Sharing interesting links via the discussion section seems to have too much overhead. I suspect we all find things that are quite interesting but don't bother to share them on LW. This is an experiment to see if a dedicated thread can work better.
Sharing interesting links via the discussion section seems to have too much overhead. I suspect we all find things that are quite interesting but don't bother to share them on LW. This is an experiment to see if a dedicated thread can work better.
Edit: apparently people here can't detect sarcasm, so I'm changing the header.
So, I took this thread as an excuse for going thought my lists of interesting websites accumulated over the years, and make a selection of things I think will specifically interest LWers. There are still a lot of links, because I sift through large swats of information. This is a valuable recourse, don't dismiss it just because it's badly organized.
I've also tried adding some descriptions because people were complaining about that.
I recommend checking out every one of these, and spreading it out over a few weeks.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/breathmed.html (meditation is a useful habit, this is a very concrete tutorial on how to do it.)
http://www.epicsplosion.com/epicsploitation/38 (A silly thing, please contribute to make it better!)
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/ (one of the most epic stories of our time, with great characters and concepts. It's long and starts slow, so just be patient.)
http://www.ted.com/ (ideas worth spreading)
http://dresdencodak.com/ (Awesome art, and deals more directly with the singularity than any other webcomic i know of)
http://vihart.com/ (distille...
Oh, come on.
It's clear to me that a link with a description that lets me make even a 50%-accurate judgment, let alone a 90%-accurate judgment, of whether I'll like it is far more useful than a link with no description at all.
Do you disagree?
More than two years ago, Vladimir Nesov linked to Tim Minchin's beat poem Storm. More recently, it's been animated -- very nicely, I think.
Summary: a rationalist goes to a London dinner party and meets an astrology-spouting, truth-is-just-opinion opining girl and goes off, much to the annoyance of everyone else in the room.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f5bcn_z0Qg
3 minute animated video with enough going on to make at least 10 movies. Maybe 100.
Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born
...The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most.
Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and
The Science Of Why We Don't Believe Science - details the cognitive biases involved in the way humans deal with information. None of this will be a surprise to LW readers, but still a nice article to spread.
Too Damned Quiet?, arXiv.org - Submitted on 4 Apr 2011
...It is often suggested that extraterrestial life sufficiently advanced to be capable of interstellar travel or communication must be rare, since otherwise we would have seen evidence of it by now. This in turn is sometimes taken as indirect evidence for the improbability of life evolving at all in our universe. A couple of other possibilities seem worth considering. One is that life capable of evidencing itself on interstellar scales has evolved in many places but that evolutionary selection, acting on
Today's xkcd: A timeline of major events in the next century, generated by Googling things like "in " and "will * by the year ".
(I like juxtapositions like "robots granted same rights as humans" followed shortly by "humans have domesticated robots" ... "Lord Jesus rules Earth from throne in Jerusalem" + "entire world population gay due to chemicals in the water" + "public masturbation legalized" ... "Singularity occurs" + "fishing industry collapses". (I bet...))
This adorable comic seems like some sort of transhumanist metaphor at the end but damned if I can explain how.
Some bitcoin links:
Pretty interesting discussion of how the criteria for tenure at top universities differ from those at others, especially since the ultra-focus top universities demand actually could be counter-thetical to scientific creativity, as shown in Simonton's "Psychology of Science" books.
Hey! Just found a link that reminded me of LW!
http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
I just stumbled upon it and am a bit sceptical as to it's accuracy, but it's interesting and relevant enough to link I think.
The always readable Rebecca Solnit has an article in the march issue of LMD that's relevant to Less Wrong's interests, the stuff on mental disaster kits is a nice idea, the anti-nuclear stuff is instructive in it's dishonesty: ArticleHere
This Collection of articles on medical reforms is specific to Britain, but the statistics abuse documented is common the world over, I particularly recommend the article on cancer stats.
I never really understood the fuss over cooking for engineers, but this vaguely similar idea is wonderful.
Also: Webcomics! Comics on the i...
An interesting project, if it gets off the ground.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/benway/arc-island-a-brave-new-civilization
Oh, come on.
It's clear to me that a link with a description that lets me make even a 50%-accurate judgment, let alone a 90%-accurate judgment, of whether I'll like it is far more useful than a link with no description at all.
Do you disagree?
No, obviously not, I spend a fair amount of cognitive resources every day trying to sort through online content and am partial to norms conductive to that purpose indeed.
I just interpret "knowing without following the link" as "at least 99% sure it'll be worth it".