Some notes in random order
- There is vast amount of literature about this. Go into any B&N and contemplate the shelves full of financial self-help books.
- You are overreaching. Career tactics? Choosing a spouse? You need to focus on a much narrower topic so that you can (a) finish this; and (b) write something useful instead of a brief overview of the surface of many things. Your outline looks to be made for a "how to live a life" book.
- Financial planning is more complicated than you think. For example, the common "save X% for Y years and you can retire at age Z" advice doesn't have much relationship to reality (consider, for a start, that is completely ignores volatility and the uncertainty of the future). In fact, financial planning is another name for financial forecasting and if you can do that well, Wall St. should provide you with enough money to retire very quickly :-/
- What's your edge? What makes you think you can write a better financial guide than some random planner from Fidelity or Schwab? He at least has the experience of having talked to customers.
Now, when we have nearly doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in the last decades, in dry places like Death Valley or Riyadh or Siberia, the effect of CO2 should be quite visible.
http://weather-warehouse.com/WeatherHistory/PastWeatherData_DeathValley_DeathValley_CA_April.html
Maximum temperatures in Death Valley have indeed been trending up over the last decades. The yearly maxima in the last ten years range from 100 to 113F, mean 106.7F; the maxima in the '60s ranged from 89 to 106F, mean 100.8 — an increase of ~6 degrees F. Mean low, mean high, and mean temperatures are up about ~2 degrees.
So, that checks out.
http://www.tutiempo.net/en/Climate/Riyadh/404380.htm
Looks like they're up a bit in Riyadh, too, although that's just from eyeballing it.
So, you're right — the effects do appear to be quite visible.
Living in rural America, where Atheism is still technically illegal in some places even though no one would dare enforce it, I think distinguishing the labels "rational thinkers" from "atheists" is a very good idea. I don't think someone who considers themselves rational and theist would be particularly proud to associate with the label that best fits their particular brand of theism (Roman Catholicism and Mormonism seem to spawn subverters of this expectation, but reducing to the common category of "christian" seems to invoke way more cultural baggage).
Or rather, I wouldn't dare call myself a christian or an atheist anywhere anyone could possibly find out about. Smart people would dismiss me as inferior for the former, 90% of people within a 200mi radius would start hurling crosses at me for the latter. Probably will need allies in both groups, so I'm kinda concerned about this whole labels thing.
I'm interested in part 4, and would likely pay $5-10 for a digital book that contains it, so long as it were favorably reviewed by other members of this community. (Other guides to this exist, I'm sure, but I'd rather pay $5 than spend the time to track down a good one.) I would probably skip part 1 entirely and skim parts 2 and 3 to confirm my impression that it contains nothing new for me.
Alternatively, your conclusion is trivial - that is, it doesn't actually say much of anything. This seems to be the case here; you're evaluating the denotative meaning of the sentence (what it literally means). It -seems- non-trivial because then you're sneaking in the connotative meaning of the sentence - what it implies.
IIRC, when public education was first debated, the arguement was that it would create good citizens. Hence the focus of social studies and history.
And I concur, the main purpose for school seems put children into a society and let them develop from there. Not that it does its job particularly well, but there you go.
I'm interested. I'm also worried that it might not be particularly helpful given my particular obstacles (a "Munchkin your way out of the basement blindfolded without necessarily starting a successful software career" sequence would be awesome), but the general utility seems worth having (and having it on LessWrong would save me the need to search for it elsewhere in the short term).
That is very interesting. Why is that?
[Edit] A quick browse through the list, it seems that western europe has homeschooling with very strong restrictions, while Eastern european nations have it banned totally. Exceptions in eastern europe include Russia (post-1992) and Ukraine.
I would definitely read the sequence. I'm especially interested in How Tos on Investment - the free advice specifically about Investment on Mr. Money Mustache boils down to "Index Funds" and "Here are a bunch of books I read on the topic" as far as I could tell from my admittedly short visits to the site.
If you found (a) co-author(s) in Germany, I would buy the Germany-specific country edition if it's not ridiculously expensive.
I would the sequence if it is not 90% filler feel-good material but mainly hard data and formulae.
If the sequence is sufficiently good I would consider buying the book for less than $15.
I don't need another Mr. Money Mustache guide but would very much like something solid.
No, I omitted that step for reasons discussed in the earlier thread: this gives too weak a "God" to be any interest to anyone, and is downright confusing.
The only way I can think to get back to some form of traditional theism is to add a premise saying that "every entity not of type G has a cause" (insert your favourite G) and then perhaps to pull the modal trick of claiming all the premises are possible...
The fact that you have a subsection entitled "Diamonds are forever, but most women would rather have a house." as part of the "Your Spouse" section suggests that you are assuming the reader's spouse is/will be a woman, which in turn suggests that you are assuming your reader is a man. Perhaps this is intentional and you really do want to write a book on financial advice for men, but I suspect it's actually an instance of a common failure mode (especially since you use "Jane" as an example in an earlier chapter). So if you're worried about potentially alienating some of your readership, you might want to rethink the title (and perhaps the content) of that section.
So anyone who uses the "there are lots of subtle ways of acquiring nutrition deficiencies and we might not know everything that one needs" argument against Soylent would first need to show why normal diets would avoid that argument any better.
Now, when we have nearly doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in the last decades, in dry places like Death Valley or Riyadh or Siberia, the effect of CO2 should be quite visible.
Morning in dry desserts should be warmer due to the CO2, relatively more dominant GHG there where the water vapor is tiny.
But are they? All temperature records are AFAIK quite old, No no such data to be found with Google. Mornings in Riyadh as they used to be.
Rhinehart's asking for $100k to launch a Soylent manufacturing company...This is ridiculous.
He plans to use some of the money to run formal clinical trials. See this video. As a matter of fact, Rob says in the same video that completely replacing food with Soylent is "not the intended use", and also states that "I wasn't trying to create something ideal; I was trying to create something better." And, for me, and for a visible fraction of the world population, it probably succeeds in that goal. I hate eating lunch and I never eat anything nutritious, then, anyways. It probably would be a net improvement for me to replace breakfast with Soylent, too.
I think "ridiculous" is the wrong word to use, here. The fact is, he got over $200k in less than 24 hours, so I think "rational" might be more appropriate. Just because the VoI is low for you doesn't mean it's low for everyone else. I suspect it is much higher for quite a few other people, and I've happily purchased some Soylent. I don't condemn you for not buying any, but it's ridiculous for you to condemn all those who are.
Also, I'd be quite happy to perform some formal-ish self-experimenting. How should I go about that?
How do they "fail"
If autistic people get classed as non-humans then that's a failure on the part of the assessing human beings and merely forms part of the baseline to which you are comparing the machines.
The humans are your control so that you can't set silly standards for the machines. The humans can't fail any more than the control rats in a drug trial can fail.
I like the idea, but I think it has been done before on other blogs. Mr. Money Mustache and Early Retirement Extreme come to mind, which were written by a (now) retired software engineer and a physicist, respectively. Their advice may bear repeating, but I do not think I would purchase a book on the subject. There are so many free resources online; it seems financially unwise to spend more on a book.
But may I ask, who are you, and what are your qualifications to speak on this subject?
And right now, this product is in its pre-early adoption stage. There is little need to criticize the product, since the formula will most probably be tweaked and updated after its first public release. Unless there is some question about the utility of the idea, or the capability of the inventor, I think optimism is warranted.
Food is good, but not that good. For instance, 95% of the time, I settle for eating something unhealthy and not particularly appetizing, because it is easy and quick to make. If I were cooking for someone else, this may be a different story. When I first read the Odyssey by Homer, my professor told me the Greek behaved as though sharing a meal was a spiritual experience, which is reflected in our culture (dinner dates, family meals, holidays etc.)
But as I currently do not eat with others on a regular basis, I think it would be of greater utility to go with whole food replacement, and eat with others on rare occasions, provided the cost for food replacement is low enough. Or I can explore new post-food psycho-social opportunities, which should be interesting in of itself.
people appreciate what they pay for, and do not care about what they may have for free.
The relation is there, but I think the causality is the other way round. You are more willing to pay to people for their service if you respect them.
Evidence: 1) People also pay for public schools, by paying their taxes. But even if the law required them to pay a fixed amount of money to the public school directly, situation would remain the same. Paying is not essential here, paying voluntarily is. 2) Sometimes people pay for a product or service simply because they need it and they can't obtain it otherwise. For example, people pay to prostitutes, but typically don't respect them. 3) If you respect your friend as an expert, and your friend explains you something for free, you don't stop respecting them. -- This is why I think respect comes before payment.
In my opinion (which is supported by my first-hand experience as a teacher), the most direct impact on teachers' status had the removing of almost everything that our ape brains perceive as status-related. Teachers are not allowed to punish students physically. (I am not saying this is a bad thing. I am just saying it removes a part of what would be obviously status-related in the ancient environment, and our brains notice that.) Students are allowed to disobey and even offend teachers (within some limits they carefully explore and share with each other) with virtually no consequences. This is responsible for maybe 80% of the change. -- Note: Some people even consider teachers' status lowering a good thing! They usually describe a (strawman?) tyrrant, and explain a need to make people more equal. In reality, in many schools the teachers are already at the bottom of the status ladder, and the most agressive students are at the top, bullying their classmates and teachers.
The remaining 20% is related to the fact that lower degrees of education are no longer a status symbol (because almost everyone has them), and even the higher degrees become a weaker evidence (as countries participate in a pissing contest about who has more % of population with a university degree by lowering the standards); many employers care about having a diploma but don't care about specific knowledge (especially the government is guilty of this; may be different in your country), which makes teachers and schools replaceable commodities, so most customers only care about the price. Having better education (assuming the same diploma) seems to have absolutely no consequences; people underestimate the inferential distances and say everything is online anyway. And then we have the vicious cycle of lower respect driving some good teachers away, which reinforces lower respect for those who stayed, who are suspect that they didn't have a better choice.
Forget saving for retirement, even if that is the stated reason. Perhaps people are actually saving for the sake of saving, and it happens that they start using the savings when they can work no longer.
Why save at all? Maybe to help your children when they need your help. Maybe it's fun.
That said, everything depends on what you want out of life. If you must believe that you will live on after death through cyropreservation, then it makes sense live and let freeze. But I would rather choose to prepare for a situation where cryopreservation is not possible within my lifetime, until I am convinced otherwise. I'm not yet convinced.
Disclaimer: rambling ahead.
One thing that struck me while reading your discussion post is that, even with simulated AI that can be saved, copied, and replayed, it isn't obvious nor given that we can merge these clone instances into a single 'averaged' instance.
We could, if we could arbitrarily shrink an instance to only require 1/Nth the resources (or time). The shrunken instance would be less perfect, but there is power in the ability to run numerous nested (sets in sets, like a tree) instances simultaneously.
Did you see this summary? (The actual description of the system starts on page 9.)
EDIT: Also, the list of papers citing that article may provide papers with further detail. For example, that list contained Question analysis: How Watson reads a clue, which goes into considerably more detail about the question analysis stage.
For society to be sure of what code you're running, they need to enforce transparency that ultimately extends to the physical, hardware level. Even if there are laws, to enforce them I need to know you haven't secretly built custom hardware that would give you an illegal advantage, which falsely reports that it's running something else and legal. In the limit of a nano-technology-based, AGI scenario, this means verifying the actual configurations of atoms of all matter everyone controls.
A singleton isn't required, but it seems like the only stable solution.
Looking over the "recipe" again, I notice one thing I failed to notice earlier; at no point have you formally defined the uncaused cause as God. That's a weak step, but if you actually want to use that argument to argue for monotheism (instead of merely the presence of an uncaused entity, nature unknown) then I think it's a necessary step. Some of the assumptions necessary to eliminate multiple uncaused causes are a bit weak, but I think that you have a very good argument that somewhere in the history of the universe there must be at least one uncaused cause of some sort.
Oh, so you meant external attention, rather than the attention of the student.
And, politics. A mere binary pass/fail system allows for less flexible boasting/excusing and spindoctoring the truth. . Of course we don't want to encourage that, but it is an existing element that would have to be dealt with somehow.
I have spotted an error in the statement (and proof) of Theorem 5, and then Corollary 6. The issue is that for any uncaused y we must have f(y) = y, so if there are several uncaused entities then they can't all have f(y) = g. The revised statements should go like this:
Theorem 5: Let x and y both have causes. Then f(x) = f(y) if and only if x and y are causally connected.
Proof: It is clear that if f(x) = f(y) then x is causally-connected to y (just build a path backwards from x to f(x) and then forward again to y). Conversely, suppose that x C y, then f(x) is uncaused and satisfies f(x) <= y so we have f(x) P f(y); since x is caused, there are f(x)=x1,...,xn=x such that each xi C xi+1 for i=1..n-1, then by A3 we have f(y) C x2 and hence f(y) <= x, which implies f(y) P f(x) and so by B1 f(x) = f(y). Next, suppose that for some uncaused z we have z C x and z C y; then z P f(x) which implies by A3 that f(x) C y and hence f(x) P f(y); similarly, f(y) P f(x) so by B1 f(x) = f(y). By an induction on the length of any other path connecting x to y, we have that f(x) = f(y).
Corollary 6: There is a single g in E such that: f(x) = g for every x in E with a cause, and every uncaused y P g.
Proof: Suppose there is at least one entity x with a cause, then set g = f(x). For any other caused entity y, f(y) = g by Theorem 5 and B5, and for an uncaused y, B5 implies y <= x, so that y P g. Lastly, if there are no caused entities, then B5 implies that E = {y} for some uncaused y, so we can just pick g = y.
I have also spotted a way of weakening or removing some of the premises (in particular A3, and B1 to B4). I will update with that later today.
I sympathize with this argument, but the obvious counter-argument is that lots of people have eaten normal diets and have been observed not to, for example, die of scurvy. (On the other hand, they have been observed to, for example, get heart disease.)
That's true. But then again, once you consider that "normal diets" is really composed of countless of different combinations of foods ranging from "fast food only" to "making a constant effort to be trying out new foods all the time", you could also use this as an argument for Soylent being probably safe. As in, "out of all the countless possible combinations of nutritional intakes that people live on, most don't lead to anybody dying of scurvy, so if we specifically construct one new diet for the express purpose of providing everything that one needs, it doesn't seem like it should kill you if all those diets that weren't constructed with that in mind don't kill you".
Total meal replacement shakes exist, although I have no idea about pricing. However, going down this route is basically ensuring sub-optimal nutrition.
Very nearly every other diet is also sub-optimal. Most of them are quite probably worse than what we can do via supplementation.
the main point of the banana is that for whatever reason it suspends the oat and seed particulates in the solution so they don't all sink. You might get the same effect if you use sunflower butter instead of seeds. Oh and it's also really hard to add marmite without something to smear it on. You can replace the potassium from the banana with more KCl but at some point it starts to affect taste.
So anyone who uses the "there are lots of subtle ways of acquiring nutrition deficiencies and we might not know everything that one needs" argument against Soylent would first need to show why normal diets would avoid that argument any better.
I sympathize with this argument, but the obvious counter-argument is that lots of people have eaten normal diets and have been observed not to, for example, die of scurvy. (On the other hand, they have been observed to, for example, get heart disease.)
it is a priori highly likely to fail since we know for a fact that severe nutrition deficiencies can be due to subtle & misunderstood factors (see: the forgetting of scurvy cures) and that nutrition is one of the least reliable scientific areas
While this is true, I would expect that for many people, the main risk in Soylent would be one of overdosing on something rather than acquiring a deficiency. Soylent at least tries to provide everything that you need, while many people (me included) optimize their normal diet mainly based on criteria like cost and ease of preparation rather than healthiness. And even if we did optimize it for healthiness, your argument is essentially saying that we might very well screw up and acquire deficiencies even if we tried to ensure that we got everything that we needed.... and that argument can be applied to normal diets just as well as Soylent.
So anyone who uses the "there are lots of subtle ways of acquiring nutrition deficiencies and we might not know everything that one needs" argument against Soylent would first need to show why normal diets would avoid that argument any better.
it is a priori highly likely to fail since we know for a fact that severe nutrition deficiencies can be due to subtle & misunderstood factors (see: the forgetting of scurvy cures) and that nutrition is one of the least reliable scientific areas
I think you're wrong about that. We have modern chemistry and we have animal experimentation at scale, which means that we can feed animals highly-refined diets to determine whether any essential nutrients are missing from our models. It would be extremely surprising if there were a vital nutrient we didn't know about.
On the other hand, there are other failure modes besides forgetting a nutrient, like using an inactive or degraded input, contamination, or for that matter, making half the calories sugar. (Which they, um, did.) I really want a correctly-executed version of Soylent, but I won't be eating anything from the first batches, because these guys really don't fill me with confidence.
I think for similar reasons, I think of morality as descriptive rather than philosophical. That is, humans have certain moral sentiments, on average, that have evolved in to place because cooperation is so darned important a part of the survival advantage of humans. Attempts to instrospect on the moral feelings and derive "ought" from them are a side effect of the sentiments and rationality that has evolved to serve humans so well. Looking for general moral truths beyond "this is right because it feels right" is at best besides the point and at worst impossible.
People fail at novel environments as mundane as needing to find a typo in an html file or paying attention to fact-checks during political debates. You don't have to come up with extreme philosophical counterexamples to find domains in which it's interesting to distinguish between the behavior of different non-experts (and such that these differences feel like "intelligence").
Most of what we strive for has survival value for the species. Yet striving is not fun. The human moral instinct is filled with features which facilitate humans living together in large numbers and working together in a unified fashion. We don't kill each other when we get mad at each other (mostly, and that is what morality pushes us towards even when we fail): this makes it way easier to live together in large groups. For the most part we are motivated to speak honestly to each other and to keep our promises and commitments. This allows groups of humans to function together to get things done that individual humans could not.
SO you ask:
Why is it that they want to have a morality, when the one they have makes them miserable?
Pardon my answering your question with a rhetorical question, but why would you think that what we have and what we get would be influenced at all by what we want or what does or does not make us miserable? But to answer more straightforwardly: if the result of having a morality which allows us to function effectively together in large numbers, then evolution will choose, if it can, for such moralities, and if being miserable does not fully negate the benefit of human cooperation, evolution will not fail at pursuing morality just because it also makes some people miserable.
It'll be the default, certainly. But I suspect there's going to be enough room for lawyers to play that it'll stay wrapped up in red tape for many years. (Interestingly, I think that might actually make it more dangerous in some ways - if we really do leapfrog humans on intelligence, giving it years while we wait on lawyers might be a dangerous thing to do. OTOH, there's generally no truckloads of silicon chips going into the middle of a legal dispute like that, so it might slow things down too.)
Perhaps the Turing test would work better if instead of having to pass for a human, the bot's insightfulness were rated and it had to be at the same level as a human's. Insightfulness seems harder to fake than "sounds superficially like a human" and it's what we care about anyway.
As a plus, it will make it easier for autistic people to pass the Turing test.
I'm surprised by the strongly negative reactions to this. Yes, the claims being made about Soylent are ridiculously overstated and undoubtedly will be softened with time. And yes, I suspect that some ill effects on health will result for some who subsist entirely on Soylent, especially in this first public version.
But I also suspect that very few people (and only those prepared to accept the consequences) will attempt to subsist entirely on Soylent for long periods of time. What I think interests most people is a way to recover most of the time they spend eating and thinking about food, while enjoying regular meals when it is convenient to do so (perhaps once daily before leaving the house or during lunch with coworkers, or a few times a week when eating socially with friends).
Diets that are mostly made up of a few ingredients aren't news; they're the way most of the world eats (see, e.g., staple foods). Soylent attempts to reorder the diet to include long periods where eating has low prep cost and relatively high nutritional value, instead of the status quo which has lots of meals with moderate prep cost, moderate nutritional value, and the unfortunate side effect of breaking up non-eating time into small blocks.
Of course there is no evidence that Soylent provides everything you need to be healthy, or none of the things that will make you unhealthy, just as there's no evidence that your current diet does the same.
But that's okay: Soylent is, as many commentors have pointed out, neither the first of its kind nor a scientific advance. It's a marketing advance. Before Soylent, a diet consisting largely of a single liquid brought up associations of illness and weight loss. It doesn't sound like something you would want to try or tell other people you were trying. The Soylent diet, on the other hand, you associate with health, saving time, and munchkinism. If Soylent succeeds, its success will be in overthrowing the three-meal-a-day status quo. As someone who would love to spend less time thinking about, pursuing, preparing, and eating food, that's an advance that I welcome.
My third paragraph cautions against doing or rewarding things like students who ask for lots of help from teachers even when they can do it on their own, or vice versa.
I see no need to provide a GPA to students in order to quantify numbers for other processes. What goal is served by more information than pass/fail?
Interesting, googling around a bit it looks like it is basically soybean oil, whey, and dextrose with vitamin powders. So pretty much the same as Soylent. I guess worries about bioavailability are overblown given that coma patients survive indefinitely, but then again, their mixture is adjusted daily based on blood work.
Might I reiterate the suggestion of my whole food version for people who don't wish to trust powders mixed by a stranger with a spotty track record of not-poisoning-himself?
I seriously don't think I can go back to not using this almost daily. Worrying about only 1 meal a day has been a huge stress gone from my life.
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