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.
How would someone donate to GiveWell in an externally verifiable manner? I am permitted to do fundraisers as volunteering projects, and donating or (if online) having customers donate to an EA organization seems like an obvious choice.
A while back I had an odd experience with meditating (something I don't do that often). I started out sitting on my bed with my eyes closed, but at some point opened my eyes. Eventually it was like my consciousness started to recede. Things like reflection and inner narrative weakened or turned off, while my vision continued more or less normally. I felt like I couldn't move my hands anymore. I also started laughing continuously for several minutes. Eventually I "woke up" again. It felt kind of like (part of?) my consciousness had fallen asleep while the rest of my brain stayed awake.
Is this a normal kind of thing to happen while meditating? It was a bit disturbing but overall a positive experience I think.
Weird things can happen, during meditation. Me, I've never experienced anything beyond boredom or relaxation – except this one time I went to a synagogue with my Sunday school class when I was 15-18 years old or so. I wasn't even trying to meditate ( I don't think I even knew meditation existed back then), but I was bored out of my mind since – not knowing any Hebrew – I couldn't follow any of it. So I must've fallen into a meditative state, but what I felt at the time (or rather, just after, because that's all I remember), was a feeling of immense gratitude at having been in the presence of God. I didn't talk about it with anyone and I didn't become Jewish, but really I should have, the experience was that strong. But I was shy, and I didn't want to call attention to myself. (I'm an atheist now, in case anyone wonders.)
Does anyone here wear makeup regularly? I'm considering starting, but I don't know if it's worth it. If it is, what sort of makeup makes sense as "light makeup"? Does that mean eyeshadow? Eyeliner? Something else?
I regularly see on Reddit and recently around here too ideas like "there is no free will hence nobody deserves anything, good or bad, no merits etc." and I am puzzled by them, because to me it is so that merit or desert or even justice means roughly like incentives that happen to work. If a reward makes people behave the way I want them to, I call the reward merited or deserved. Basically a sound investment. "you deserve punishment" is nothing more than "I think punishing you will make you or others behave the way I want to". ...
Punishment as moral desert, and punishment as incentive lead to different results in some cases.
I have a nasty hunch that one of the social functions of punishment is to prevent personal revenge. If it is not harsh enough, victims or their relatives may want to take it into their own hands. Vendetta or Girardian "mimetic violence" is AFAIK something deeply embedded into history, and AFAIK it went away only governments basically said "hey, you don't need to kill your sisters rapist, I will kill him for you and call it justice system". And that consideration has not much to do with recidivism. Rather, the point here is to prevent further escalation: his relatives, in turn, cannot try to enact vendetta on the government. So it seems it is at least partially rooted in stopping blood revenge chains by the government actually performing a blood revenge, once. And thus if recidivism stats figure out 3.5 months in prison are enough, we see blood revenge coming back.
How do I make a hash? In case I'm using the wrong word, I want to encrypt a message, then put the encrypted message in a public place, then decrypt the message in a way that proves that I actually encrypted a message (I didn't just write a nonsense string and later retcon an encryption scheme that makes it meaningful).
Is there some reason to think that physiognomy really works? Reverse causation is probably the main reason, e.g. tall people are more likely to be seen as leaders by others, so they are more likely to become leaders. Nevertheless, is there something beyond that?
Is there some reason to think that physiognomy really works?
It is the case that appearances encode lots of information, because lots of things are correlated. For example, height correlates with intelligence, probably because of generic health factors (like nutrition). Nearsightedness and intelligence are correlated, but whether this is due to different use of the eyes in childhood or engineering constraints with regards to the brain and the skull is not yet clear. The aspect ratio of the face correlates with uterine testosterone levels, which correlates with masculinity. Those are just the particularly famous ones; an expert could keep going for some time.
The question of whether or not people's naive impressions correspond to actual correlations, though, is less clear. Overall, it looks like stereotypes are more likely to be right than not, and it's more likely that the ground fact shifts the impression than the impression shifts the ground fact. (How is thinking that blockier faces are found on more masculine men going to adjust the response of bone growth to testosterone in utero?)
How does aggressively demanding compassion work? I mean, it does, politically, lots of social change was achieved by people going on the street and yelling the equivalent of "fuck you, you are harming us, we suffer, you asshole" but I guess on me it does not really work and I wonder on how it works on others. I am compassionate with people who come accross as harmless and non-threating for me, while when people come accross as aggressive or angry I am in a defensive-hostile, fight-or-flight mood. But apparently, not everybody, for this thing clearly seem to work.
Why does the edge of a shadow sometimes appear to shift when another shadow gets close to it?
Details: I was in front of a window. The edge of a chair cast a shadow on the floor from the window light. When I moved such that the shadow of my arm got very close to the shadow of the chair, part of the edge of the chair's shadow was "pulled towards" the shadow being cast by my arm. The shadow of my arms didn't appear to move. My arm was closer to the sun than the chair.
How does "calmness" work? Calmness in this context means that a person has an easy-going view on life, is likely to be free of stress and whatever you feel when there's chilly wind in a fall evening and you're sitting feeling tranquil (tranquility sounds like a good word)
I'm just like that (although people often tell me they think I'm feeling something else) and I wonder how does it work?
Another point of interest to me is what separates true tranquility from x-induced tranquility? I had a conversation with a coworker and she said that people who ...
One way to control my daily alcohol habit was to switch to beer only, since there is a long standing human experience that more diluted drinks are easier to control. And as my after-work fluid intake is mostly beer, I realized that now my brain cannot tell the difference between thirst and alcohol cravings. Literally, I just managed to train my brain to thirst -> want a beer and cravings -> want a beer and now it does not know the difference.
One idea would be thirst-like feeling -> drink water -> re-examine, but water is not a very good thirst...
water is not a very good thirst quencher
Water is an excellent thirst quencher, I think your problem is that it's not a good want-a-beer quencher.
Are there any moral implications of accepting the Many Worlds interpretation, and if so what could they be?
For example, if the divergent copies of people (including myself) in other branches of Multiverse should be given non-insignificant moral status, then it's one more argument against the Epicurean principle that "as long as we exist, death is not here". My many-worlds self can die partially - that is, just in some of the worlds. So I should to reduce the number of worlds in which I'm dead. On the other hand, does it really change anything compared to "I should reduce the probability that I'm dead in this world"?
Have there been any rationalists on Jeopardy or similar game shows? It seems like there are a lot of high-IQ, well-educated, high-agency people in the rationality community who could make a good amount of money from such competitions fairly easily, which they could then use at least partially for effective altruism or similar high-utility causes.
I think you need to learn the kind of things for that that many people here would consider a waste of time to learn.
Is there overwhelming evidence on the safety (not efficacy) of vaccines somewhere, and I've just missed it?
As a non-physicist who has read the non-technical parts of LW discussions on quantum mechanics, I find the argument for MWI over Copenhagen convincing: From what I gather it is uncontested that Copenhagen adds additional complicating assumptions which don't make falsifiable predictions. If that is true, it is certainly a good reason to prefer MWI
My stupid question is as follows: Can someone give an intuitive explanation if why we don't interpret this stochastically? Ie that someone wrote a simulation that selects an Everett branch at random from a dis...
Has anyone dug into the numbers related to AGW in connection to the heat content of the oceans? I've seen the graph on this wiki page in several places, and I did a calculation suggesting that the heat capacity of the oceans is about 5e24J/(deg C). Since the graph suggests an increase in heat content of about 1e22J/yr, this calculation implies we'll get about 1 degree of warming in 500 years.
Is my calculation wrong? If so, why? Has anyone else looked into this?
Why does everybody seem to be so worked up about whether religion is true or not and call it theism or atheism? My Central European experience is that it is largely an institution, custom, habit, social expectation, identity, a way of expressing things and all that, but people did not really believe for 150 years at least, so it is not really something meant to be true for a long time now. I know there are people in the US Bible Belt who still mean it, and they have angry atheist children, but how comes the majority of Internet discussion kinda revolves around them? How many people on LW want to approach the topic from the angle Max Weber and similar scholars did?
I think the "everybody" is really an American-centric thing. As far as I can tell, all of the New Atheist types are non-European, or who focus most of their polemics on American audiences.
I've never lived in Europe, but this was my experience growing up in the US:
I've lived in a lot of places in the US and in my experience the places where this sort of stuff doesn't happen are mainly large cities like NYC or San Francisco. And even then, it has to be the parts of those cities that are leaning on the more affluent side of things. It's not just a USA Bible-Belt phenomenon... I've actually never lived in or visited the Bible Belt so it must be a lot worse there.
How does it look like with American eyes - completely fake? Or normal?
It looks like a very exaggerated version of one particular America. There are shops that sell this kind of merchandise in the Western US, but they sell as much to tourists as to folks who actually dress like this.
What you need to understand is that there is more than one distinctively American subculture in the US. In particular, there are at least two major poor, rural, white American cultures: the high-religiosity country music culture, and the low-religiosity rock/metal culture. Though they can often be found side by side in the same trailer park, the same home, or even sometimes the same individual, there is also some real tension between them. Rock/metal appeals more to teenage rebellion, rejection of responsibility and civilization, rootless adventure. Country is more aspirational and its adherents see themselves as salt-of-the-earth folks who love their family, flag, and God. I guess that doesn't go over so much in Europe, so we mostly export rock culture. (Even in the US, urban upper-middle-class people tend to get the two cultures confused since they both equally reject things like suits and liberal arts degrees and clever hipster music.)
Looking at people around me (EDIT: Central Europe), there are not so many hardcore believers (although I have already met a few of those, too), but there are many... I would call them "half-believers". People who believe they believe, and who follow the commands of the religious leaders when doing it is cheap. For example, despite what religion says about sex, they have as much sex as the atheists, only they later ask God to forgive them. They visit church once in a long time, for example only for Christmas, weddings, and funerals. Etc.
But in my opinion, even those half-believers can do a lot of damage. For example, they obey their religious leaders when the cost is paid by someone else. Does my pastor tell me to avoid premarital sex? Uhm, I will pretend I want to avoid it... then I will do it... and then I will confess my sins and ask forgiveness, just like all my friends do. Does my pastor tell me that homosexual marriage offends God? Well, since I am not a homosexual, I will follow God's will at this point.
Church tries to infuence politics, to get money from state, and to teach religion at schools. -- It is especially the last part which makes me extremely angry (as a ...
Kind of a weird question. I've noticed that when I'm at work, my eye often starts twitching. It typically twitches on and off throughout my workday, and stops whenever I take a break. This only happens when I'm at work. Is this some known psychosomatic thing, or should I talk to a doctor about it?
Why does anyone think BitCoin is going to work when its users aren't mostly BitCoin enthusiasts?
I'm specifically referring to incentives of 51% attacks. The returns on mining seem to increase as computing power eclipses 50%, creating an economy of scale in mining and incentivicing attacks.
I had an arguement with my gilfriend about how on earth golden rock doesn't drop over an edge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyaiktiyo_Pagoda)
I said there must be scientific explanation of course, that the rock is somehow heavier on the opposite side of the cliff, and that the monks probably knew some math, or just picked up this one trick from unknown piligrim
And she continues to argue that this is magic and it is the legendary Buddha's hair that prevent the Stone from falling...
Is there any effect that chemical composition of a gase has on its behaviour when it is heated/cooled (in the range where it is a stable substance and not a liquid)? (just popped into my head all of a sudden, sorry.)
Is there a reason why we have trouble defining counterfactuals? Does this only apply to defining counterfactuals mathematically?
Intuitively a counterfactual/hypothetical situation seems like a simulation to me. But I've heard a couple times on the site that we don't know how to define counterfactuals in AI, so I feel like I must be missing something.
Could I have some advice on salary/benefit negotiations?
I just got a formal job offer from the company where I interned last summer, and it's about what I expected/think I'm worth. I really want to just take the job, but I don't want to leave money on the table; my understanding is that expected value of trying to negotiate should be positive regardless. On the other hand, the company basically knows I'm going to take the job, so I don' t believe I have much power in these negotiations.
Since the whole reason I want more money is to be able to donate more, ...
How do you assign probabilities to expected lengths of inferential differencies needed to technically understand clearly 'cascading' issues? I mean, the grass is green. I know it has to do with light being selectively reflected off it, because of photosynthesis, because of the plant needing energy to live. I estimate the ID in the range of c. 5 steps (the level at which I'd feel comfortable in predicting outcomes of adding fertilizers to vegetable garden) to 50 (answering an exam question). Yet, I happen to need knowledge of photosynthesis now and again, a...
...But when it comes to messy gene expression networks, we've already found the hidden beauty - the stable level of underlying physics. Because we've already found the master order, we can guess that we won't find any additional secret patterns that will make biology as easy as a sequence of cubes. Knowing the rules of the game, we know that the game is hard. We don't have enough computing power to do protein chemistry from physics (the second source of uncertainty) and evolutionary pathways may have gone different ways on different planets (the third so
Urrgh, fluctuating priors... Went to work, thought 'I'd rather face some nasty threatened-flowers-sellers than face my Dept. Head'. Declined joining a celebration specifically because I could need 0 alcohol levels if I do have to argue about law. Didn't meet DH, but... Went home and almost got served by 5 NTFS. Updated my priors. But come Tuesday, I just know I'll update them back!..
What do you do when you know you're inconsistent about certain subjects?
What will "religion" look like in the next 100-300 years?
This comes up in the new Edge discussion between Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman;
http://edge.org/conversation/yuval_noah_harari-daniel_kahneman-death-is-optional
...In terms of history, the events in Middle East, of ISIS and all of that, is just a speed bump on history's highway. The Middle East is not very important. Silicon Valley is much more important. It's the world of the 21st century ... I'm not speaking only about technology.
In terms of ideas, in terms of religions, the most int
Yet she sleeps with a man on the space ship, showing that she practices a liberal morality by traditional christian standards.
About that...
...The usage of making a trysting-place of the church by young men and young women was so universal that only moralists were scandalized by it. The virtuous Christine de Pisan makes a lover say in all simplicity: "Se souvent vais ou moustier, / C'est tout pour veoir la belle / Fresche comme rose nouvelle."
The Church suffered more serious profanation than the little love services of a young man who offered his fair one the "pax," or knelt by her side. According to the preacher Menot, prostitutes had the effrontery to come there in search of customers. Gerson tells that even in the churches and on festival days obscene pictures were sold tanquam idola Belphegor, which corrupted the young, while sermons were ineffective to remedy this evil.
As to pilgrimages, moralists and satirists are of one mind; people often go "pour folle plaisance." The Chevalier de la Tour Landry naïvely classes them with profane pleasures, and he entitles one o fhis chapters, "of those who are fond of going to jousts and on pilgrimages.&q
This is a wonderful data point. It moves our model from "if you're a man, don't wear makeup" to "if you're a man, don't wear makeup unless you're going to appear on camera, in which case, wear just enough to counteract visual artifacts." I expect this to be a nontrivially better model for a significant amount of men here.