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2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
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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.
It's also possible that people's perception of the landscape itself changed over time as Clarity posts often and has been here a while now. That, and if any votes were from Eugene's downvote brigades, then their removal would have helped. (I'm at 85% karma and i think almost all of the negative votes were from Eugene's accounts.)