (No individual SNPs are identified here.)
87565 CC CC
86952 GG GG
75289 TT TT
75087 AThe conflict between liberty and equality seems to dominate contemporary political philosophy, but do we all understand this conflict only happens when you already have fairly high levels of both? If the lack of liberty means someone gets to give you orders, you are clearly not equal with that someone, so you cannot achieve meaningful equality through repressing liberty. Conversely, why a purely wealth/income inequality is compatible with liberty, there is a more fundamental sense of equal respect or consideration that is a prerequisite for liberty. Libert...
This Video Will Make You Angry by CGP Grey discusses the meme-ic virility of controversial arguments.
A few different sources have also discussed the idea that we are out of the Age of Information, and into the Age of Attention, and that attention is the currency of the day.
Now, has anyone found these ideas combined in a short online text or video to present the idea that: If you find an idea to be ideologically offensive, the best way to fight it is to not engage it in argument but to starve it of attention and let the cat photo and inspirational quote weeds of social media grow over what ever fertile soil it may have found.
Ray Kurzweil spouts more innumerate nonsense. Why does a date 15 years from now sound like some far-off future time to him? I could see how FM-2030 made the year 2030 as the arrival date of the Cool Future sound sort of plausible back in the 1980's. But Ray should know better than to say something like this now:
Ray Kurzweil: Humans will be hybrids by 2030
http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/03/technology/ray-kurzweil-predictions/
I'll give you a prediction I have more confidence in: According to the actuarial tables, a man Ray's age has a 45 percent chance of dying...
Suggestion: We should ask futurists to predict what will happen 5 years in the future. Then publish the results. Then publish it again 5 years later.
With shorter time period (but probably still long enough to trigger wild imagination in some) we could get more iterations, so we could filter out the worst ones, and still get a few useful predictions from the remaining ones.
I'm trying to understand fear of public speaking, because that's an emotion I appear to lack entirely.
So if you have it - a little or a lot - can you tell me if it is better when your audience is paying full attention, versus when they're somewhat distracted, looking somewhere else, versus when they're not listening at all but looking at their cellphones or something?
What does it feel like when someone is silently looking at you with a blank expression, and how does that feeling change depending on whether you're speaking?
I've heard that lots of folks from LW have graduated from App Academy. Has anyone from LW participated in a data science bootcamp?
I've been looking into data science bootcamps which accept people who don't have PhD's, because data science seems much more intrinsically interesting to me than web design. Zipfian Academy's data science program looks interesting, though I've just started looking into the idea of doing a data science bootcamp, and am not yet committed to the idea of doing one. Thanks for any thoughts or recommendations!
Maybe I've gone far too deep into the Terrible LessWrong Cult, but could someone remind me why everyone else around me often seems to think that not-thinking and irrationality are happier, more satisfying ways to go through life than thinking clearly about stuff? Because I really don't fucking get it anymore.
Suppose we have a set S of n elements, and we ask people to memorize sequences of these elements, and we find that people can generally easily memorize sequences of length k (for some definition of "generally" and "easily"). If we then define a function f(S) := k log n, how will f depend on S? Have there been studies on this issue?
Sorry, this was an useless post so now it's gone
Is Solomonoff induction a theorem for making optimal probability distributions or a definition of them? That is to say, has anyone proved that Solomonoff induction produces probability distributions that are "optimal," or was Solomonoff induction created to formalize what it means for a prediction to be optimal. In the former case, how could they define optimality?
(And another question: I posted this a couple days ago on the last open thread, but it was closed before I got a response. Is it okay to repost it?)
I just got a Kindle Paperwhite. I'm still in the process of learning how to interact with the device. In case you have a Kindle, can you give me a few pointers?
1) How do you organize the relationship between the Kindle and Evernote?
2) How easily is a Kindle damaged by falling to the ground? Is it important to use a case to prevent damage?
3) Do you have tips for good PDF conversion. Especially for textbooks?
4) Anything useful to know as a new Kindle user?
This illustrates the problem I have with how we leave boys' sexual development to the haphazard and just hope that they can figure it out somehow. What about the boys who can't or don't have these experiences and learn these skills at an appropriate age?
Sex And The Valley: Tech Guys Seek Expert Love Advice From Therapists
http://www.vocativ.com/culture/society/the-sex-therapists-of-silicon-valley/
...“Dan” seems at first to perfectly embody that popular object of scorn these days in San Francisco: the privileged tech worker. He’s a developer-turned-manager at
I think this is true and I don't really understand the downvotes. Before the Sexual Revolution it was simple, not necessasarily satisfying but the rules were easy to grasp.
The early stages of the Sexual Revolution, say 1940-1970 were simple too. Pretty much everybody understood that the kind of guy who is good at sports and dancing and similar things will get the girls, and they would pretty much just go to the dances on the weekends, where Tommy Dorsey type of music was played in the 1940's or the newer rock and roll in the 1960's, and these dances still had traces of the old ballroom etiquette where girls would be sitting on one side and the boys on the other and they would approach a sitting girl and politely ask them for a dance. And things would develop on their own from there. Although the SR meant people stopped marrying as virgins (excluding the religious crazy at least) the goal was still to get married after having a few relationships and women were pretty open about basically testing men for marriage or LTR and attitudes were monogamous so there was this idea that you knew those five boys are far better than you but still as the five prettiest girls at the dance grabbe...
I don't really understand the downvotes
I downvoted to say "less like this." advancedatheist has brought this topic up far too many times.
Given that he has been "drawing attention" to this issue more or less constantly for months, I think it is reasonable to demand he stop repeating himself and start actually developing the idea further in some actually constructive way.
Why is inequality ipso facto a problem?
Because money is power. And that wouldn't be a problem in itself. The real problem is that money does not look like power. For example, in a feudal system, where power is obvious, the rights and duties of lords and servants are clearly defined and the lords generally understand they have responsibility. That is not too bad. In a system where there is formally equality, yet money is still power, none of this is there, nobody defines the duties of the rich, this kind of power does not come with a clear sense of responsibility and so on.
Money works as power in multiple ways. Influencing politics is an obvious one, and although one good argument would be that politicians should not have too much power to sell to begin with, it is a moot one - since reducing government is in itself a political act, you can bet your ass that every time it gets reduced, it gets reduced in a way that it serves the interests of influential people. So true limited government you could only have through frequent revolutions, not by simply arguing and voting so that politics should limit itself - it will never happen in a way that is truly fair, it can only happen as a farce to serve vested interests.
Money is also power in different ways, and this is why I now consider the libertarian economics textbooks I tended to worship when I was 25 (Rothbard's Man, Economy and State etc.) way, way too naive. It is easy to see market exchange as an equitable transaction that makes both sides better off. But in reality often one party has the power. Adam Smith already saw it, when he wrote that a typical employee will need money right now, the typical employer can easily wait a month or two to employ a new worker, and thus the employer has the power in the bargain. The transaction itself still makes both parties better off, of course, the problem is not with the transaction, the problem is with the structural situation before the transaction. The problem is not that people exchange work for money, the problem is that most people own fuck all in the way of productive resources so they cannot possibly live any other way just others giving them a job. As a generalization, the market of consumer goods is equitable enough. The two huge exceptions are jobs and housing. Let a man have a fully paid house and a small business and he will feel free and equal enough, and consider all market exchanges fair and equal and mutually beneficial, but people who need a job to live and need to rent a flat from a landlord will never feel free. They feel like the employer and the landlord has power over them. This is why they pretty much never become libertarians. Libertarians are largely recruited from the self-employed and the home-owners. Any man who comes home from a job where the boss threatens him to fire if he does not work faster, and at home the landlords yells I did not allow you to keep a dog here, will not feel free, and will not think the government is the primary reason he does not feel free. If anything, he wants the government to balance out the transaction. So this is also how money is power.
I had enough libertarian sensibilities left in me to not simply jump from here to saying let's just throw a lot of government on the problem and that will surely solve it. Rather, I would prefer to reduce the demand for government by trying to have the kind of structures that lead to broadly equitable market outcomes. Clearly, a self-employed, family business market is more suitable for that than huge corporations. However there are significant issues with the implementation. The dilution of voting power is a real one, for example. As of now, I was unable to figure out a fully functional solution. I just know that if you want to reduce the demand for government, you basically need to live the "frontier life": nobody is a home renter and almost everybody is self-employed.
Because money is power.
No, it's not. Money can be used to purchase power, if you know what your doing and have the right connections. But it itself isn't really power. That's why throughout history those with money frequently find themselves on the receiving end of power, at best they must pay off those with power, at worst they get killed, e.g., the Jews in Nazi Germany, the bourgeois and "kulaks" in Soviet Russia.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.