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.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-evidence-that-liquid-water-flows-on-today-s-mars
Evidence of seasonal flows of small amounts of extremely briny water full of perchlorates on the surface of Mars.
They don't know if it's coming up from some kind of underground aquifer, seasonal subsurface ice melt, or the high salt content of the soil pulling out seasonal humidity from the air and producing transient moist soil layers that then leak out at suitable locations.
There are sometimes controversial discussions here, and I wonder how these conversations play out at meetups. Do you ever get an anarchist, a communist and a neoreactionary turning up to the same meeting? If so, does it cause problems? Or, indeed, do discussions about dust specks/torture or other controversial but apolitical topics ever get heated?
LW seems far more cool-headed than the rest of the world, and I am wondering to what extent it might be partially due to being online.
Personally, I have only gone to a few meetups, but I think I have managed to offend people :(
Do you ever get an anarchist, a communist and a neoreactionary turning up to the same meeting?
So an anarchist, a communist, and a neoreactionary walk into a LessWrong meetup...
I'm confused about where to post stuff when I post stuff to LW. I've xposted several articles (most recently this one) that seem like decent candidates for Main, but it seems that if I submit them to Main without them getting promoted, then they end up in the weird place that I'm guessing most people never check.
My current strategy is "post to Discussion so that people will actually see it, and hope that magically promotion happens".
..."magically" used deliberately to indicate that I don't know what the process for that is.
I found that variations on the following exchange are very common on programming forums:
Alice: Programming language feature X is misused more often than not. It's bad.
Bob: Every language feature can be misused. That does not make it bad.
Suppose Alice is correct on the statistics: most code that uses feature X uses it in a way that Alice and Bob would both agree to be wrong. Suppose Bob still disagrees with her over it making the feature bad. He disagrees not because he thinks the good uses outweigh the bad ones but because it is possible, in principle, to only use feature X the right way. Is there a specific name for their kind of disagreement?
Journaling, an extended argument for why you should do it.
Since January 2015, journaling has become the basis for everything I do, try and want. What I've found is that there's huge potential in a pen and some paper.
Keeping a structured notebook system is helping me monitor my habits, both good and bad. It makes it easier to keep tabs on my projects and to brainstorm solutions. Writing daily motivates me to try new things, and note what works and what doesn't.
Let's break down some of the reasons why I believe journaling is such a powerful tool for introspection, problem solving and goal setting.
In the short term, rehearse well with as close a simulation of your eventual stage as you can manage, or use prescription or nonprescription anxiolytics, or try one of the many speakers' tricks for reducing stage fright. Most of the latter probably won't work, but some might.
In the long run, the best way is probably exposure: doing a lot of public speaking, perhaps in front of progressively larger audiences.
It seems conventional wisdom that tests are generally gameable in the sense that an (most?) effective way to produce the best scores involves teaching password guessing rather than actually learning material deeply, i.e. such that the student can use it in novel and useful ways. Indeed, I think this is the case for many (most, even) tests, but also think it possible to write tests that are most easily passed by learning the material deeply. In particular, I don't see how to game questions like "state, prove, and provide an intuitive justification for ...
One easy way I can think of gaming such a test is to figure out ahead of time that those questions will be the ones on the test, then look up an answer for just that question, and parrot it on the actual test.
I know at my college, there were databases of just about every professor's exams for the past several years. Most of them re-used enough questions that you could get a pretty good idea of what was going to be on the exams, just by looking at past exams. A lot of people would spend a lot of time studying old exams to game this process instead of actually learning the material.
If you taught the principles of effective altruism to a rich person in (say) 1400, what would they have thought was the most effective thing to do with their money? What was in fact the most effective thing they could have done?
This video talks about high school curriculum design issues; advocating greater focus on concrete life skills and less of a focus on classes with "intangible" value like history or more advanced mathematics. If I recall correctly, he doesn't say anything about science class, which I think there's a lot to criticize there too. A lot of common counter-arguments to his point do not seem scientific. The argument that history teaches critical thinking for instance is very popular, but there's no good definition of critical thinking and research se...
I'm planning on running an experiement to test the effects of Modafinil on myself. My plan is to use a three armed study:
Each day I will randomly take one of the three options and perform some test. I was thinking of dual-n-back, but do people have any other suggestions?
This isn't worth a karma hit to me (though I'm risking one by posting this way), but I'm pretty sure that advanced atheist was making a joke. It wasn't an especially good joke, but all the comments seemed to assume aa was serious.
Who came up with Pascal's Mugging? Both EY and Nick Bostrom (pdf) present it as seemingly their own idea.
This is an open question about a brain-hack.
I don't believe the concept of love languages is big on LW, but searching the forum leads to a few mentions of them. It not exactly a data-driven concept, but anecdotally, spending time and acts of service are effective ways to make me feel loved, while gifts and compliments are not (they actually usually make me feel uncomfortable).
The primary concept of the love languages book is to change the way you show love from what you prefer to what your partner prefers (ie if your main language is touch and you a...
Does anyone have connection to whoever is answering this email address? hello@eaglobal.org trying to contact them.
For anybody more directly in the medical field:
Is there such a thing as a cryptic sinus infection / bronchitis / ear infection that produces fever and systemic effects but not local effects? I got a hell of a respiratory virus last weekend, the primary symptoms of coughing and nose issues are almost gone but my fever and general malaise are still around or even a little worse, and a doctor failed to see any indication of bacterial infection anywhere. I got antibiotics prescribed just in case and told to take them if I don't get better in the next few day...
Noticed a weird thing about myself today... Probably more useful for its vagueness, so reporting it here.
I owe a friend, who is also a colleague, 100 hrivnas. Recently, I found an unused gift certificate allowing to buy things for 150 hrn in a book shop, and thought, wow, I can just give it to her: her child has just started school, and the shop sells basic school supplies among other stuff - or better yet, since my child is going to school in a few years, I can just buy copybooks and give her two thirds of the loot. Great!
Then I went to the shop, and lear...
Are there any known deaths due to Quantum suicide experiments? Conversely, are there any known survivals in such experiments? (We should presumably not expect the latter for large odds of death, but just want the question to be complete.)
Is it okay to re-ask questions on open threads if they were not answered the last time the were ask on it? I had asked this question but received no answer, and I am concerened it would be spammy to re-ask.
I expect that most people are biased when it comes to judging how attractive they are. Asking people probably doesn't help too much, since people are likely to be nice, and close friends probably also have a biased view of ones attractiveness. So is there a good way to calibrate your perception of how good you look?
I'm really hesitant about posting about controversial topics like climate change because of the heavy mind-killing effect they have. But I was recently involved in a debate about climate change, and one of the opponents in the debate pointed to evidence supposedly supporting the 'global warming hiatus' in the past 15 years and that 90's climate models did not predict the hiatus. On the other hand, work by NASA/NOAA suggests that the supposed hiatus is actually illusory and an artifact of uncorrected ocean temperature data. Other sources suggest that the ti...
Just take a look [...] and check what your eyes tell you :-)
This is the same procedure that leads a lot of people to lose a lot of money trying to pick stocks, and a lot of other people to believe in the efficacy of prayer. Human eyes attached to human brains are very good at seeing patterns that aren't really there.
I am not a climate scientist and haven't looked at the data in detail. But, for what it's worth, when I eyeball the plots what I see is a highly noisy time series whose last 10 years or so do indeed look cooler than trend but not so much so that I'd want to rule out random variation as a sufficient explanation. And at least some people who have looked at the data in detail have arrived at the same conclusion; see e.g. passive_fist's second and third links.
I don't know whether those people are right, but what they say seems to me obviously credible enough that saying "just eyeball the data, it's obvious" is really bad advice.
[EDITED to add:] Maybe what's actually going here is different interpretations of "the hiatus exists". It seems fairly uncontroversial that (e.g.) the slope of the least-squares straight line fit to mean surface temperature fro...
The recent propaganda about the wonders of sex robots has gotten me worked up because I consider the sex robot a horrible idea, and it leads me to worry about just how disordered the relationship between the sexes can possibly get. Young men need experience with sexual relationships starting at an appropriate age so that they can develop the skills they need for dealing with women successfully in adult life in general. Sufficiently advanced sex robots (“advanced” in a technological sense, because I consider the technology socially damaging) could sabotage this process and result in turning a whole generation of adolescent boys into emotionally and socially impaired adult male virgins who don’t know how to relate to real, biological women. Something like this trend has already advanced far in Japan, even without sex robots: Reportedly a quarter of unmarried Japanese men in their 30’s have had no sexual experience, despite Japan’s normal male to female sex ratio, the culture’s sexual liberalism and Japan’s proximity to other Asian countries which have sex tourism industries. Japan has a funny way of living “20 minutes into the future,” so we shouldn’t shrug this off this phenomenon as a peculiarity of Japanese culture and not expect it to show up elsewhere.
For some reason I find little reception to my concerns about this. I would even argue that male sexual backwardness should become a focus of professional development in business, to show the importance of addressing it as a wider problem. Promising male business leaders who lack sexual experience need help in acquiring it as part of their training so that they can earn the respect of women in the work place. (What, you don’t think that women can pick up on the difference between the experienced, confident man versus the inexperienced man who feels uncomfortable around young women, ceteris paribus?)
But as I said, I don’t know of anyone else who shares my point of view, and especially not professional sexologists. The sex scientists in the West, at least, seem to have the agenda of promoting feminism and normalizing deviancy. They don’t care about the experiences and problems of adult male virgins and incels with normal desires, so guess who gets thrown to the wolves?
Then I just read the following story:
Advent of the virgin births: Women who have never been in a relationship paying £5,000 to get pregnant http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3250413/Advent-virgin-births-Women-never-relationship-paying-5-000-pregnant.html
Apparently some fertility clinics in the UK will help virgin women bypass sexual experience on the way to motherhood, even ones who might never have had a boyfriend or gone on a date.
Hmm. Okay. What could possibly go wrong with this, apart from the usual hazards of single motherhood?
Well, the Daily Mail article says the following:
Uh, you know, this resembles my concerns about the developmental deficiencies of adult male virgins. Perhaps I sound like a crank for insisting that young men need experience with sexual relationships to develop into thriving adult men; but then this psychotherapist says that young women need the emotional growth that comes from experience with sexual relationships, and they preferably need to become pregnant in these relationships, so that they can become good mothers.
And now the UK has inadvertently started a social experiment where female virgins can forego this stage of life experience and skill development because they want to make babies right away without having any sexual involvement with men. The women who give birth this way will probably have problems forming relationships with men afterwards, and not just because of men’s natural aversion to cuckoldry – why should these men invest their resources into rearing other men’s children? – but also because these women could project something “off” about them that reduces the perception of their reproductive fitness. Making babies as virgins minus sexual intercourse has to muck up women’s hormonal cycles involved with courtship, pair bonding, mating, conception, pregnancy and childbirth – natural and sexual selection shaped women’s bodies and minds to do it this way over hundreds of thousands of years - and the subtle but detectable damage will probably manifest itself in their bodies and in their behavior around men.
However I doubt if the medical community will heed the warnings of mental health professionals like Dilys Daws. In the modern political regime, women can get pretty much whatever they want, even female virgins who want to become mothers without having to submit to the indignity of coupling with the bodies of icky boys. Meanwhile, some transhumanists who should know better think that sexually backwards men will find meaningful “relationships” with sex robots. The two trends complement each other, in a sick and twisted way; and I just don’t see how they can turn out well, especially if the one about virgin motherhood goes viral.
How is a sexbot different from a sexdoll or a fleshlight and pornography?
I don't think it would create any problems in a mentally healthy individual, though it might exacerbate those suffering from pre-existing issues surrounding sex.