My 11-year-old son had homework on how to be more compassionate. Rather than doing the homework he decided to donate (and tell the teacher that he was donating) $25 to the against Malaria foundation.
While that's part of the goal of the assignment it likely wasn't the only goal. If he was supposed to write an essay on the topic of "how to be more compassionate" he was likely also supposed to train essay writing.
The teacher apparently didn't like it, and found it disrespectful. Overall, however, she is a good teacher.
Just musing on how LW has had a profound impact on my life. It was a strong influence in my deconversion from theism, it's helped me make significant medical decisions, and I'm in love with someone I met at a LessWrong meetup, as well as another person whose first interaction with me was a Bayes theorem joke.
Seeking help with Voronoi map generation
I'm hoping somebody here can help me create a particular map. I'd like to build a weighted Voronoi map of North America, with the weights corresponding to each urban area's population. Or, put another way, I'd like to start with http://lpetrich.org/Science/GeometryDemo/GeometryDemo_GMap.html , input the urban areas listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_population , and then tweak how the map is produced so that if one metroplex has a population of 1,000,000 and another has 10,000,000, the border between them is about 90% of the way closer to the smaller city.
I'm trying to build a scifi setting to put a story in, and have certain suspicions about what such a map would look like, but would like to confirm my intuition. I'm running Fedora Linux, and don't mind compiling oddball software, I just don't know which packages I'd need to even try to generate this thing.
By any chance, anyone here already able to generate the final product with just a few mouse-clicks? :) If not, anyone have any advice on how to get started?
Homestuck has just joined HPMOR, Ra, Pact and TNC in the pantheon of "geek epic" stories with underwhelming endings :-(
As far as I know, only Worm and Undertale have managed to beat that curse so far.
Rust, a video game, has a veil of ignorance
After you've had a character for a while, gender is imposed randomly and permanently.
While I don't play Rust, my impression is that the devs are being dicks (heh) for what looks to be ideological reasons. They say:
"Technically nothing has changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings. The only difference is that whether you feel like this is now decided by your SteamID instead of your real life gender."
They are wrong, of course, what changed was that there was no choice possible and now there is a choice (which they dangle in front of you and then deny to you).
I agree with the assessment of Good_Burning_Plastic and Lumifer that user vision is Eugine redivivus yet again.
Have our esteemed moderators taken a look at what accounts are upvoting all Eugine's comments (across his multiple identities)? If, as has often been suggested, Eugine is getting most of his upvotes from sockpuppets then disabling those might be somewhat effective in making it harder for each of Eugine's accounts to start mass-downvoting before getting banhammered.
I think you misunderstood their comment. They aren't raging proponents of "transgenderism" whatever you seem to think that means.
They were saying that women (50% of the population) were being forced to play as guys when they played Rust.
R.A. MacAvoy on talking with imaginary people
Is it really a tulpa if you win all the arguments?
Top rated questions on the new prediction website metaculus:
Will 2016 be the warmest year on record?
Will a clinical trial begin by the end of 2017 using CRISPR to genetically modify a living human?
Will an AI successfully masquerade as human for 20 questions by 2017?
Has a new boson been discovered at the LHC?
Will Lockheed Martin and Skunkworks announce a successful test of a break-even compact fusion reactor by late 2019?
Skills are learned through training. Metaculus is a good way to train to estimate the future.
Sorry for mindkilling content, but I remember reading on LW long ago that the political left is supposedly morally different, because it doesn't use the "purity/disgust" moral axis.
Then I found these photos online, and I wonder whether that is the microexpression (except there seems to be nothing "micro" when these people do it) of disgust. Or am I reading the expression wrong?
My point is that if someone has this expression pretty much stuck on their face, I find it quite difficult to believe that they don't care about the "purity/...
Is the hypothesis about the political left not using the "purity/disgust" axis wrong?
It is wrong. Or, rather, the original hypothesis was about which axis dominates in political discourse and yes, purity/disgust does not dominate, but it is not completely absent either.
A clear example of the left doing the purity/disgust axis is environmentalism, opposition to GMOs, organic food, etc.
are their expressions very unrepresentative of their usual behavior?
If I take a few dozen pictures of one person talking, I can find in them most any microexpression you want including ridiculous ones. These expressions are not representative of anything.
By the way, there is Kling's three-axis model and there is Haidt's moral foundations model. They are different.
And the people were probably selected for being easily displayed in a bad light.
I just did a totally scientific experiment. I determined a perfectly fair and unbiased sample of leading names in social justice by (1) thinking what names come to mind when I think about "SJ" or "feminism" and (2) putting "leading advocate of social justice" into Google. I then looked for pictures of the resulting people (once again, Google is my friend).
In the resulting images, there were maybe one or two wearing something a bit like that sourly-disapproving expression, and none anywhere near as bad as in the image you linked to. Which, by the way, doesn't seem to name the people whose pictures it's showing; are they in fact prominent SJ people?
So I don't know how much is selection of people and how much is selection of photos, but I'm pretty sure that that facial expression is not in fact "The Face of Social Justice" in any useful sense.
I don't think there is that implication here.
The funny thing is looking at the responsible party. Just who is responsible for releasing a game where your character could only be male and no female option was available?
Why, I think the devs are women-haters! X-)
1. Validity of altruism
...Lesons from India
People self reported money and jobs as more important than health
Quite a few times we asked impoverished people what they most desired or what they thought would improve their happiness most. The most common answer we got was the desire for employment or a better job. People's happiness seemed to vary a lot depending on their job and it also came up a lot in general conversations. The second and third most common things we heard were money and food. We almost never heard about health issues or loss of family member
Misc
Transference: explains the relationship that failed to take after she said I 'felt' like one of the her ex's in Hong Kong, but then I emphasize that 'I'm different', explicit.
Paternalism
...In the southern United States before the Civil War, paternalism was a concept used to justify the legitimacy of slavery. Women would present themselves as mothers for the slaves, or protectors that provided benefits the slaves would not get on their own. Plantation mistresses would attempt to civilize their workers by providing food, shelter, and affection. These wome
Parenting/Housing
I have been playing with the thought of instead of buying a house for a big family, maybe I should buy a small land/house for me and my potential fiancee, and seperate lands/houses for my children.
At what age would you be confident that your child could handle living alone-ish?
I plan to have a large family (this is coming from a childless person, so make of it what you will, but I am entertaining the idea of double digits...so what this means in practice, is that their number probably won't be bottlenecked by my willingness, and thus, the ...
Past surveys show that most LessWrongers are consequentialists, and many are also effective altruism advocates. What do they think of infinities in ethics?
As I've intuitively always favoured some kind of negative utilitarianism, this has caused me some confusion.
Counterfactual Diaspora Question:
If Eliezer had written on OvercomingBias and gotten enough activity to create LessWrong, but the population was filled with different personalities (no So8res, no AnnaSalamon, no Yvain, etc.) do you think the diaspora would have occurred in the same way and on the same general timeframe that it has?
I' m curious about what parts of LessWrong's development you think were inevitable and why.
Ethics question:
Apple introduced http://www.techinsider.io/iphone-night-shift-blue-light-affects-your-brain-and-body-2016-4 . If Apple would have information about the sleeping habits of it's users via the Apple Watch. Would it be ethical for Apple to use that health data to inform decisions about how it doesn f.lux style color changes? Would it be ethical if it uses other information from the Care Kit for that decision without explicitely asking for it (of course the terms of condidtions that noboby reads would include information)?
Especially in the conte...
So I was wondering what career is best in terms of being able to accumulate wealth and having a decent quality of life. I've heard finance jobs are good.
For the purposes of completely illustrating the relative merits of this criterion based approach in comparison to the contributor guarantor model, it may be more efficacious to identify the general form of authorship problems than attempt to exhaust every conceivable existing and potential problem. This is because the contributor-guarantor model addresses all the challenges that individual criterion based guidelines are established to address – the asymmetrical standards between readers as to the interpretation of authorship assignment and order. Authorshi...
4. Karma policy
I used to have a 50% positive/negative karma target (0 net karma).
Recently a LW user (feel free to identify yourself if you want to be known and not if you don't) asked about my former karma policy. I don't currently have a karma policy.
That user suggested I make a post about it, so here it is with answers to their questions:
Begin:
Thank you for your interest.
aim for 50%
Last evening I edited my wikipage (a couple of hours before you sent this) to edit out that line. It takes time for the wiki page to update. Did that edit play a role in ...
I don't think it's that the community got used to your mental illness posts, it's that the lack of focus and high quantity got on people's nerves. Now that you aren't doing that, you aren't getting as much negative karma.
While I'm hoping that no one posts in the future with so much lack of focus, I think that if someone does, they will get at least as much negative karma.
1. Validity of altruism
Lesons from India
People self reported money and jobs as more important than health
Quite a few times we asked impoverished people what they most desired or what they thought would improve their happiness most. The most common answer we got was the desire for employment or a better job. People's happiness seemed to vary a lot depending on their job and it also came up a lot in general conversations. The second and third most common things we heard were money and food. We almost never heard about health issues or loss of family members due to health concerns.
2. Challenging popular criticisms of Hinduism
This week a friend challenged my appreciation for the Hindu caste system alleging that lower caste people are servile. They may literally be servants in some cases, but they servile treatment, subsistence payment or slavery are incompatible with Hindu scripture (Sections IV.1 through IV.6, Manusmriti) which explitly disapproves of that means of survival for those those in what approximates the 'working stage' of one's life in English: 'Shvavritti' which means doglike subsistence, servitude or slavery. Others have probably explained this better elsewhere but I haven't checked.
Even then, the system is opt-out. Anyone can become a renunciate who are beyond caste.
He also raised the tension between moksha and ideals of liberation, and the explicit moral values of pleasure and wealth that are also Hindu cannon. Wikipedia resolves this succintly:
Other Indian texts state the same answer to tension between "pursue wealth and love" versus "renounce everything" Purusarthas, but using different words. Isa Upanishad, for example, states "act and enjoy with renunciation, do not covet"
His final point wasn't a criticism, but the assertion that there is a unity between all religions. Religion is generally faith based, but Hinduism is not. Wikipedia again:
Vivekachudamani, which literally means 'Crown Jewel of Discriminatory Reasoning', is a book devoted to moksa in Vedanta philosophy. It explains what behaviors and pursuits lead to moksha, as well what actions and assumptions hinder moksha. The four essential conditions, according to Vivekachudamani, before one can commence on the path of moksha include (1) vivekah (discrimination, critical reasoning) between everlasting principles and fleeting world; (2) viragah (indifference, lack of craving) for material rewards; (3) samah (calmness of mind), and (4) damah (self restraint, temperance). The Brahmasutrabhasya adds to the above four requirements, the following: uparati (lack of bias, dispassion), titiksa (endurance, patience), sraddha (faith) and samadhana (intentness, commitment).
...
The value and appeal of the Mahabharata is not as much in its complex and rushed presentation of metaphysics in the 12th book, claims Ingall, because Indian metaphysics is more eloquently presented in other Sanskrit scriptures; the appeal of Mahabharata, like Ramayana, is in its presentation of a series of moral problems and life situations, to which there are usually three answers given, according to Ingall: one answer is of Bhima, which is the answer of brute force, an individual angle representing materialism, egoism, and self; the second answer is of Yudhishthira, which is always an appeal to piety and gods, of social virtue and of tradition; the third answer is of introspective Arjuna, which falls between the two extremes, and who, claims Ingall, symbolically reveals the finest moral qualities of man. The Epics of Hinduism are a symbolic treatise about life, virtues, customs, morals, ethics, law, and other aspects of Dharma.[49] There is extensive discussion of Dharma at the individual level in the Epics of Hinduism, observes Ingall; for example, on free will versus destiny, when and why human beings believe in either, ultimately concluding that the strong and prosperous naturally uphold free will, while those facing grief or frustration naturally lean towards destiny. The Epics of Hinduism illustrate various aspects of Dharma, they are a means of communicating Dharma with metaphors.
2. Update on my love/sex life
She asked me why I don't have a girlfriend and other such questions. I reciprocated and she answered very candidly. I could even ask her if she had ever cheated on anyone, eventually, and she said yes. She asked me many a time if I am shy, and why I am shy, and if I am shy with her, and eventually I just took the hint and brought her closer as we sat at the banks of the river. When we walked away we walked hand in hand. The next night I escalated to asking her if she wanted to kiss me. She said I don't know, or something like that. I said, 'I want to kiss you' to which she said 'then do it' and I did, many a time after that. One time I said I want to make a porno jokingly, after the context was raised, and she said then make one with your roommate (she is my roommate too). But, I am still shy to take that hint, but another time I did get to rub her torso after to started rubbing my ... pant area. I asked her what she likes about me and she only said my skin colour and my teeth :/ Okay enough back story.
I wanted to recommend she applied for graphic design and video editing work which she is talented in, since she isn't sure what she can do career-wise, but now it's too late. I wanted to watch I, origins with her since it reflects our story. But now it's too late. I wanted to watch her favourite movie: 'one day' with her, which also reflects our story, but not it's too late. I wanted to hand write her a letter, but now it's too late. I wanted to suprise her after or during work, but now it's too late. I want to share with her 6/7 major secrets (the 7th being my passwords...), to show her how looked as a kit, and to 'dine at the y' but not it's too late. She pushed away when I sent her a goodmorning text, with a love heart at the end. I think she just wanted a casual hookup. At least I stopped jerking off :) Lately I felt undeserving of the experience. This cheered me up.
My social worker tells me that it's not so much the negative in this situation (since it's better than nothing, and previously) but the uncertainty that is stressful. Now having accepted that, I feel much better.
4. misc
I'd guess that some otherwise inexplicable acts of gregarious violence can be explained by individual-social misalignment in terms of honour vs dignity culture
Do you have behavioural/competency based question preprepared answersl
A reference class databse would help would [reference class forecasting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting. Any expedient options?
How I have been rationalising a lack of social esteem:
"Many of the bravest never are known, and get no praise. That does not lessen their beauty, though perhaps it makes them harder, for we all like sympathy," and Dr. Alec sighed a patient sort of sigh.
If you are interested in ISKON, search up ritvikism
Not long after I met her she said I was childish so I started acting less playful, not she says I'm like a teenagerl. I don't get it. What's up with this?
As a lecturer recently said:
Other things I want to adapt to now:
Other action steps: Tell her I just want to have fun, play around, have xxx or something like that. It could be a god consolation prize. On the other hand, she said she would only have sex with a boyfriend early on. But, maybe I can still DATY or 'just the tip' which are opportunities I value highly since they 'can't be bought', at least safely or inexpensively that is...
Also I've forgotten that relationship based goals are destructive cause they assume we can control another person. So, vanquished!
I moved close to the city because research says that distance from work is one of the highest determinants of happiness, but I don't feel THAT much happier because of that, once accounting for other reasons I'm happy after the move. So now, I’m gonna hold off on making an income goal of 40,000 dollars a year after all monetary goals and minding doesn’t make us happier.
5. Personality disorder recovery log
Right now my mental health diagnosis is personality disorder not otherwhere specified which basically means I relate to people in abnormal ways but clinicians aren't sure how to label it. This section is for insights that seem useful to me, and that I would appreciate comment on. I seem to have depressive cognition like depressive personality disorder, self defeating (masochistic) traits, avoidant, borderline traits and narcissistic traits - not very proud of all that...well maybe a little ;) Clinicians tend to believe that it's more a cluster B personality disorder though.
I've been recommended for cognitive analytic therapy and psychodynamic therapy - more so the latter.
are women childish?
Even then, the system is opt-out. Anyone can become a renunciate who are beyond caste.
Can you give me a source for this? I've never heard of anyone renouncing their caste, and I have heard about many instances of lower-caste people lying about their caste, and I can't reconcile the two.
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.