This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Dear Americans,
While spending a holiday in the New Orleans and Mississippi region, I was baffled by the typical temperatures in air-conditioned rooms. The point of air conditioning is to make people feel comfortable, right? It is obviously very bad at achieving this. I saw shivering girls with blue lips waiting in the airport. I saw ladies wearing a jacket with them which they put on as soon as they entered an air-conditioned room. The rooms were often so cold that I felt relieved the moment I left them and went back into the heat. Cooling down less than to the optimally comfortable temperature would make some economical and ecological sense, and would make the transition between outside and inside less brutal. Cooling down more seems patently absurd.
What is going on here? Some possible explanations that come to mind:
Still, the above points seem nowhere near sufficient to explain the phenomenon. The temperatures seem uncomfortably low even for people wearing a suit with a tie. Places like cinemas clearly want their customers to feel comfortable, and their employees don't wear suits.
Thanks for clarifying.
Is there an index of everything I ought to read to be 'up-to-date' in the rationalist community? I keep finding new stuff: new ancient LW posts, new bloggers, etc. There's also this on the Wiki, which is useful (but is curiously not what you find when you click on 'all pages' on the wiki; that instead gets a page with 3 articles on it?). But I think that list is probably more than I want - a lot of it is filler/fluff (though I plan to at least skim everything, if I don't burn out).
I just want to be able to make sure, if I try to post something I think is new on here, that it hasn't been talked to death about already.
I am seeing an 'epistemic status' descriptor used in some posts. If I want to use it does the community have a standard vocabulary described in a post somewhere or is it up to the author to use it as they like?
Does the community do anything different when discussing?
I am going through the site and exploring some of the writings. I am also listening to the Bayesian conspiracy podcast. It is all very interesting but I can not see a change in the method of discussion. Techniques such as Bayes theorem etc. do not seem to be used when the subjects are of some complexity (which all interesting subjects are). It all seems to me that it is just a nice, civilised conversation with awareness of biases and the need to keep emotion on hold, as well as, examine assumptions.
Is there a discussion in video/audio/writing that you can point me to which demonstrates a different methodology of argumentation?
Is there a good way to find out what's common knowledge?
I feel like it would be handy to have a repository of things that, for example, a typical high school or college graduate knows. I think this would be useful for explaining things or writing about topics where you have too much domain knowledge to remember what it's like to be outside the field, and also for finding out if there are topics where you're lacking. Another case where I found myself wanting such a tool was when I recently got in a disagreement about whether a particular word was a niche t...
I recently had a dream in which an unspecified organization was anticipating trouble from an unspecified group of people. One member of the organization remarked that, should things get bad, they had seven gay 400 lb game theorists that could be called in on a moment's notice.
What sort of problem is solved by the deployment of unusually heavy game theorists? Does it matter that they are gay? What kind of organization would have such resources at its disposal?
This is my stupid question:
https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/geometry-problem/
Do not hesitate to patronize me, or whatever does it take, I'd really like to have an answer.
I would like to know what do you think it is the probability that we are living in a simulation.
Personally, my guess is that the posibility that we are living in a base reality is only 1 in (Very big number with lot of zeroes).
I'd be very curious to hear any creativity tips that have worked for LWers in any fields (writing, drawing, music, etc.)
I read this post named Flinching away from truth is often about protecting the epistemology. The post reminds me of familiar psychological biases such as catastrophic thinking. In catastrophic thinking individual events are seen as having further, ill nature consequences than they de facto usually have. I see these two approaches (the bucket error and the catastrophic thinking) have qualitatively different approaches to the same thing. The kid in the story is engaging in catastrophic thinking when they equate the writing mistake with not being allowed to b...
Thank you I fixed it. I think the same argument shows that that question is also undefined. I think the real takeaway is that physics doesn't deal well with some infinities.
The question may be flawed in a way that I don't see it.
Or the question may be flawed not by my mistake, but by a mistake already built in R^3 or R^4 math.
I think, it's the later.