I like Comic Sans too, but is it intended?

I think Scott Adams has taken to trolling the readers of his blog.

I wouldn't put it at 98%, but I definitely wouldn't put it at Nate Silver's 2%, which I think comes from an analysis that is just way too simplistic.

Forgetting what I know (or think I know) about Scott Adams, Donald Trump, Nate Silver, Jeb Bush, whoever, and going straight to the generic reference class forecast — I'm very sceptical someone could predict US presidential elections with 98% accuracy 14 months in advance.

I think Adams is right that Trump has played the media exceedingly well and he has clearly surprised a lot of people. Some Republican pollsters have focus-grouped Trump supporters and found an extreme level of antipathy among them toward "establishment" Republicans. So it is unlikely his current supporters will abandon him in a sudden collapse, which is the failure mode a lot of Trump-skeptics have been describing. That means Trump will likely stay in the race for a long time--unless he gets bored and drops out. I doubt Trump will actually drop out though, he seems to enjoy the fray and clearly hates many establishment conservatives enough to stay in just to have a platform to keep attacking them.

Most likely Trump will split the anti-establishment vote with Ben Carson and eventually most of the establishment candidates will drop out and throw their support to an establishment survivor, who will manage to beat Trump with solid but not huge majorities and take the nomination. If Trump does manage to win the nomination, it is unlikely he will win the white house--odds are less than even, maybe 2:1 against him. Overall I would estimate a ~10% chance Trump wins the presidency.

Did Adams praise Obama for skillful use of vagueness? "Hope" seems to be in the same category as "take your country back".

Well... Scott Adams has a lot of money. I am willing to bet that Trump will NOT become president, at EVEN ODDS. Scott, if you read this, how about a wager? I propose a $10,000 stake.

Why do so many people see Adams as being rationality-compatible? I've seen very little that he has to say that sounds at all rational or helpful. Cynical != rational.

It seems like a lot of focus on MIRI giving good signals to outsiders. The "publish or perish" treadmill of academia is exactly why privately funded organizations like MIRI are needed.

The things that su3su2u1 wants MIRI to be already exist in academia. The whole point of MIRI is to create an organization of a type that doesn't currently exist, focused on much longer term goals. If you measure organizations on the basis of how many publications they make, you're going to get a lot of low-quality publications. Citations are only slightly better, especially if you're focused on ignored areas of research.

If you have outside-view criticisms of an organization and you're suddenly put in charge of them, the first thing you have to do is check the new inside-view information available and see what's really going on.

A very reasonable suggestion, and I'm not just saying that because I have a PhD. I'm saying it because it's so easy to reinvent the wheel and think you're doing original research when you're really just re-discovering other people's work in a different context. It's very hard to root out these sorts of errors; when I was doing a PhD I thought the work I was doing in developmental biology was new and unique until about a year later I found that the 'new' mathematical problems I had solved had actually been widely used in polymer science for years. I just wasn't able to find the research because none of the search terms matched.

A link to the wider academic community would do a lot to help in MIRIs goals, and a very good way to do this would be undertaking PhDs. It should be a snap for the MIRI folks...

Nancy Leibowitz was quoting this. Having spent the weekend reading 20th century French philosophers, this was refreshing. From the paper:

To make a loose statistical analogy, [asking for more nuance] is a little like continuing to add variables to a regression on the grounds that the explained variance keeps going up.

It's not a loose analogy. It's a literal description of an example of the sort of thing that should happen in the reality underlying the theory.

There is another aspect to nuance that I don't yet see mentioned in the paper. In French philosophy, the nuance is nuance of interpretation, not an attempt to handle more cases. Many theories are presented without having any cases at all that they handle! Jacques Lacan, for instance, only described one case history during his entire career; he presented detailed theories of personality development with no citations or data.

This happens with many who descend academically from Hegel: Marx, Lacan, Derrida. The model is not "nuanced" in the sense of handling many cases; it is never demonstrated to handle any data at all, or at best one over-simplified case (a general claim, or a particular sentence which the philosopher made up to illustrate the model). The nuance is all in the interpretation. It complexifies the theory without enabling it to handle any more cases--the worst of both worlds.

Connoisseurship gets its aesthetic bite, and a little kick of symbolic violence, from the easy insinuation that the person trying to simplify things is, sadly, a bit less sophisticated a thinker than the person pointing out that things are more complicated.

I think you were the person using the username account to post in this style. Thank you for making an account and welcome :)

Awakenings is a perennial favorite, a cohort of people with severe Parkinsonism given levodopa all at once (and going through the several month long process of becoming nearly completely functional with the quirks that come from excess dopamine, then their brains slowly losing homeostasis in the face of the exogenous uncontrolled neurotransmitters).

Seeing Voices, a look into the perceptions of the deaf and the nuances of signed languages, was fascinating to me.

This is a broad question, and it will get broad answers.

Can you give some examples when avoiding biases made life less enjoyable?

I think I know what you are talking about.

There are almost two modes of functioning. "Never thinking hard and going with the flow"; and "thinking hard about what happened". I would suggest that these processes are like system1/system2 processes about living. where if you only play in system 2 you have an exhausting life where you feel like you never get far because you didn't actually do the washing; you just thought really hard about it. You never really had fun; you just thought hard about it. etc etc.

The important thing to note is that we need both system 1 and system 2 to go about getting things done. You are concerned about the balance; Absolutely!

In my post here; http://lesswrong.com/lw/mj7/3_classifications_of_thinking_and_a_problem/ Slider suggested a heuristic for producing results in the area of knowing how to balance.

in this case because you are balancing "hard thinking about the problem" and "enjoying life" If you are finding you are not enjoying life; reduce the time you spend hard-thinking. Iif you are finding you are making mistakes; or needing more planning time to make things work the way you want them to; increase hard-thinking time. If you want to increase both at once - take a break; work on a problem of no consequence.

In the US at least, where the system it set up such that there can only be two parties that matter, I think the parties are too much of a "big tent" hodgepodge for that to work. Perhaps it would if they were based on the parties in a country where they have more of an incentive to be based around a consistent world view.

Any Germans want to weigh in?

Anyone ever try modeling internal monologue as political parties?

Why would you want to dumb yourself down? X-/

I've tried to model it as it was shown on Herman's Head. It helps me remember that I don't have to listen only to my inner wimp.

I've been thinking about different ways to model the adaptive system of thought and ideas in my mind. Governments don't seem like a helpful model because parts of my mind aren't as autonomous as people, nor do I have clearly defined interests groups or political party proxies. Also keen to hear ways of modelling that system for internal usage.

Political parties, no. I just don't care that much about the topic to have a solid identity for any party which I could usefully use to apply to myself.

I do have an internal dialog, though. It's just more fluid about identity of participants. I generally think of it as different-timeline future-selves arguing about which of them has it better based on the decisions I'm about to make.

What do I do?

How about taking the question to a car mechanics forum?

And I'm wondering if there are engineering whistleblowers on this site that I can chat with.

Spongy means air in the lines which means the lines need to be "bled." A hard pedal with decreased effectiveness sounds like your brake power-assist is failing. With the engine off you should feel this effect after pumping the pedal two or three times. A hard spongy pedal seems contradictory.

Very few states give pedal force in lbs vs. pedal deflection standards, which I find rather unscientific. IMHO, the middle 1/3 of pedal travel should go from no braking to max braking, for a 100 lb. driver.
With a clutch, the middle 1/3 should go from no engagement to full engagement.

You're welcome! :)

My car seems to take a bit longer to break

That's a good thing :-P

What do I do?

Go to a competent mechanic. Spongy brakes commonly result from two causes -- either your braking system has air in it (usually because there is a leak), or your brake pads and/or rotors are worn out.

It's worth distinguishing a number of things.

1. Actually and visibly being really smart, and pretty much always right in their domain of expertise.

2. Trying to look really smart and right, over and above merely being so.

3. Arrogance in dealing with people who are wrong.

4. Arrogance in dealing with people disagreeing with oneself.

(1) is a great virtue, (2) and (4) are mortal sins of rationality, and (3) merely a venial one. I will overlook a lot of arrogance in someone who is actually pretty much always right, especially if it isn't me they're being arrogant at.

People who are insecure around smart people often read actually being right and knowing it (1 and 3) as pretending to be right and intimidating others (2 and 4).

I openly display my intelligent all the time. Nobody would -describe- it as that, however. They'd describe me as giving advice, suggesting solutions, or similar -specific- activities, and only in appropriate situations. (If you don't know when advice is desired - which is, critically, not whenever somebody mentions a problem they have - don't give it unless asked.)

"Openly displaying your intelligence", as an activity in itself, is merely -bragging-, and is just as annoying, and for precisely the same reason, as the guy who will tell anyone who will listen about how he's a motorcycle racer who could easily win any race he ever entered, but he just enjoys riding his motorcycle for the fun of it.

I think the ingrained hostility doesn't come from high school and media, but from human nature which doesn't like it when people are trying to raise their status relative to you.

But anyway, the motive of speaking the truth is different from the motive of displaying intelligence, so to the degree that someone has the second motive that is likely enough to hinder the first. So if someone has the second motive, that isn't a good reason to be hostile, but it is a good reason to take what they say with a grain of salt.

"attempt to" is a key phrase in your question. I don't see much trouble with openly displayed intelligence, as long as it's actually intelligent (correct, and directed to an agreed shared goal). Nobody much cares for show-offs or useless knowledge.

I do see a bit of resistance to "weird", which often comes with analysis. Much of the time, but not always, that's because the supposed-intelligent participant has done only a superficial analysis and not really attempted to understand the equilibrium that is the status quo.

High-school is ... unrelated to the real world, for which I am grateful. Don't extrapolate from what is effectively a Robbers Cave experiment that kids impose on each other in the absence of any meaningful effort/skill rewards.

For me the most annoying aspect of "displaying intelligence openly" is the following:

Imagine that you have an average person A, an intelligent person B, and a super-intelligent person C. More precisely, imagine that there are 100 As, 10 Bc, and 1 C, because most people are at the center of the bell curve.

From A's point of view, both B and C are smarter than him, and he cannot really compare them. All he can say is that he kinda understands what B says, but a lot of what C says is incomprehensive.

The experience of B is that most people are either A or B. Add some political or other mindkilling, and B may quickly develop a heuristic "everyone who agrees with me is a B, and everyone who disagrees is A and a huge waste of time".

Now once in a while B and C meet and disagree about something. B, using their long-practiced heuristics says "lol, you're an idiot".

An observer A looks at their interaction and thinks "B is probably right, since I know B to be a smart person; and C also seems kinda smart, but not as smart as B, and B says he is wrong, so he probably is".

From my point of view, B is "cheating" in this process, using both his intelligence and his lack of even higher intelligence to create an advantage over C. Thus I applaud the norms which prevent this, even if they were created for other reasons.

In digital markets with extremely quick liquidity like the stock exchange, Is investing based on macroeconomic factors and >megatrends foolhardy?

One shouldn't expect to systematically beat the market without privileged information. But even "trying to beat the market" (depending on what exactly that strategy entails) or doing what you describe is often better than what most people do in terms of actually growing their savings. Financial securities (especially stocks) have high enough long-run expected returns such that a "strategy" of routinely accidentally slightly overpaying for them and holding them still results in a lot more money than not investing at all.

Is it only sensible to invest when one has privellaged information including via analysis of public data at a level no one else >has done?

Not investing is far worse than shoving your money into random stocks and committing to reinvest all dividends for the next 50 years.

Unpack the question. What do you mean by "foolhardy"? What is your next-best option for your money?

In almost all cases, you should opt not to make a wager on a topic where you are at an information disadvantage. However, investments are not purely a wager - they're also direction of capital and sharing of risk (and reward) with for-profit organizations. It's quite possible that you can lose the wager part of your investment and still do fairly well on the long-term rewards of corporate shared ownership.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkage_disequilibrium

Being a sex buyer is low status. Being in an oppressed group such as sex workers is high status in many political contexts.

Cigratte companies manage to fund advocacy groups for smokers. Mafia that runs brothels on the other hand doesn't fund advocacy groups.

How about some variation on Bulls and Cows?

Based on simple coin flip; other games:

• Several coins;
• scissors paper rock (and then iterated)

I am sure there are more small games that have a similar "known" problem space.

The two-coins example might be useful as a first step, even if you then present a more difficult one.

Bridge, the card game. Bidding is the process of two players exchanging information about the cards they hold via the very limited communications channel (bids). The play itself is also used to transfer more information about which cards remain in the hand.

I don't know if that will work as a demonstration of the Aumann's Theorem, though, bridge gets very complicated very fast :-/

I would like to point out a concept that has recently entered into my life.

Sometimes these emotions are generated internally and often the word for the emotion is one that is about an emotion that "pulls" you to feel that way. An example is; "Appreciated" where something else gives you a feeling of being appreciated. It's not an emotion you can give to yourself. (only recognise it) where distress can be from yourself; or hesitation.

Not sure how that adds to the list exactly.

I make a spreadsheet of how often I think I experience each one - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lkOftycrnhjSdbC6cExawoiyX-Jbn9wuxg2GlCjGeh4/edit?usp=sharing on a scale of 1-10, nothing is 9 or 10 because that would imply I experience it all the time.

This is useful. Do you have experience with Focusing? Part of the workflow is to sit with your emotional state and gently try to discern what label applies to it. This can be hard because sometimes the feeling is complex or unclear, but I expect part of the difficulty lies in a simple lack of vocabulary with which to label the feeling.

Far out, that was an excellent account and several people had clearly used it to make important contributions.

It would be nice if there was a way to memorialize the posts or something externally. Or, perhaps the moderators could implement an 'official' throw-away to protect against this.

I have been a beneficiary of comments from the Username account and believe it does...or did a true service to the community. Thank you for taking it upon yourself to report this and making a new account.

It's worth contacting a moderator and seeing whether they can do anything about it.

I actually meant to ask at some point whether the Username account would have protection against people changing passwords willy-nilly, but I didn't because, you know... information hazards and all that. Didn't want to give people the idea. But now that it's happened, I suppose I could ask retrospectively: how come nobody ensured some protection against that?

I always assumed that was just one person. I feel like someone died. (Not really. But, how was I supposed to know it was an open account?)

It's not a straightforward subject. Legalized prostiution in Germany results in a situation where it likely would be good if the majority of brothels don't exist http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/human-trafficking-persists-despite-legality-of-prostitution-in-germany-a-902533.html because they are abusive to the women in them.

On the other hand there are people doing body work for whom the lines between sexual and nonsexual are pretty fluid. For those people a law forbidding sexual contact makes little sense.

If you focus on utilitarianism the question doesn't come up. The important thing isn't who "owes" but how we can produce utility. If that means the best way is to give betnets to African's than that's the thing to do, regardles of the concept of "owing".

I would only count debts toward the specific peoples directly affected; e.g. the Spanish Empire lived off Bolivian silver, the Belgians worked the Congolese to death, and the United States is literally built on stolen Native land. Those examples and many others allow for a case in favor of reparations.

However, the passage of time sometimes blurs the effects of exploitation and aggression. Should the UK sue Denmark for the Norman Conquest? Should Italy sue Germany because Germanic tribes destroyed the Roman Empire? Should Hungary sue Mongolia for what the Golden Horde did to them? I admit I don't know how to answer to that in a way that is consistent with my first paragraph.

Do western civilizations owe something to those civilizations that were disadvantaged as a result of imperialism?

No.

It is relatively easy to understand the situation when one person owes money to another person, having borrowed it before. It is also not much more difficult to understand the situation when one person owes another person a compensation for damages after being ordered by court to pay it. Somewhat more vague is a situation when there is no court involved, but the second person expects the first one to pay for damages (e.g. breaking a window), because it is customary to do so. All these situations involve one person owing a concrete thing, and the meaning of the word "owes" is (disregarding edge cases) relatively clear.

Problems arise when one tries to go from singular to plural but we still want to use intuition from the usage of singular verb. Quite often, there are many ways to extend the meaning of a singular verb to a plural verb in a way that is still compatible with the meaning of the former. For example, one can extend the singular verb "decides" to a many different group decision making procedures (voting, lottery, one person deciding for everyon, etc.), saying "a group decides" simply obscures this fact.

Concerning the word "owe", even when we have a well defined group of people, we usually prefer to either deal with them separately (e.g. customers may owe money for services) or create a juridical person which helps to abstract a group of people as one person and this allows us to use the word "owe" in its singular verb meaning. There are more ways to extend the meaning of the word "owe" from singular to plural, but they are quite often contentious.

"Western civilizations" is a very abstract group of people. It is not a well defined group of people. It is not a juridical person. It is not a country. It is not a clan. The singular verb "owes" is clearly inapplicable here, and if one wants to use it here, one must extend its meaning from singular to plural. But there seems to be a lot of possible extensions. Therefore one has to resort to other kinds of arguments (e.g. consequentialist arguments, arguments about incentives, etc.) to decide which meaning one prefers. But if that is the case, one can bypass the word "owe" entirely and go to those arguments instead, because that is essentially what one is doing, because words whose meanings one knows only very vaguely probably do not do much in actually shaping the overall argument.

In addition to that "being disadvantaged as a result of imperialism" is very dissimilar from "having a window broken by a neighbour", it is not a concrete thing. The central example of "owing something" is "owing a concrete and well defined thing". Whenever we have a definition that works well for a central example and we want to use it for a noncentral one, we again must extend it and there are often more than one way to extend it (Schelling points sometimes help to choose between all possible extensions, but often there are more than one of them and choice of the extension becomes a subject of debate).

In general, I would guess that if someone argues that an entity as abstract as "western civilizations" owes something to someone, most likely they are either unknowingly rationalizing the conclusion they came to by other means or simply sloppily using an intuition from the usage of the singular verb "owes". I think that the meaning of the word can be extended in many ways, many of which would still be compatible with the meaning of the singular word and some of them would imply "new generations are not responsible for the sins of the past ones", while some of them wouldn't, therefore it is probably better to bypass them altogether and attempt to solve a better defined problem.

Other words where trying to go from singular to plural often causes problems are: "owns", "chooses", "decides", "prefers" (problem of aggregation of ordinal utilities), etc.

How much does Mongolia owe Russia? How much do North African countries owe Europe for the millions of Europeans kidnapped and sold into the Arab slave trade in north Africa? The notion is itself ridiculous.

I think that framing "Imperialism" as belonging to the past is inaccurate.

Many of the problemmatic behaviours grouped together into the term "Imperialism" have not actually stopped. There are Western developed countries that are doing horrible things to non-Western developing countries right now, and doing horrible things to their own people too.

I think a good first step would be to stop doing the horrible stuff now. If the problemmatic behaviour stopped, the topic of redress for past wrongs could be considered from a better vantage point. "I'm sorry I killed your ancestors and stole their stuff 100 years ago" tastes like ashes when coming from someone who is killing your family and stealing your things now, or who is doing something more subtle but equally awful.

"Disadvantaged" is a word that glosses over the damage done. Also, the whole question could benefit from being more specific and defining terms better.

Is anywhere on Earth inhabited by the descendants of the humans who first moved in?

How does one deliver Interpersonal psychotherapy? It's just as effective as CBT without the psychobabble. I can't find information on what is actually done, however.

If you can't find information on what's done why do you think there less psychobabble than in CBT?

There are many shared Anki decks. In my experience, the hardest thing to get correct in Anki is picking the correct thing to learn, and seeing someone else's deck doesn't work all that well for it because there's no guarantee that they're any good at picking what to learn, either.

Most of my experience with Anki has been with lists, like the NATO phonetic alphabet, where there's no real way to learn them besides familiarity, and the list is more useful the more of it you know.

What I'd recommend is either picking selections from the source that you think are valuable, or summarizing the source into pieces that you think are valuable, and then sticking them as cards (perhaps with the title of the source as the reverse). The point isn't necessarily to build the mapping between the selection and the title, but to reread the selected piece in intervals determined by the forgetting function.