A dirty great text file is awesome: http://xkcd.com/208/

Yes, seriously.

I'm not super reference heavy but I myself use evernote quite a lot.

Whenever I find something that I probably want to reference in the future I clip it into evernote.

Evernote has the advantage that there a google plugin that searches through your evernote everytime you do a google search. Finding a reference again takes searching. Sometimes more sometimes less. If you want to reduce the time it takes you to refind information, evernote tags or simple hashtags help.

Back in Google Reader days Google Reader search was also quite central, because I often used to quote stuff that came into my RSS feed on some way.

If you want to go more high tech there are options like http://www.mendeley.com/ to manage references. Zotero and CiteULike are similar solutions that are specifically designed for references management.

I personally still use Evernote over single purpose reference management systems because I can simply dumb all information that I might need later into evernote.

Evernote happens to be a cloud service of a US company, so it not 100% secure for all types of information. If I could get a similar service that's hosted safely I would switch, but at the moment convenience wins over data privacy for myself for most data.

There also information that so important that I want to have it available in brain memory. That information goes into Anki.

I'm writing a literature review at the moment, and use Evernote to organize the references. I tag them with year, subject, type, language. I give each reference a number. I abbreviate the conclusions of the references in the notes that contain the original articles as pdf files, and will finally use those snippets to construct the review article.

I believe Ramit Sethi is the general recommendation here.

Note that the comparison (more to do with X than Y) isn't very helpful for cases where X and Y are not exclusive, and/or related. For this particular topic, the quality and quantity of work in many fields has a direct effect on your ability to negotiate for salary (for three reasons: your actual ability to positively impact the business, your confidence in asking for what you're worth, and your (prospective) employer's comfort level in treating you differently from your nominal peers).

Also, 5 minutes of salary negotiation is bull crap. There is no excuse not to spend dozen hours of research and have multiple 30 minute conversations every year or two. Of course, you should put the same level of thought and effort into other areas of job-satisfaction (commute, hours, duties, etc.) as well.

You might be interested in this article.

Referrals are the best source for finding someone involved in negotiation at a specific company. I believe that Google has HR negotiate salaries, so if you know any Googlers, asking them to introduce you to someone in HR will probably work.

If you haven't done so already, you can get ~80% of the value here just by practicing with a random friend playing the role of hiring manager. As you mentioned, most of the value is in ingraining the behaviors through practice, not in the extra knowledge you get. So you don't necessarily need a specialist for this.

If you are interested in Effective Altruism (donate 10% or more of your income or work at an EA organization) then I would be happy to help. I have successfully negotiated 80%+ raises before, and taught 7 people to negotiate with average results of 30% or more raises. About half of the teaching was role-played practice. Feel free to email me at satvik.beri@gmail.com .

Done.

While I agree that you have to be careful about olive oil you buy in a supermarket, I am somewhat wary about the UC Davis results. My wariness is a function of two sentences. One is on the front page of http://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/ -- it says "Enhancing the quality and economic viability of California table olives and olive oil" (emphasis mine). The second one is in the report and it says "We are grateful to Corto Olive, California Olive Ranch, and the California Olive Oil Council for their financial support of this research."

Also, an observation. EVOO ages. If you really want the freshest tastiest yummiest EVOO you need to buy it around December, a month or two after the harvest (the bottle should have the harvest date on it). If you take the same EVOO and try it after a year has passed, it will be different, certainly by taste. Note that it's still "true" EVOO -- no heating or adulteration or anything. It's just that time has passed.

To try real fresh EVOO buy a bottle of what's called Olio Nuovo and make sure it's not more than a couple of months after the harvest.

I'm pretty sure I've saved time on net by looking through http://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/top?t=all

I think we need some sort of wiki page to list high-value practical advice, where people could e.g. look under "health" and they'd be directed to Shangri-La for weight-loss, or a list of what supplements they should take for general health, with direct Amazon links, or melatonin, red light, red glasses, sleep masks, etc. for sleeping better, and so on. (I am not going to create such a page.)

Hm. I feel like "impossible to manipulate" just means that you can prove that it will never cooperate when the opponent will defect.

But yeah, if we equate "acting first" with acting in ignorance of the other person's move, then we get something interesting.

Here are two options for cheap(er) theatre tickets in NYC:

• TKTS booth - half price tickets the day of the show
• Student rush/standing room policies - Same day tickets and lotteries with steeply reduced prices. (Age/enrollment restrictions may apply

Also, the Staten Island Ferry is free to ride, and gives you pretty views of the city from the water. Just be sure that when you land in Staten Island, you hurry through the terminal to reboard the boat immediately to go back. There's little to visit in Staten Island.

Here's Optimal Employment, where the working in Australia idea is discussed, and here's the Optimal Employment Open Thread.

I've been picking up bottles of 120 3mg pills off eBay for about £7 including P&P. FYI, in six month's time when you can't do without it.

I was taking melatonin for a while, but I kept having these weird/disturbing dreams whenever I took it, so I stopped. Are melatonin induced nightmares common?

I've been taking melatonin for a while. I haven't noticed any obvious improvement, but when I temporarily ran out of it and forgot to buy more for a few days, it felt like I slept worse. Might've been just a placebo effect, but then the pills are cheap and taking them feels like a nice evening ritual to do before going to bed, so I don't mind continuing it.

1mg is hitting yourself over the head with a sledgehammer. Try 200mcg or 300mcg first!

I've taken melatonin for a few months, and at the start I thought it did make me sleep better; but then I ran out of tablets one day and I didn't notice my sleep getting worse, so I stopped again.

Were the pills slow release or normal? The difference in time to fall asleep could be significant.

Do you know why the age of consent for sex is 18?

The age of consent differs over the world. Even within the US. Kansas has one of 16 while it's 18 in Florida.

According to Wikipedia Spain even has an age of consent of 13 (with some exceptions) and the government recently announced that it wants to raise it to 15.

I don't think my morals on sexuality would change much by living in Spain.

I went to an early college program — a residential four-year college where most students entered at age 15 or 16, after two years of high school. This was in a state where the legal age of consent was (and is) 16. As a consequence, many sexual relationships among first-year students were illegal. However, they were also very common.

The culture at this institution was such that students were treated as "college students who happen to be two years younger", not as "gifted young teenagers who happen to be doing college-level academics". As such, the age-of-consent law was basically regarded as an inappropriate technicality. Students were cautioned about it, but along the lines of "Technically, if someone really wanted to hurt you, they could charge you with this ..."

So far as I know, the only time while I was there that anyone was even seriously threatened with legal charges over an "underage" relationship was one case where a freshman boy (age 15) cheated on his girlfriend with another guy (age 17). The girlfriend initially wanted to report this as "child abuse" but changed her mind before doing so.

In Italy the age of consent is 14, it can go down to 13 if the partner is at max 15 years old, but it raises to 16 if the partner is a temporary or permanent authoritative figure, like a coach or a teacher.

18 is the limit at which it is allowed to publicly show or sell pictures/movies about that person naked or performing sexual acts.

I frankly feel that this is one of the very few cases where Italian laws get the facts right: thirteens would still (try to) have sex wether or not it was allowed.
I remember that I believed too that the age of consent was 18, and felt fine with it, so it was a little shock to discover that the limit was much lower. I later however got various data about how sexual expression/desire/maturity starts around that age (mine too, FWIW), so I reconsidered that this was indeed a case of a law just making common sense: you don't throw in jail a teenager just because of his/her natural impulses.

Probabilistically your question makes sense. It doesn't make much sense if I think about my personal experience. I don't think my ethics are determined by the law and I don't give much thought to it when thinking about right and wrong. Then again, I know myself imperfectly. My mom was generally obeying the law and my dad was breaking it. I learned from both of them.

In Finland, the age of consent is 16. I disagree with it, but don't really care to elaborate how. I find it really hard to be judgemental about sex.

I'm going to come at this from descriptive ethics, rather than a prescriptive ethics, because I find that more interesting for this particular case.

The popularly termed "age creepiness rule" (don't date under age/2+7) appears to be a weirdly accurate reflection of what most OKCupid men proclaim is reasonable (see: male chart, youngest allowable match) and this is despite the human male inclination towards choosing younger mates (as okcupid shows, actual messaging rates differ from declared values)

Let's just suppose that outwardly stated preferences on OKCupid mimic (at the very least) the moral intuitions of Western men, and that the "age creepiness equation" is not well known enough to actually alter anything.

What would we predict about our laws, given age/2+7?

14=14/2+7

Making 14 the age at which people can start exploring sex without violating the equation.

18=22/2+7

Making 22 the age at which it is inappropriate to have sex with anyone under 18.

Another equation conforming pair which seems to correspond to legally important ages: 16 & 18.

Does this information hold any predictive value for how nations tend to make laws? Does the equation change based on cultural variables? Do you think that the equation reflects anything important about human maturity levels? Does it reflect anything about which behavior would be adaptive ancestrally? Does the equation makes sense from a proscriptive ethics perspective?

My answer to these is generally "yes" with increasing uncertainty and qualifying for each successive question.

Taking his 8km/sec speed and 100km height as accurate, the energy to lift one kilogram that high on a ballistic arc (ignoring air resistance and the motion of the Earth's surface) is mgh = 1kg*100km * (1000m/km) * (10 m/s^2) =1e6 J. The energy to accelerate it to orbital speed is 0.5mv^2 = 0.5*1kg*(8000m/s)^2 = 32e6 J. First pass, then, his reasoning seems accurate. Am I oversimplifying? What is your calculation?

Reaching orbital speed takes much more fuel than reaching orbital height.

Hogwash.

Explain. The XKCD guy is usually quite competent at what he does. Are you sure that you are talking about the same thing as he is? If so, what precisely is his mistake?

Downvoted for calling math 'hogwash' without pointing out a math error.

There was a lively "spray cold water into your left ear for debiasing purposes" discussion.

Ritalin is pretty helpful for me (when I can get it) against akrasia. Dunno about bias.

Why haven't we done an systematic investigation of drugs as means towards debiasing?

I have focussed my attention more on enhancing cognitive function more generally, which has some benefits with respect to debiasing but is far from explicitly targetted. There are some specific behavioural and psychological biases that I can target pharmaceutically but not all of them, not without combining drugs with training. Of course there is much that can be done to enhance the executive function, motivation and relaxed self awareness that makes training oneself out of biases much more viable.

By systematic investigation do you mean a literature review? I hope so. Does such literature even exist, have you done any searches?

I have to take SSRIs to stay sane, but they blunt my emotions (which is usual) and kill my motivation. This has to affect my biases in some way. Then again depression would make me ridiculously biased. Nicotine and caffeine seem to make me overconfident, but help me to get things done.

That's very interesting -- I noticed the exact opposite effect. Melatonin helps me fall asleep faster, but sleep quality doesn't appear to be much better. I did notice an improvement in sleep quality with ZMA (zinc+magnesium+vitamin B6), and the melatonin+ZMA combo works wonders for sleep.

I've not noticed a difference with generic Kroger brand and other brands of Vitamin D3. Seems to be about the same effect. 5,000IU and 10,000IU aren't noticeably different in my experience, but either are a marked improvement over no supplementation.

Cautiously playing around with supplements I found melatonin to be effective in aiding sleep quality, though not with time to fall asleep. Any suggestions to that effect?

Have you tried taking melatonin sublingually? The rapid absorption leads to a faster onset of sleepiness, which might help (I get extremely sleepy about 10 minutes after sublingual administration). Sublingual melatonin tablets can be found on Amazon.

I was under the impression that vitamin D is absorbed much better if taken together with fats or oils. I would take it with food, not on an empty stomach.

What happens when you tell it that you forgot your password. Many system respond by sending you an email with allows you to set a new password.

This is unlikely (p<0.05) to help in this case, but sometimes client-side validation is stricter than server-side. I recently had to disable the max-length on a text entry box so that I could enter the reference number I'd been given (but I checked and there isn't a max-length on the old password box here); another time I had to disable javascript so that I could use an email address with a + that had been accepted before.

I think this is probably really hard to answer sensibly without some more information about you and your goals.

For people who spend a lot of time in the United States I often recommend learning enough Spanish to curse plausibly, make casual smalltalk, ask for directions, and order lunch in, because it's not rare to find communities here where doing so gets you marked as an insider, or at least a potential ally, with all the associated benefits of that marking.

If you don't have a need for learning a specific language then I think that you should put your learning efforts elsewhere.

There are many areas where effort gets higher returns.

I like learning languages (Esperanto, German, Chinese, Japanese), but consider it as more of a hobby than a useful skill, unless you're planning to move abroad, or have a job that involves a lot of travelling, or marry someone from there.

More useful than video games, reading fiction, surfing on reddit, playing chess.

Less useful (marketable) than programming, self-marketing, public speaking, fixing up your house, negotiating a salary, driving a car, fixing a car...

Probably about as useful as drawing, or doing advanced maths.

I am not particularly interested in the answer to this question but this community's answer:

I am curious what you mean by this. If someone/we find a more optimal solution, we should adopt it, no?

Is there a transcript of the interview somewhere? The youtube auto-generated one mangles Chomsky's replies horribly.

I think his problem is he assumes an AI has to closely resemble a human mind to be powerful enough to be dangerous.

Um, the statement "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" is wrong to start with.

EDIT: Deleted the mistaken part of the post -- was reading too fast and screwed up the formal logic counter-example. Mea culpa

If you disagree with "anyone who even tries to hide anything MUST be doing something wrong.", then you disagree with it's logically equivalent contraposition 'If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.'. And indeed you do, you say there are people who've done nothing wrong but do have something to hide. There's no logical error, you just disagree with a premise.

I think the question is poorly formulated. If you say:

P: you have done something wrong

Q: you have a reason to hide something

P->Q: If you have done something wrong, then you have a reason to hide something

!Q->!P: If you do not have a reason to hide something, then you have not done something wrong

Which seems quite consistent to me, as it makes it possible to have a reason to hide something without having done something wrong. The negations of the original are throwing me, and I think the if-then phrase might be backwards as the causality should be doing something wrong causes you to have something to hide, rather than the reverse. My logic course was long enough ago that I can't pin it exactly.

This assumes that there are two categories of things: Right and wrong. In real life that's not the case. If someone tries to judge us their is information that makes him think very highly of us and information that positive but doesn't have such a big impact. If you can control that someone only get's to see the information that makes you look really awesome you achieved something by hiding the information that makes you look medicore.

Nothing you have done needs to be below some threshold that makes it wrong for you to have an advantage by hiding the worst things that you did. As the quality of the things you did naturally fluctuates there will always be worst things.

You could also have done something that a AI that analyses your habits likely pattern matches as suspicious. Given modern technology that means that you will less likely get a good rate when you want to get your mortgage.

Government can also give you trouble with extra inspections when you pattern match to be a dangerous person. It's not directly punishment but when you run a restaurant and you get more food safety inspections than your competitors because you pattern match to be a dangerous person it still hurts you.

If you fly the TSA will bug you if you score highly on some metric. An AI analyses all communication data and those people who look suspicious will get flagged for extra scrutiny.

In our society we also have a concept that it's okay to speak with friends in confidence. If you tell a friend that you protect a secret that he tells you, you have something to hide. I don't think anyone would argue that it's morally wrong to promise a friend that you will protect a secret he tells you.

If someone asks you whether you are feeling alright, you might not want to talk about a problem that you are facing with that person and hide the problem from them. That in no way implies that you think having the problem is "wrong" it just means that you don't think that you will profit from discussing the problem with them.

If you made a new invention and haven't yet patented it, you might want to hide that invention for some time till you are ready to bring the invention to market or patent it. Businesses also have various other forms of trade secrets that they hide. Most busineses don't want to give a competitor their customer list.

If you are in a negotiation having more information than the other party can give you an advantage. As a result you don't profit from sharing all information with them.

If you follow TDT you have to hide certain information, because otherwise someone could infer from the fact that you don't talk about an issue that you feel badly about the issue. You don't want that political dissidents, who share your views, can be distinguished by a government from yourself, because you don't want that the government has the power to go after every political dissident.

"open secret"

Curious... what is the term for that in Italian?

It's from a sermon in which Wesley advocates that Christian should "gain all you can", "save all you can", and "give all you can" — a teaching somewhat similar to efficient altruism. Wesley has slightly different priorities, though: he emphasizes providing for the local community first rather than distant humans.

The line you quote comes from the provisos he puts around "gain all you can" — in gist, don't earn money at the expense of your bodily or mental health or your neighbor's well-being.

Some context for the quote:

We are, Secondly, to gain all we can without hurting our mind [...]. We must preserve, at all events, the spirit of an healthful mind. [...] There are yet [other trades] which many pursue with perfect innocence, without hurting either their body or mind; And yet perhaps you cannot: Either they may entangle you in that company which would destroy your soul; and by repeated experiments it may appear that you cannot separate the one from the other; or there may be an idiosyncrasy, — a peculiarity in your constitution of soul, [...] by reason whereof that employment is deadly to you, which another may safely follow. So I am convinced, from many experiments, I could not study, to any degree of perfection, either mathematics, arithmetic, or algebra, without being a Deist, if not an Atheist: And yet others may study them all their lives without sustaining any inconvenience. None therefore can here determine for another; but every man must judge for himself, and abstain from whatever he in particular finds to be hurtful to his soul.

The key is the use of the word "experiments". Wesley is saying that he found that studying mathematics would "entangle [him] in that company which would destroy [his] soul" — that is, the company of deistic and atheistic mathematicians — and that he could not separate mathematical studies from association with those (to his view) corrupting influences.

the Christian origins

As opposed to, say, its Jewish origins in the Ethical Culture movement, or its academic philosophical origins in the Scottish Enlightenment?

(I think it's usually an error to talk about "the origins" of a current memeplex — they usually develop from several origins.)

Counterpoint: They got more press that way, and only one small set of actors had to coordinate, and the answer is obvious.

Folks, this is what "things you can't say" looks like. This is what a real social taboo looks like.

Notice how different the community response is to this, versus to some of the things that are claimed by their proponents to be "things you can't say" but which are actually merely explicit statements of common beliefs in the cultural mainstream.

When someone triggers a social taboo, the response isn't so much "I will argue against this person!" — not even in the "someone is wrong on the Internet!" fashion. That's just disagreement (sometimes ideological or partisan disagreement), not taboo.

When someone triggers a social taboo, the response is more to try to stifle or exclude it quickly. This sometimes ends in trying to pretend that it never happened.

(I am not asserting that the taboo response is right or wrong on this subject. I am pointing out that it is different.)