Sorry to complain, but I opened the site to see what was going on, and Main has gone to utter crap.
"Is spirituality irrational?" and "3 reasons it's irrational to demand 'rationalism' in social-justice activism" are now heavily-commented recent posts in Main. Meanwhile, "Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People" was published a short while ago, and nothing about it appears on this site.
Looks like this site has slid into the River of Low Domain-Knowledge, Easy-to-Discuss General Stuff, rather than staying up in the nice Forest of Stuff LW Purports to be About.
Context: Main is currently disabled; LessWrong 2.0
LessWrong is actively being redesigned. Until further notice, posts to Main have been disabled. Once the redesign is complete, LW may have multiple subs, none of which might be called 'Main', but one or more of which will be designated as where the nice Forest of Classic LW Stuff you're hoping to find here. The only posts in Main recently are meetup posts and the survey, which were promoted there for visibility. Apparently, usage statistics show for the last several months Discussion has been getting much more attention than Main, so Discussion is where non-crap is. Of course, there is no more explicit division between crap and non-crap you'd expect the 'Main'/'Discussion' divide to reflect. Try finding other ways to filter out crap, like reading the top posts from the previous week.
Don't apologize. I've been waiting for weeks for someone to complain, to make sure that it wasn't just me who felt this was an actual problem.
Just a random thing I wanted to say before I forget it:
It is okay to be rational and happy.
Why am I even saying this? Did anyone claim the opposite? Well, I haven't heard anyone say explicitly "no, as a rational person you must be always serious and grim", but sometimes people behave as if they believed that. Why could it be so?
There are many bad things in the world. Knowing and understanding more will make you see more of those bad things, which logically can make you sad. On the other hand, fools are believed to be ignorant and happy. So it's like we have an intuitive idea that intelligence or wisdom or rationality (I am not going to distinguish between these things properly; this is a comment on a blog, not a doctoral thesis) correlate negatively with happiness. Of course this isn't always true -- for example a paranoid person can be less rational, see more dangers, and thus be less happy -- but in general the idea seems plausible.
However, this is confusing two things: knowing in general that a bad thing exists, and thinking about it obsessively all the time. It is the latter that can make you sad 24/7. People in difficult situations often do have happy moments; they f...
Interesting astrophysics development in our solar system with astrobiological implications: the rings and inner moons of Saturn, everything closer than Titan, may be young, forming between 100 million and 1 billion years ago rather than at the dawn of the solar system.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.07071
Recent measurements of Saturn's moon system suggest that it evolves due to tides quicker than was previously believed, with moons moving ourwards more rapidly due to bigger tidal bulges on Saturn transferring more energy. This would explain the large quantity of heat pouring out of Enceladus and powering its geysers and oceans. Tidal forces go down with the cube of distance so closer moons should move out much faster than further moons. Using new figures one can trace back the orbits of the inner moons and see that they should have hit various orbital resonances during the history of the solar system as the ratios of orbital periods changed, which would have left imprints in the system in the form of effects on the rings and changes to the orbits of the moons that we see no evidence of. Conclusion is the system is younger than the age at which backtracking would produce those even...
user account: "Lamp" is banned for being eugine_nier. This is an update in case anyone was wondering.
so far accounts have been:
(that I know of, I think there were more in between too that I forgot.)
If I could send this guy a message it would be this: You are quite literally wasting our time. And by "our" I mean; the moderators and the people who could be spending their time improving the place, coding and implementing a better place; instead are spending their time getting rid of you over and over. DON'T COME BACK. You are literally killing LW.
I don't want to get into the community's time or the time of the people you debate with; or the time of anyone who reads this post here. That time also adds up. Seriously.
If one banned troll (and AFAIK, we only have one who's bothering to come back, and doing so badly enough to get caught repeatedly) is enough to kill LW, we're in pretty bad shape.
Thanks to the mods for continuing to remove his accounts, but please try not to spend any more thought on him than you feel is beneficial.
You're getting dramatic for no good reason. I don't think that in reality people didn't submit patches because they were too busy with Eugine. Just didn't happen.
You are literally killing LW
Nope. Availability bias is a fallacy. Eugine is a very minor problem for LW.
I'm not sure Eugine is sucking up nearly that much moderator time. I expect his bigoted comments do more damage because we're likely to lose some good commenters.
Interesting molecular biology/neuroscience development: magnetically sensitive ion channels.
Some researchers through a series of trial and error screens managed to tether a tension sensitive ion chanel to an iron storage protein such that in the presence of strong magnetic fields (think rare earth magnets) the channels are pulled open and able to induce action potentials in electrically active cells.
Upon expression in sensory nerves on zebrafish, the fish reacted to swimming into magnetic fields as if they were being poked. Upon expression in deep brai...
This is a meta thread for the Positivity Thread.
All opinions about the Positivity Thread as a whole or about specific comments therein belong here.
It's hard for destruction to be nice.
Disagree. If you genuinely wish to help someone by destroying something by truth, and you fully take into account their subjective experience of the situation, you can be nice while destroying things.
Should we try to promote the most valuable/important (maybe older?) Less Wrong content on the front page? Currently the front page features a bunch of links and featured articles that don't seem to be organized in any systematic way. Maybe Less Wrong would be more attractive/useful to new people if they could access the best the site has to offer directly from the front page (or at least more if it, and in a systematic way)?
Want to tell the future? Ask an PhD, unemployed, media-experienced, female, high-self-rated-relevance-of-expertise, right wing, realist, optimist, cognitively-foxy, extremist with integratively complex thought protocols, according to the evidence in Tetlock's Expert Political Judgement book exerpts tables for: 'individual difference predictors of calibration of subjective probability forecasts, and variable loadings in rotated factor matrix from maximum likelihood factors analysis (quartimin rototation) of belief systems item' >wtf does that mean?<
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ngj/open_thread_april_4_april_10_2016/d7q6
In a follow up of unprecedented proportions - our disappointing protagonist Aladdin returns in the long awaited sequel Lamp2.
Following gwern's post about Melatonin, I did a self-trial of melatonin to see if it improved my sleep.
Objective: To see whether I (myself only) should take melatonin regularly or not. Therefore: Have a clinically significant decrease in sleep time or increase in daytime awakeness. Clinically significant=statistically different & meaningful (i.e. 1 minute difference is not worth the effort, for example)
Note that at baseline, I never have trouble falling asleep, and I never have trouble staying asleep. Melatonin is theoretically advantageous in inducing...
Review of state-of-the-arts in artificial intelligence. Present and future of AI.
Vladimir Shakirov
http://immortality-roadmap.com/review-of-state-of-the-arts.pdf
The article has some interesting insights in latest deep learning successes. It is an example of hyper-optimistic thinking about AI timing (which is hyper-pessimistic, if we look on risks), as 2020-2030 for the authors seems like a plausible dates of AI arrival.
Some quotes: "The difference between year 2011 and year 2016 is enormous. The difference between 2016 and 2021 would be even much mor...
From experience, it results in better life quality if you call out bulls**ters without being angry inside about it.
From Omnilibrium:
Many people are aware of Alicorn's post on polyhacking. There are a few things which have been written on bihacking, though I haven't seen bihacking discussed within the rationalist community as widely as polyhacking has been. Bihacking is the process of actively trying to become bisexual.
First, there are a couple sources which suggest that people can have "epiphanies", after which they become bisexual, or perhaps just recognize their latent bisexuality. This may be due to the fact that they are able to tell themselves different stories about the...
To avoid only reading filtered evidence, people interested in polyhacking might also look at this SSC thread.
Yvain's latest post at SSC is, among other things, about the dynamics of tribes:
Scholars call the process of creating a new tribe “ethnogenesis” ... My model of ethnogenesis involves four stages: pre-existing differences, a rallying flag, development, and dissolution.
Homework assignment: apply the four-stage model to LessWrong.
(meta: I'm not sure if I should make a Discussion post for this, so I'm posting here. Feedback most welcome)
I'm exploring the following hypothesis : sometimes, you have to give up constructive actions for the sake of focus.
Most productivity methods suggest the obvious, to keep wasteful activities in check. It could be gaming, chatting, checking news websites. They all share a common trait: you don't gain any significant utility (nor money, nor fun, nor rest) for spending more time on it. You achieve the same result by spending a little time on it, rather t...
Remembering the existence of the term ‘compersion’ gives me hope that I may overcome some jealousy I have felt lately :) At the back of my mind I fear the only reason the girl I'm dating is into me is because of transference from her ex boyfriend who's vibe I apparently give off, convenience since I live close by, and the 'rebound' of a recent breakup
Why would you take head of information that doesn't help you? it's up to you
Effective Altruist? No, I participate in the effective altruism community because I'm Hindu and needa game the Karma yoga system
Oftentimes, I am confused because I didn't lock in my algorithm. This makes my behavior incongruent.
Remembering the existence of the term ‘compersion’ gives me hope that I may overcome some jealousy I have felt lately :) At the back of my mind I fear the only reason the girl I'm dating is into me is because of transference from her ex boyfriend who's vibe I apparently give off, convenience since I live close by, and the 'rebound' of a recent breakup
Why would you take head of information that doesn't help you? it's up to you
Effective Altruist? No, I participate in the effective altruism community because I'm Hindu and needa game the Karma yoga system. Why not outreach to Hindu communities, not just skeptics groups?
Yoga is dangerous. Don't do it as a substitutde for physical therapy rehabilitation exercises (like for back pain!). > An extensive survey of yoga practitioners in Australia showed that about 20% had suffered some physical injury while practicing yoga. In the previous 12 months 4.6% of the respondents had suffered an injury producing prolonged pain or requiring medical treatment. Headstands, shoulder stands, lotus and half lotus (seated cross-legged position), forward bends, backward bends, and handstands produced the greatest number of injuries.[239]
[MAXMINCON Principle(bama.ua.edu/~sprentic/607 outline-maxmincon.html)
'Neuropsychological research about the order of events in brain functioning has revealed that emotions precede reason and perception and hence some emotional repsponses and memories may be formed without any conscious thoughts (LeDoux 1998). Therefore, the cofounders of the Human Givens Institute argue that it is the emotional arousal that causes blacka nd white thinking (HGIPRN 2009). It is widely known that evidence-based CBT is underpinned by the premise that the opposite cocurs, that is, thoughts precede emotions. However, arguably, and in line with LeDoux's (1998) findings, and the APET model which drew upon them, there area great number of things that practioniers may do before challenging faulty thinking, as this may be too taxing to begin with for young people. Order of events in brain functioning
Organ donation registered-only party
Australians can sense the lack of good governance, and minor parties are becoming increasingly popular (among some voters) because none of the major parties (LNP, ALP, Greens) are able to represent those voters. When you think about it, a system of democracy that isn’t able to deal with a diverse votership can’t be that good at the end of the day.
What is the evidence for and against slum clearance?
I recently used Doodle to schedule a meeting. It only let's you schedule for particular days, whereas need to meet lets you schedule by the hour - way better, instant regret
Anyone remember that monopoly pc game with the nice music?
will rough skateboard grit that scratches your hands when you carry it toughen them..is that even bad?
By repeatedly recounting recent social interactions, identifying emotions, and putting them into perspective, DDP is hypothesized to activate higher-level cortical pathways, thereby strengthening them and remediating deficits in how emotions are processed in the brain. The analogy used is to physical therapy following stroke; physical therapy repeatedly activates motor neuron pathways in the brain, thereby strengthening them and restoring control over muscle functioning and voluntary movement.
My favourite colour combination: blue and beige
song: Röyksopp - Eple
Why can't I get my receipts sent me to by email, itemised, rather than paper copies. My bank card could carry that detail.
I wish my mum would understand this fact sheet on family violence :'(
Violent virtue:
'Tetlock uses a different “functionalist metaphor” to describe his work on how people react to threats to sacred values—and how they take pains to structure situations so as to avoid open or transparent trade-offs involving sacred values.[21][22][23][24] Real-world implications of this claim are explored largely in business-school journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, California Management Review, and Journal of Consumer Psychology. This research argues that most people recoil from the specter of relativism: the notion that the deepest moral-political values are arbitrary inventions of mere mortals desperately trying to infuse moral meaning into an otherwise meaningless universe.[25][26][27][28] Rather, humans prefer to believe that they have sacred values that provide firm foundations for their moral-political opinions. People can become very punitive “intuitive prosecutors” when they feel sacred values have been seriously violated, going well beyond the range of socially acceptable forms of punishment when given chances to do so covertly'
Tetlock has a long-standing interest in the tensions between political and politicized psychology. He argues that most political psychologists tacitly assume that, relative to political science, psychology is the more basic discipline in their hybrid field.[30][31] In this view, political actors—be they voters or national leaders—are human beings whose behavior should be subject to fundamental psychological laws that cut across cultures and historical periods. Although he too occasionally adopts this reductionist view of political psychology in his work, he has also raised the contrarian possibility in numerous articles and chapters that reductionism sometimes runs in reverse—and that psychological research is often driven by ideological agenda (of which the psychologists often seem to be only partly conscious). Tetlock has advanced variants of this argument in articles on the links between cognitive styles and ideology (the fine line between rigid and principled)[32][33] as well as on the challenges of assessing value-charged concepts like symbolic racism[34] and unconscious bias (is it possible to be a “Bayesian bigot”?).[35][36][37][38] Tetlock has also co-authored papers on the value of ideological diversity in psychological and social science research.[39][40] One consequence of the lack of ideological diversity in high-stakes, soft-science fields is frequent failures of what Tetlock calls turnabout tests.[41][42][43]
Tetlock argues it is virtually impossible to disentangle the factual assumptions that people are making about human beings from the value judgments people are making about end-state goals, such as equality and efficiency.
Why syncretism outperforms ideologies - syncretists are foxes and ideologues are hedgehogs
When Flux is implemented, it will take the form of an app you can access right from your computer or smartphone. You’ll be given a vote on every bill put before Federal Parliament, and can use that vote immediately on the issue at hand, give it to a trusted third party to cast on your behalf, or save it for an issue you care more passionately about later. We seek to dismantle political apathy, by empowering the disenfranchised, and motivating a new generation of innovative Australians to take responsibility for their society. We are excited about a democracy for the information age. One which fosters constructive criticism, encourages innovation, and empowers our best and brightest.
Anyone remember that monopoly pc game with the nice music?
The jazzy music? I played that a lot.
don't reuse floss
I think most of the answers there imply that one shouldn't use floss picks (unless you use many per day)? That's unfortunate.
isn't the nurturant parent model blatantly the best parenting style, obviously?
Seems to me like it's the best. But I can imagine being convinced otherwise by data. It also depends on what you're trying to optimize for. The generally agreed-upon answer to that question has likely changed over time.
edit: fixed formatting
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.