I might be super mean about this!

I'd be interested! I hereby promise to read and comment, unless you've gone totally off the bland end.

A particularity of English is that to be means a lot of different things. It covers three distrinct categories in natural semantic metalanguage

If it turns out to be the case that the main reason why Chinese philosophers never discussed Being is that Chinese has no word for "be," that would seem to me to be a very strong indication that Western philosophers have spent centuries asking the wrong questions

Or that Eastern philosophers have spent centuries failing to ask the right questions. If language A makes it easy to ask a certain question and language B makes it hard, it doesn't follow that it's a bad question arising only from quirks of language A; instead it could be a good question hidden by quirks of language B (or revealed by in-this-case-beneficial quirks of language A).

It seems a stretch to put Buddhism in the category of don't-really-care-about-Being. Rather, it's an important point that there is no being and realizing so brings countless bliss and enlightenment.

I was under the impression that 是 was Chinese for "to be". The nuance isn't quite the same--you can say 是 in response to "are or aren't you American?", but that's more or less subject-omission--but it seems close enough?

But my experience with Chinese includes only two years of Mandarin classes and a few podcasts; I haven't studied the linguistics in so much detail, and that studying ended 5 years ago, so if you're basing this on something I don't know, I'd be glad for the correction.

Related to this, I am trying to get a subreddit going for statistical decision theory links and papers to discuss: https://www.reddit.com/r/DecisionTheory/

Right now it's just me dumping in decision-theory related material like cost-benefit analyses, textbooks, relevant blog posts, etc, but hopefully other people will join in. We have flair and a sidebar now! If anyone wants to be a mod, just ask. (Workload should be negligibly small, this is more so the subreddit doesn't get locked by absence.)

Your average disco is such a company. They make parties that people can enter by paying money.

not profitable. companies try, venues for example - regularly email clubs and try to get business from them.

source: personal experience.

I had a friend who organized these kinds of events. She made okay money for the amount of time invested in the organization of the event itself, but events were sporadic, and once you considered the time investiture in getting the event, a retail job paid rather better. If you can achieve the kind of success where people seek you out, it would pay pretty well, but that requires considerable social capital and skill, and there are other opportunities where similar social capital and skill would pay better.

If I understand correctly, FDIC insurance costs more that way, so whatever you save in negative interest, you'd lose and then some on FDIC insurance.

"Abuse" is not a binary thing; it's a scale. Just because you were not at one extreme, does not mean that you were necessarily at the other extreme or near it.

The article disclaims that fussng over labelling is not particularly helpful. But is this a healthy reframe or experience to identify with?

Depends on how you are going to react to the label. The healthy aspect is that it may allow you to see causalities in your life that you have previously censored from yourself; and then you can take specific actions to untangle the problems.

The unhealthy aspect is if you take it with a "fixed mindset", and start crying about your past ("I am tainted, forever tainted"), or in extreme case if you start building some ideology of revenge against the whole evil society (or parts of the society) responsible for not preventing the bad things from happening to you.

I reckoned it may be more prudent to ask how. How can I overcome these feelings.

Seems like you are choosing generally the good direction.

My line of questioning was influence by the memory of a friend who once mused that she is grateful for all the relationships that didn’t work out, because there was something good in all of them

Okay, I wouldn't go that far. ("What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger", Just World Hypothesis, etc.) It is good to react to bad things by deriving useful lessons. However, in a parallel universe you could have good things happen to you, and still derive useful lessons from them. (Or you could derive useful lessons from bad things that happened to other people.) Bad things are simply bad things, no need to excuse them, no cosmic balance that needed to happen to make you a better person. That would mean denying that those things were actually bad.

Being able to turn a bad experience into a good lesson, is a good message about you and your abilities. Not about the bad experience per se. A different person could remain broken by the same experience.

DON’T dwell on the past

I'd say: Use the past to extract useful information and move on, not to build a narrative for your life.

DON’T play the blame game

I'd say: Admit that some people have fucked up, but don't waste your time planning revenge (it is usually not the optimal thing to do with your life). Maybe don't even analyze too much who or how precisely have fucked up, if such analysis would take too much energy.

DON’T suppress your feelings

I agree.

DON’T fear vulnerability

Depends on context. Feelling vulnerable (in situations where you feel safe) is okay. In public, we all wear masks, so it would be inappropriate to e.g. start thinking about your childhood when you are at a job interview.

DON’T focus on the negative

Keep focused on where you want to get.

‘’Males are not supposed to feel vulnerable or fearful about sex.’’

Overcoming fear is always healthy, but you should not let social expectations dictate how you have to feel. There's no single way how men are supposed to behave. Trying to force masculinity to fit inside a rigid box of allowed behaviors is a recipe for frustration and self-hatred. If you have feelings of vulnerability and fear, rather than denying or repressing them, you can observe and understand them.

In cases like this I always recommend the Empty Closets forum. Members are knowledgeable and compassionate.

Though, one link on the page, hyperlinked as ‘sorting it out for yourself’appealed to my confusion. I clicked on it and reconsidered. There are some circumstances from my childhood that I had not considered child abuse that I can reframe as child abuse.

That's dangerous territory. Quite a lot of people got talked by their therapist has having false memories of abuse.

How can I overcome these feelings.

There are many psychological techniques to overcome feelings. There's CBT with includes workbooks like The Feeling Good handbook and there Focusing.

I am not sure what exactly you wanted to say. All I got from reading it is: "human anatomy is complicated, non-biologists hugely underestimate this, modifying the anatomy of human brain would be incredibly difficult".

I am not what is the relation to the following part (which doesn't speak about modifying the anatomy of human brain):

It felt implied that 'rationality' was a culture of either hacking humanity, or patching together the best practices accumulated in the past

Are you suggesting that for increasing rationality, using "best practices" will be not enough, changes in anatomy of human brain will be required (and we underestimate how difficult it will be)? Or something else?

I know it is dishonest to ask LW-ers to spend time on studying exactly human anatomy, but even a thorough look at some skeleton should give you a vibe of how defined human bodies are.

I see three lines of addressing this concern:
1) Anatomy was over a long time under strong evolutionary pressure. Human intelligence is a fairly recent phenomena of the last 100,000 years. It's a mess that's not as well ordered as anatomy.
2) Individual humans deviate more from the textbook anatomy than you would guess by reading the textbook.
3) The brain seems to be build out of basic modules that easily allow it to add an additional color if you edit the DNA in the eye via gene therapy. People with implented magnets can feel magnetic fields. It's modules allow us to learn complex mental tasks like reading texts which is very far from what we evolved to do.

The XKCD for it: DNA (or "Biology is largely solved"): https://xkcd.com/1605/

This is awesome. Awesome awesome awesome. I have been trying to code something like this for a long time but I've never got the hang of UI design.

Moderately.

On the plus side it's forcing people to acknowledge the uncertainty involved in many numbers they use.

On the minus side it's treating everything as a normal (Gaussian) distribution. That's a common default assumption, but it's not necessarily a good assumption. To start with an obvious problem, a lot of real-world values are bounded, but the normal distribution is not.

This isn't "more evidence can be bad", but "seemingly-stronger evidence can be weaker". If you do the math right, more evidence will make you more likely to get the right answer. If more evidence lowers your conviction rate, then your conviction rate was too high.

Briefly, I think what's going on is that a 'yes' presents N bits of evidence for 'guilty', and M bits of evidence for 'the process is biased', where M>N. The probability of bias is initially low, but lots of yeses make it shoot up. So you have four hypotheses (bias yes/no cross guilty yes/no), the two bias ones dominate, and their relative odds are the same as when you started.

So, why not stab someone in front of everyone to ensure that they all rule you guilty?

I believe I read somewhere on LW about an investment company that had three directors, and when they decided whether to invest in some company, they voted, and invested only if 2 of 3 have agreed. The reasoning behind this policy was that if 3 of 3 agreed, then probably it was just a fad.

Unfortunately, I am unable to find the link.

See:

• "Probing the Improbable: Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes"
• http://www.gwern.net/The%20Existential%20Risk%20of%20Mathematical%20Error
• Jaynes on the Emperor of China fallacy
• Schimmack's incredibility index

If you are more confident that the method is inaccurate when it is operating then it being low spread is indication that it is not operating. A TV that shows a static image that flickers when you kick it more likely is recieving actual feed than one that doesn't flicker when punched.

If you have multiple TVs that all flicker at the same time it is likely that the cause was the weather rather than the broadcast

"The street finds its own uses for things." -- William Gibson

My model of him has him having an attitude of "if I think that there's a reason to be highly confident of X, then I'm not going to hide what's true just for the sake of playing social games".

You seem to assume that MWI makes the Sequences more vulnerable; i.e. that there are people who feel okay with the rest of the Sequences, but MWI makes them dismiss it as pseudoscience.

I think there are other things that rub people the wrong way (that EY in general talks about some topics more than appropriate for his status, whether it's about science, philosophy, politics, or religion) and MWI is merely the most convenient point of attack (at least among those people who don't care about religion). Without MWI, something else would be "the most controversial topic which EY should not have added because it antagonizes people for no good reason", and people would speculate about the dark reasons that made EY write about that.

For context, I will quote the part that Yvain quoted from the Sequences:

Everyone should be aware that, even though I’m not going to discuss the issue at first, there is a sizable community of scientists who dispute the realist perspective on QM. Myself, I don’t think it’s worth figuring both ways; I’m a pure realist, for reasons that will become apparent. But if you read my introduction, you are getting my view. It is not only my view. It is probably the majority view among theoretical physicists, if that counts for anything (though I will argue the matter separately from opinion polls). Still, it is not the only view that exists in the modern physics community. I do not feel obliged to present the other views right away, but I feel obliged to warn my readers that there are other views, which I will not be presenting during the initial stages of the introduction.

Everyone please make your own opinion about whether this is how cult leaders usually speak (because that seems to be the undertone of some comments in this thread).

Because he was building a tribe. (He's done now).

edit: This should actually worry people a lot more than it seems to.

Given the way the internet works bloggers who don't take strong stances don't get traffic. If Yudkowsky wouldn't have took positions confidently, it's likely that he wouldn't have founded LW as we know it.

Shying away from strong positions for the sake of not wanting to be vulnerable is no good strategy.

I've also seen a milder claim from his that exposure to moderate temperature extremes (cold/hot showers, I think) makes one's blood vessels more flexible.

Being able to withstand extreme colds isn't a pretty useful skill?

Buck Kennedy

Brian Kennedy. Note that he's on the "Against" side with Aubrey, as makes sense given the Buck Institute's goal to "extend help towards the problems of the aged."

Reading that HN discussion... well, I understand that it doesn't necessarily tell me anything, but socially I can't help but notice how idiotic anti-LWers sound in that thread. Fnords upon strawmen upon fnords upon cherry-picking upon fnords upon claims that if anyone on LW ever said that the probability of something is greater than zero that means every single LWers is certain that thing is guaranteed upon mood affiliation upon misspellings of EY's name upon claims that if you don't condemn poster's political enemy you must be supporting it et cetera et cetera.

Use RAID on ZFS. RAID is not a backup solution, but with the proper RAIDZ6 configuration will protect you against common hard drive failure scenarios. Put all your files on ZFS. I use a dedicated FreeNAS file server for my home storage. Once everything you have is on ZFS, turn on snapshotting. I have my NAS configured to take a snapshot every hour during the day (set to expire in a week), and one snapshot on Monday which lasts 18 months. The short lived snapshots lets me quickly recover from brain snafus like overwriting a file.

Long lived snapshotting is amazing. Once you have filesystem snapshots, incremental backups become trivial. I have two portable hard drives, one onsite and one offsite. I plug in the hard drive, issue one command, and a few minutes later, I've copied the incremental snapshot to my offline drive. My backup hard drives become append only logs of my state. ZFS also lets you configure a drive so that it stores copies of data twice, so I have that turned on just to protect against the remote chance of random bitflips on the drive.

I do this monthly, and it only burns about 10 minutes a month. However, this isn't automated. If you're willing to trust the cloud, you could improve this and make it entirely automated with something like rsync.net's ZFS snapshot support. I think other cloud providers also offer snapshotting now, too.

Use a backup system that automatically backs up your data, and then nags at you if the backup fails. Test to make sure that it works.

For people who don't want / can't run their own, I've found that Crashplan is a decent one. It's free, if you only back up to other computers you own (or other peoples' computers); in my case I've got one server in Norway and one in Ireland. There have, however, been some doubts about Crashplan's correctness in the past.

There are also about half a dozen other good ones.

Generally speaking, the best practice is to have two separate backups, one of them offsite.

First, you might want to run some kind of a RAID setup so that a single disk failure doesn't affect much. RAID is not backup, but it's useful.

Second, you might want to set up some automated backup/copy of your data to a different machine or to a cloud. The advantage is that it's setup-and-forget. The disadvantage is that if you have data corruption or malware, etc. the corrupted data could overwrite your clean backup before you notice something is wrong. Because of that it would not be a bad idea to occasionally make known-clean copies of data (say, after a disk check and a malware check) on some offline media like a flash drive or an external hard drive.

Disk space is really REALLY cheap. It's not rational :-/ to skimp on it.

As boring as it might sound, something with the term quantitative or similar might be prudent in the long run.

Bay Esteem (halfway sounds like Bayes Team, har har).

Conquan.

Or AskClippy :-)

quanto costa

It should be obvious how focusing on one of these groups and downplaying the significance of the other creates two different political opinions. Paul Graham complains about his critics that they are doing this (and he is right about this), but he does the same thing too, only less blindly... he acknowledges that the other group exists and that something should be done, but that feels merely like a disclaimer so he can display the required virtue, but his focus is somewhere else.

So why are you focusing your complaining on Paul Graham's essay rather than on the essays complaining about "economic inequality" without even bothering to make the distinction? What does that say about your "ugh fields"?

In fact a remarkable number of the people perusing strategy (1) are the same people railing against economic inequality. One would almost suspect they're intentionally conflating (1) and (2) to provide a smokescreen for their actions. Also since strategy (1) requires more social manipulation skills then strategy (2), the people pursuing strategy (1) can usually arrange for anti-inequality policies to mostly target the people in group (2).

I'd say that his critics are annoyed that he's ignoring their motte [ETA: Well, not ignoring, but not treating as the bailey], from which they're basing their assault on Income Inequality. "Come over here and fight, you coward!"

There's not much concession in agreeing that fraud is bad. Look: Fraud is bad. And income inequality is not. Income inequality that promotes or is caused by fraud is bad, but it's bad because fraud is bad, not because income inequality is bad.

It's possible to be ignorant of the portion of the intellectual landscape that includes that motte; to be unaware of fraud. It's possible to be ignorant of the portion of the intellectual landscape that doesn't include the bailey; to be unaware of wealth inequality that isn't hopelessly entangled in fraud. But once you realize that the landscape includes both, you have two conversations you can have: One about income inequality, and one about fraud.

Which is to say, you can address the motte, or you can address the bailey. You don't get to continue to pretend they're the same thing in full intellectual honesty.

I would say that the really simplified version is that there are essentially two different ways how people get rich. (1) By creating value; and today individuals are able to create incredible amounts of value thanks to technology. (2) By taking value from other people, using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word;

Sure, but does rent-seeking really explain the increase in inequality since, say, the 1950s or so, which is what most folks tend to be worried about and what's discussed in Paul Graham's essay? I don't think it does, except as a minor factor (that is, it could certainly explain increased wealth among congress-critters and other members of the 'Cathedral'); the main factor was technical change favoring skilled people and sometimes conferring exceptional amounts of wealth to random "superstars".

Paul Graham ... does the same thing too

Well, but he's writing an essay and has a position to put forward. Not being blind to counter-arguments does not require you to never come to a conclusion.

At a crude level, the pro arguments show the benefits, the contra arguments show the costs, but if you do the cost-benefit analysis and decide that it's worth it, you can have an express definite position without necessarily ignoring chunks of reality.

"More specifically, after reading the essay Economic Inequality by Paul Graham, I would say that the really simplified version is that there are essentially two different ways how people get rich. (1) By creating value; and today individuals are able to create incredible amounts of value thanks to technology. (2) By taking value from other people, using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon."

Which one is inheritance?

People in the studies presumably don't take it all in the morning. Do you have an estimate of how that affects the total effect? How much bigger would you estimate the effect to be when people take it in the morning?

Is it 5000IU per day?

There is Bostrom's argument - but there's also another take on these types of scenario, which you may be confusing with the Bostrom argument. In those takes, you're not sure whether you're the simulation or the original - and since there's billions of simulations, there's a billion to one chance you'll be the one tortured.

Just make sure you're not pattern matching to the first type of argument when it's actually the second.

My take on ethics is that it breaks into two parts: Individual ethics and population ethics.

Population ethics in the general sense of action toward the greater good for the population under consideration (however large). Action here consequently meaning action by the population, i.e. among the available actions for a population - which much take into account that not all beings of the population are equal or willing to contribute equally.

Individual ethics on the other hand are ethics individual beings can potentially be convinced of (by others or themselves).

These two interplay. More altruistically minded individuals might (try to) adopt sensible population ethics as their maxim, some individuals might just adopt the ethics of their peers and and others might adopt ego-centrical or tribal ethics.

I do not see either of these as wrong or some better then others (OK, I admit I do; personally, but not abstractly). People are different and I accept that. Populations have to deal with that. Also note that people err. You might for example (try to) follow a specific population ethics because you don't see a difference between population and individual ethics.

This can feel quite natural because many people have a tendency to contribute toward the greater good of their population. This is an important aspect because it allows population ethics to even have a chance to work. It couples population ethics to individual ethics (my math mind kicks in and wonders about a connection coefficient between these two and if and how this could be measured and how it depends on the level of altruism present in a population and how to measure that...).

What about my ethics? I admit that some people are more important to me than others. I invest more energy in the well-being of my children, myself and my family. And in an emergency I'd take greater risks to rescue them (and me) than unrelated strangers. I believe there is such a thing as an emotional distance to other people. I also believe that this is partly hard-wired and partly socialized. I'm convinced that whom and what one feels empathy with depends to a large degree on socialization. For example if you were often part of large crowds of totally different people you might learn to feel empathy toward strangers - and resent the idea of different treatment of e.g. foreigners. So populations could presumable shape this. And you could presumably hack yourself (or your next person) too.

But assume a given individual with a given willingness to do some for the greater good of their population and a capability to do so (including to reason about this). What should they do? I think a 'should' always involves a tension between what one wants and what the population demands (or in general forces of the environment). Therefore I split this in two again: What is the most sensible thing to do given what the individual wants. That might be a fusion of population ethics (to satisfy the desire for the greater good) and individual ethics (those parts that make differences between people). And what is the most sensible thing to do given what the population demands? That depends on many factors and probably involves trade-offs. It seems to me that it shifts behavior toward conforming more with some population ethics.

And what about your question: I in my framework there can't be a proof that you individually 'should' care for the other selves. You may care with them to some degree and society might tell you that you should, but that doesn't mean that you have to rewire yourself to do so (though my may decide that you want to (and risk to err in that)).

Totally tangential point: Do you sometimes have the feeling that you could continue the though of a sentence along different paths and you want to convey both? But the best way to convey the idea is to pick up the thought at the given sentence (or at least conveying both thoughs requires some redundancy to reestablish the context later on). Is there a literary device to deal with this? Or should I just embrace more repetition?

So the child was generalizing along the wrong dimension, so you decided the solution was to train an increase in generalization of the word meow which is what you got. You need to teach discrimination; not generalization. A method for doing so is to present the pink cat and pink fish sequentially. Reward the meow response in the presence of the cat, and reward fish responses to the fish. Eventually meow responses to the fish should extinguish.

The necessity of negative examples is well-known when training classifiers.

Teaching subtraction:

'See, you had five apples, and you ate three. How many apples do you have?' 'Five.' 'No, look here, you only have two left. Okay, you had six apples, and ate four, how many apples do you have now?' 'Five.' 'No, dear, look here... Okay...' Sigh. 'Mom?' 'Yes, dear?' 'And if I have many apples, and I eat many, how many do I have left?..'

I'd guess that that falls under the usual paradigms like Savage or Von Neumann-Morgenstern. For example, the Kelly criterion.

Sure. Just stop thinking in terms of discrete probabilities and start thinking in terms of full distributions.

What are "Cor:" and "Rel:"? Are those conditional predictions?

What is the meaning of the global temperature predictions? Are you going to compare the average temperature of 2025 to the average temperature of 2015? The average of one decade to another?

Are you going to bet on this? Your stock predictions and 2016 political predictions are pretty far from consensus and easy to bet on.

Trump to get Republican nomination: 65% Cruz to get Republican nomination: 35%

That suggest zero chance for Marco Rubio. Why so low? Especially with 10% left open for a non-Hilary, non-Sanders candidate.

So probability of either Trump or Cruz is 100%?

Major military conflict between two first world nations over the next ten years: 10%

What's a major military conflict?

Couple of questions. What's your definition of a "market slump" and/or an "economic crisis"? Also, what's Health Index and what is the US National Health Database?