ArisKatsaris comments on August 2014 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (108)
Short Online Texts Thread
Technology:
Economics:
Fiction:
Misc:
The walrus lodger add is down; could you explain what the add was for exactly?
I mean...
Did someone want a walrus as a lodger?
Basically, but they were willing to settle for someone who would pretend to be a walrus for a few hours each day in exchange for free rent. A pity it's gone, it was fairly funny even if I have to doubt its veracity.
Everything is heritable:
Politics/religion:
What about constructing a decent fantasy-world economics? ;)
Truly remarkable though...
An alt-historical fic maybe, but you'd have to input an entire world of data to construct a fantasy world. Seriously, the world in ORBIS is amazing: they have detailed geographical tiles of land/shore/water/various-routes, water current speed in both direction, fees for each point to point, variation in fees by time of year... You'd spend more time constructing your world in ORBIS than it would take to write your novel with some reasonable guesses as to plausible economics.
I know of at least one author who did exactly that (not with Orbis though). Predictably, the outcome was pretty boring.
Who was that?
Yeah, realistic worlds are not necessarily optimized for being entertaining. That's why fiction exists, after all - because we're not satisfied with nonfiction.
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
Psychology:
Gwern, are you human?
Serious question, do you naturally find high quality media the most entertaining or did you train yourself to make better use of your leisure time? I can't exactly define high quality media but I would say that all of those links are higher quality than youtube and online video games for instance.
I specifically quit video games to try to force myself to more important stuff. I do spend time on Youtube (as you can see from my music comments), but mostly for music which can be put in the background.
That okcupid link is really worth checking out... if you want to be depressed about humanity.
Replication in social sciences
The Originist by Orson Scott Card.
This may be the best science fiction story I have ever read, nudging Egan's Wang's Carpets out of first place. By best, I mean a high concentration of sparkly ideas, and in the case of the Card story, reasons to be fond of the human race-- and there's a metalevel, because a lot of the story is about the good we get from having mental models of each other, and the story is Card trying to channel Asimov.
It has none of the character torture which makes a lot of Card's fiction squicky to me.
I read it in Maps in a Mirror, and I can't vouch that the online version is complete or correct. On the other hand, I want to improve the odds of the story getting read.
If you're a Card fan, you may want to get the hardcover edition-- it's got some stories which are mentioned as not being included in the paperback edition.
The resource leak bug of our civilization