The deadliest school massacre in US history was in 1927. Why its aftermath matters now
...In the end there were 38 children dead at the school, two teachers and four other adults.
I’m not talking about the horrific shooting in Connecticut today. I’m talking about the worst school murder in American history. It took place in Michigan, in 1927. A school board official, enraged at a tax increase to fund school construction, quietly planted explosives in Bath Township Elementary. Then, the day he was finally ready, he set off an inferno. When crowds rushed in to rescue the children, he drove up his shrapnel-filled car and detonated it, too, killing more people, including himself. And then, something we’d find very strange happened.
Nothing.
No cameras were placed at the front of schools. No school guards started making visitors show identification. No Zero Tolerance laws were passed, nor were background checks required of PTA volunteers—all precautions that many American schools instituted in the wake of the Columbine shootings, in 1999. Americans in 1928—and for the next several generations —continued to send their kids to school without any of these measures. They didn’t even drive them t
Since the perpetrator in 1928 was a school board official who had taken time to prepare the crime, it's unlikely that modern-style security would have helped. If the same thing happened today, it would be harder for people to demand important officials be searched every time they enter the school, than to demand random adults should be searched. This accounts for some of the difference in reaction.
These things are huge triggers for me. It drives me mad that society has the reaction it does when this event killed as many people as die every eleven seconds. If we had a proportional societal reaction to all deaths, maybe we'd have solved the problem by now.
Edit: I accidentally the math
This weekend I staged a Les Mis "One Day More" flashmob in our train station with about 20 people. (I'm Javert).
I realized I had been wishing that a flashmob would happen, and finally wised up and realized I should just do it myself. I think most of us underestimate how willing people are to go along with wacky plans, as long as they don't have to have any logistical responsibilities. It also helped to set point people for a couple different social circles to recruit (alums, work colleagues, an improv group, church friends). This has definitely lowered my reticence to stage other public spectacles.
I'd like to take a moment to boast about my site traffic: gwern.net recently passed 1.5m pageviews with 1m unique pageviews by 973.4k readers.
I began gwern.net on ~3 October 2010, so it took a little over 2 years to reach this point. (I have fewer pageviews and visitors than Overcoming Bias did when it broke 1m visits, but Eliezer and Hanson and co. is some pretty stiff competition!)
LW traffic has been indispensable all the while, both in building up numbers and in criticizing many of my pages and hopefully improving them, so thanks to everyone.
I've finished my potassium sleep experiment: http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#potassium It made my sleep much worse, and I didn't notice any daytime benefit.
EDIT: ditto for the followup
Why is there a Boing Boing article in Featured Articles on the front page? Who has edit access to the front page and why are they spamming?
Apparently the Featured Articles list comes from http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Template:Lesswrong:FeaturedArticles , which is maintained by Costanza. Looks like she added it during a routine weekly update, I guess to get some variety to the list? Anyway, I deleted it for now. (You may need to hit "Force reload from the wiki" to see the updated front page.)
And before anyone criticizes Costanza too harshly, I'd like to say that regularly updating the list of featured articles each week is a great thing for someone to do, and I'd like to thank Costanza for being the one to do it. :-)
I've changed my mind on a few big things recently, or at least clarified my doubts. Somewhere along the way, I noticed that the correct side (as I judge) on controversial issues tends to use evidence and careful logical argument, and the incorrect side tends to use indignation, invocation of taboos, straw-manning, and scoffing.
I find logical arguments more convincing than social authority, so a lot of the fact that the "correct" arguments use logos (logical argument) instead of ethos (social argument) could be selection. This explains the above, but fails to explain the extreme polarization on some issues where one side uses mostly logos and the other uses mostly ethos.
So if logos has a reliable correlation with the truth (either because logos-tending people more reliably produce truth, or because only truth can be armed with logos), that has some interesting implications. For one, you can get a quick estimate of correct side in a controversy just by surface-level syntactical analysis.
That idea has disagreed with previous beliefs in interesting ways that have not yet been resolved:
I ran into some holocaust deniers, who tended to cite "facts" (that may or may n
How much should I care about online privacy?
As far as I can tell most people's fear s in relation to privacy are motivated by an intuitive 'ick' feeling not by any projection of future harms. But as we know reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, so the question of how much one should care about privacy, especially online, is still open.
What do you do in terms of preserving privacy and why? E.g. Do you keep your real world and online (or different online) personalities distinct, if so why?
Edited for typos and clarity
It's hard to judge. When I started seriously participating in stuff online, I kept heavily pseudonymous so I could disavow it later (I was still growing up) and out of interest in crypto & security issues. This came in handy when I earned some enemies on Wikipedia who sought to 'out' me; one group went so far as to call up universities looking for info on me in order to harass me and in the best-case scenario, get me fired from a job. Naturally, they failed. More recently, I learned of death threats; I believe the threat to be very minimal, but it's still not a particularly happy thought.
The point being that when I started, I didn't seriously expect stalkers and threats, but if I had started 'public', I didn't have the option to retract all the relevant privacy info.
Is Kessler syndrome relevant to existential risk? Kessler syndrome is the danger that if low-earth orbit becomes sufficiently crowded, a bad collision could result in a cascade effect. This would in a few hours or days destroy all satellites in LEO and would possibly render LEO unusable for decades. While this isn't an existential risk by itself, it may be relevant. Many existential risks can be dealt with in part by simply not having all are eggs in one basket- nuclear war, nanotech, and many others fall into this category. Meanwhile some existential risks such as large asteroids can only be detected and stopped by having well-developed space capabilities.
So is Kessler syndrome relevant to existential risk? Does this not substantially matter because there's already a fair bit of resources going in to preventing it?
This is a sockpuppet I have created. It is a ROT13ed version of my username, for comments that I would prefer to have not associated with a simple google search of my real name. Generally personal things that I don't mind random strangers on the internet knowing. I have only ever thought of two or three things that I would want to use this account for, and the alternative is simply not making those comments. As long as I never use this account for voting purposes, do you as a LW member feel this is an acceptable use of sockpuppetry?
Is this acceptable? [pollid:373]
Some perspectives from Prudentius
A delightful and short new post by Moldbug on Christianity and the Fall of Rome. The link to Peter Frost's take is very much worth reading as well. The post is also related to Frost's Genetic Pacification paper.
Did Christianity and evolution leave Late Antiquity Romans particularly vulnerable to bad consequences of the typical mind fallacy when dealing with non-pacified populations?
I often find myself rooting for the villain in pop-culture stuff, especially if he's the sort of villain that has been putting together a massive plan that obviously took time, dedication, and quite a lot of hard work and ambition. The hero is often, by contrast, a slacking power-of-friendship layabout who has power/talent due to an intrinsic property: "the Chosen One".
Villains are sympathetic to me even when they really shouldn't be; in Avatar: The Last Airbender (spoilers follow) Sver Ybeq Bmnv'f tbny jnf yvgrenyyl gb ohea gur jbeyq, erohvyq...
There's an old Google tech talk by Geoff Hinton about restricted Boltzmann machines that was my introduction to a bunch of topics in machine learning, and it still strongly informs a lot of my thinking about cognition. The main example is about labeling image from the MNIST handwritten digit database. Then, starting around 23:20, he shows that his RBMs are also generative; he can fix the state of a high level unit in the network (that normally discriminated images of 2s), crank forward his inference algorithm, and get out images of handwritten numbers &quo...
The Sherlock Game
For those of you who watch the Sherlock BBC serial, here's a rationalist's game: try to extrapolate other hypotheses to explain the found evidence than those the protagonist came up with, and compare them in terms or relative likeliness. To give you an example of how it's done, from Pratchett;
...[Vimes] distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant na
I was reading the comic "Heavenly Nostrils" yesterday, and it was a pretty good illustration of the idea of Mundane Magic.
On luminosity
With extensive observation of myself, I finally understood that familial dynamics were reinforcing maladaptive thoughts in myself that I was actively trying to remove. Thinking very carefully about what my situation would look like from someone else's perspective bolstered my suspicions that my situation was likely emotionally abusive. As such, I (with extensive assistance from my own social circles) have managed to remove myself from my childhood home.
While not necessarily useful in a carve-reality-at-the-joints sense (1), I have found the co...
Could anyone comment on the market for biomedical engineers? I'm specifically interested in regenerative medicine, so the common advice of "get a degree in MechE or EE and apply to biomedical companies" doesn't seem like it would apply.
I know Zvi has thought about this, as well as Scott Adams and probably some Berkeley Lesswrongers: I am wondering if there is a name for the "field" which may or may not exist that encompasses optimal modern housing and architecture, especially in the sense of communal/group living. If there's not an actual field, is there some sort of consensus or document similar to the NYLW Paleo document? I've found that I really enjoy living with other people and hanging out at houses that consist of a bunch of room-mates so I want to look into doing this in the best possible way.
Commencement speech by Ira Glass-- specifically about reporting, but it's also rather a lot about how to be agenty-- find ways to do your work better, fight the pull of mediocrity, do enough things so that luck has a chance to work.
Does somebody happen to have an overview of the current consensus on Dual N-Back? My understanding is that the impact on IQ is not solidly established. What about working memory? Is there solid evidence for transfer? Is it wort a) learning more about it b) actually spend time on training if you have a cognitively demanding job (analysis/programming)? Thank you!
I'm looking for two things I think I found on this website.
One is a philosophy paper that argued that deontology was merely the rationalization of unconscious moral heuristics (or something like that...). Meaning that people have unconscious moral instincts that they arrive at unconsciously, then they try to justify them, therefore deontology. I think I remember getting access to it through LessWrong, though I don't remember, nor do I remember who it's by (maybe Joshua Greene)? Anyway it was really interesting and I'd be grateful if someone pointed me to i...
Found this gem in a singularity thread on 4chan/b/:
If the first ultraintelligent machine is based in any way on human thought then it will just be retarded really really fast.
Quick thought experiment for you all: A machine has been invented that can view the past (type in place/time/date and you can see what happened then with perfect accuracy). Would you allow the police to use it to investigate crimes?
Why is it fun to be bad? I've heard actors say its more fun playing the bad guy. Also, I find the thought of stealing millions of dollars and getting away with it, thrilling, but not very nice.
I hope that deathism remains a powerful ideology, such that if radical life extension becomes possible, I can opt out with minimal social consequence. I may be generalizing from one example, but strongly suspect that LW overestimates the number of people who would genuinely prefer to live forever relative to those who could be socially coerced into it. I also suspect this is already true in the case of ordinary life extension, for which no deathist safeguards are in place.
What are people's thoughts on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (nature of language affects how people think).
If it is true are there lessons for teaching rationality in different linguistic communities or modifying language to increase rationality?
There are a few short stories/essays that I'm pretty sure I came across on lesswrong but have been unable to find with my brief, lazy googling. If you know any of these off the top of your head it would be much appreciated.
Story about a kingdom tormented by a dragon that demanded villagers be regularly sacrificed to it. People attempted to rationalize the situation and make excuses for the state of affairs. Eventually something is done about the dragon and the people lament that it took them so long. The dragon symbolized death.
Essay about a brain in a
You may be thinking of Nick Bostrom's "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant", Daniel C. Dennett's "Where Am I?", and David Deutsch's "The Final Prejudice", respectively. Best wishes, the Less Wrong Reference Desk.
Culture-toxic fundamentalism and the love for austerity
Where does that come from? The anti-hedonistic love of scarcity, spareness, composure, measure, rigour, effort, sacrifice, strain, toughness, drought, and grim-faced resolution? The hatred for art, for music, for wine and other drugs, for sex, for food? The notion that sloth, lust, gluttony, and pride are not just sins, but mortal sins? It's not exclusive to one culture, and it comes and goes with the ages, and it pops up all over the planet, all over the ages. Entire cultural movements surge with the ...
Some cool new videos by Aurini a fellow LessWrong user and reader:
Transhumanism, Mind Replication, Right Wing Attitudes, & Left Wing Opulence
An interesting take on Em World Scenario and Forager vs. Farmer distinction by Robin Hanson. It is obviously a political take however.
I have a bunch of cards in an Anki 2.0 deck. How do I generate their reverses and add them to my deck? That is, if I have a card 'bestehen' -> 'to exist', I would expect to see a new card, 'to exist' -> 'bestehen'. There's a FAQ about it for 1.2, but I can't find anything on 2.0.
University of Southampton decided to stop teaching social work due to lack of credible research in the discipline. (May 2012) http://www.examiner.com/article/university-of-southampton-decides-to-stop-teaching-social-work
Is there a way to "sticky" a post on Google Groups? For example, if I want to (privately, for now) track local meetup attendees and topics for X period of time, and I want to sticky a post for the entire duration just in case anyone wants to retain anonymity or plausible deniability or whatever.
About Newcomb's problem + something non-deterministic:
If the contents of box B are increased so that B > A, it seems like by basing the choice of one-boxing or two-boxing off of a quantum coin toss, one could limit Omega's predicting powers from 100% accuracy to a mere coin toss with 50% accuracy.
Where A has $1000 and B has $2000, the average payoff would be $1500 the coin toss ($0 or $3000) versus $1000 by one-boxing and $0 by two-boxing in a way Omega can predict.
Has something like this been considered as a possible resolution?
Call supernatural metanatural then recycle old Catholic/Hindu/Taoist arguments in LW jargon. #WinningAtLessWrong #lifehacks
On 15 December 2012 06:01:26PM, I received an unsolicited and badly-spelled PM from a "ZakaulRehman" (who does not appear to have sent any non private messages) on ... subatomic physics, I think. Has anyone else received similar messages?
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.