Hi everyone! This is an experimental thread to relax and enjoy the company of other aspiring rationalists. Special rules for communication and voting apply here. Please play along!

(If for whatever reason you cannot or don't want to follow the rules, please don't post in this thread. However, feel free to voice your opinion in the corresponding meta thread.)

Here is the spirit of the rules:

be nice
be cheerful
don't go meta

And here are the details:

On the scale from negative (hostility, complaints, passive aggression) through neutral (bare facts) to positive (happiness, fun, love), please only post comments from the "neutral to positive" half. Preferably at least slightly positive; but don't push yourself too far if you don't feel so. The goal is to make both yourself and your audience feel comfortable.

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Avoid inherently controversial topics, such as politics, religion, or interpretations of quantum physics.

Feel free to post stuff that normally doesn't get posted on LessWrong. Feel free to be silly, as long as it harms no one. Emoticons are allowed. Note: This website supports Unicode. ◕‿◕

Upvote the stuff you like. :)

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(Note: There is one user permanently banned from this website. Any comment posted from any of this user's new accounts is considered an intentional breaking of the rules, regardless of its content.)

Don't go meta in this thread. If you want to discuss whether the rules here should be different, or whether a specific comment did or didn't break the rules, or something like that, please use the meta thread.

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Even if you notice or suspect that other people are breaking some of the rules, please continue following all the rules. Don't let one uncooperative person start an avalanche of defection. That includes if you notice that people are not voting according to the rules. If necessary, complain in the meta thread.

Okay, that's enough rules for today. Have fun! I love you! ❤ ❤ ❤ ٩(⁎❛ᴗ❛⁎)۶

EDIT: Oops, I forgot the most important part. LOL! The topic is "anything that makes you happy" (basically Open Thread / Bragging Thread / etc., but only the positive things).

Open Threads

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[-]Fyrius9y300

controversial topics, such as (...) interpretations of quantum physics.

I love that this is a thing here.

[-]Fluttershy9y290

One time, Yvain mentioned on SlateStarCodex that it was surprising that he didn't have more conservative acquaintances. The reason for that was that people who are similar along certain axes tend to cluster together. So, when I say that you're a beautiful person, you can be sure that that's true, because everyone with a connection to this site holds a resilient spark within themselves that sings of hope for the future of humankind.

Awesomeness clusters here.

You are deserving of friendship and love. Do you know how uncaring the world is? The world has not praised you for being good at changing your mind. It has valued neither your intelligence, nor your ability to have an impact, to the degree to which these things ought to be valued. You are valuable. Remember this.

[-]Viliam9y60

That's why LW meetups are my favourite holiday of the year!

[-]SquirrelInHell9y230

I love you too! ❤ ❤ ❤

I mean, it's fun and all, but what do you think about:

spreading niceness to all discussion on LW, not just a special separate thread,
having an actual topic to discuss while being nice about it?

Edit: ah, right, you wanted to not go meta here. Sorry.

#LessWrongMoreNice

[-]Fluttershy9y120

I really like the tag #LessWrongMoreNice. :)

[-]Soothsilver9y90

LessWrongMoreNice is now my favourite hashtag.

[-]SquirrelInHell9y70

Thanks for noticing my sneaky attempts to peddle this idea :)

[-]Viliam9y70

Oh, I'm sorry, I completely forgot. :D :D :D

The topic was supposed to be "anything that makes you happy" (basically Open Thread / Bragging Thread / etc., but the positive subset of it). James_Miller guessed it correctly! Added to the article.

Your other question... /smiles and silently points towards the meta thread

[-]Gleb_Tsipursky9y20

Upvoted especially for the #LessWrongMoreNice promotion :-)

[-]Fyrius9y220

I'm really very happy that this whole website/community exists! I think it's one of the best influences on my life that I can think of.

Honestly, the world is a terribly confusing place to me. I'm not natively good at forming opinions — probably worse still than the average untrained person. And there are so many people very firmly believing contradictory things about so many things, and so many arguments that seem so convincing and still turn out to be wrong, so many different strands of dark side epistemology. LessWrong, to me, is an oasis of sanity in that landscape of discord. LessWrong represents a school of thought that teaches you how to wade through the fog without stumbling quite as much, making the Problem of Figuring Out What To Believe a lot more manageable.

And I like how there's no angry talk here, just an academic atmosphere of unjudging curiosity. I appreciate that too.

[-]MrMind9y110

I almost cannot measure how LW saved my life in multiple occasions... everytime I do not fall for a fad or I notice I'm confused I thank this site.

[-]SquirrelInHell9y110

I think most of us have felt that the world is confusing at one time or another... I like how this comic sums it up.

Anyway, I notice angry talk around here sometimes, but mostly the anger is on a very high level of abstraction :) Hopefully no such things happen in this thread.

If you feel like writing about it, I'd like to hear how exactly LW influenced your life. This is a very interesting topic for me, as I'm putting a lot of energy myself into research and experimentation on how to apply rationality to improve lives (and my own life in particular).

#LessWrongMoreNice

[-]Fyrius9y70

If you feel like writing about it, I'd like to hear how exactly LW influenced your life.

Hm, maybe I will. : )
It definitely feels like it's been a tremendously good influence on me, even if it might be more challenging to find hard evidence to support that feeling (and we know how important that is). At the very least, I feel that I've learned so much about advanced reasoning skills and about biases and pitfalls that can get in your way if you don't take them into account.

I'd say the Human's Guide to Words is a great example of a sequence that's helped me think in ways that are less likely to be baffled by or misinterpret complicated situations. The notion that a label has no intrinsic importance, and that its applicability is completely irrelevant and uninteresting if you already know all the features that would be implied by your possible usage of that label, sure saves you a lot of trouble when it comes to defining your identity and dealing (or not bothering to deal) with people who are going to insist that you are or are not an X.

[-]chaosmage9y00

I heartily agree. This xkcd sums it up really nicely I think.

[-]Soothsilver9y140

It's old news but I recently came across this article and found it quite cheerful.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/10/slow-but-steady/

[-]Viliam9y60

Yeah, good visualizations allow us to see the slow but steady improvements.

Maybe we should do the same things in our personal lives, e.g. to make a 1m long timescale of our lives, and put there all our successes (such as "learned to walk", "learned to talk", "completed school", "found a boyfriend/girlfriend", "started a blog", "composed a song", "had 10000 readers on the blog", etc.), and suddenly we would realize how awesome we are!

[-]chaosmage9y00

You mean something like this?

[-]Dagon9y130

Yay! Congrats to all of us on being among the remarkably few conscious entities alive in the early part of the 21st century!

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke9y100

Yesterday evening I enjoyed our regular get-together with friends and I'm still feeling very happy because of a talk with my brother-in-law that improved our mutual understanding a lot and reduced a long standing tension!

[-]Viliam9y30

More details available?

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke9y100

Can't say because our discussions default to private. In general this includes even the topic; I realize that I might already violate his preference.

Actually that is one insight of an earlier talk that led to the realization that people have an enormous variety of privacy preferences and it may pay off to talk about it!

[-]Fuglinnavon9y90

It's good to see that LW too can be really human sometimes

[-]Kaj_Sotala9y90

:D ^_^ <3

[-]James_Miller9y80

Metaforms is a fantastic logical reasoning one player board game for children.

[-]Viliam9y30

Seems awesome! Do we have a wiki page with resources for children?

This game seems appropriate from age 5 or 6 years, maybe a gifted 4-years old.

[-]James_Miller9y70

The games can get fairly challenging, and some of the puzzles took me awhile to solve so I would agree with the manufacturer recommended age of 6-15.

Do we have a wiki page with resources for children?

Great idea.

[-]ike9y80

This is hilarious.

[-]Viliam9y90

(｡◕‿◕｡) Thank you!

[-]polymathwannabe9y70

Aurora Peachy is a huge Sailor Moon fangirl and watching her get so excited for every episode always melts my heart.

[-]Viliam9y20

Fascinating! Almost made me watch the series... except that I already did, and didn't have the same reaction. Not bad, though.

[-]polymathwannabe9y20

It's the remake.

[-]RowanE9y40

She fangirls over the remake? I've never heard the remake described as anything other than some variant of "lifeless", especially from fans of classic Sailor Moon.

EDIT: Forgot it was the positivity thread for a second, let me have another go at that: So I guess maybe I should have another go at the remake! I actually really like being convinced to like a show I was previously "meh" about. Some shows it's more fun to get a hateboner/kismesis thing going for, but Sailor Moon Crystal isn't one of them.

[-]tadrinth9y20

My fiance likes it, supposedly it's been very true to the original manga. It might just be better than the original dub.

[-]Jiro9y00

According to anncast the later seasons of Crystal have gotten better.

[-]Viliam9y20

Oh my! Anime series, films, anime remake, live-action series, musicals. Quite popular.

[-]username29y70

Who are your favorite low profile LWers? Are there any LWers whose comments you often find insightful, interesting or otherwise worth reading even though they aren't among top users or have a lot of karma?

[-]username29y20

I like some comments by other people who use this account. You can't get more low profile than that.

[-]Gleb_Tsipursky9y00

I like the insights provided by query and Bound_up

[-]MrMind9y00

I find Lumifer, despite being abrasive, cynical and sarcastic, quite entertaining and enlightening at times :) Or maybe even because he is abrasive and sarcastic...

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

[-]gjm9y60

I don't think Lumifer quite counts as "low profile" or "not among top users".

[-]MrMind9y70

Sorry, I totally missed that part. You're right of course. Retracted.

[-]gjm9y70

No problem; an easy mistake to make. Well done for retracting so graciously. (Am I being positive enough?)

[-]MrMind9y60

Ahah, I think so :) It reminds me of a story I heard: apparently in the Chinese culture there's not a big tradition of thanking someone for their services, so that a guy that thanked the waiter for every course got renamed 'Xie xie xiaosheng', Mr Thank you.

[-]dxu9y20

he

For some reason my brain keeps insisting that Lumifer is not a "he", but I don't know why.

[-]MrMind9y00

Ah, on the contrary I've never thought Lumifer could be a she, maybe because of a personal sexist bias or vague reminiscence from high-school Latin that a female Lumifer would be a Lumifera?

[+][anonymous]9y-50

[-]taryneast9y60

My garden makes me happy.

Right now the leaves are turning yellow and there's a new, autumnal bite in the air that I find invigorating.

The birds are still visiting, and every now and then I'll feed the king parrots and rosellas seed and watch them twitter at each other, all colourful plumage and huffed-up self-importance. I think they sound like guinea pigs, which always makes me laugh :)

[-]Viliam9y60

Kitties!!!

This is my daughter's (13 months old) favourite kitten video. So adorable! She keeps meowing with them. (ʘ‿ʘ)

If you have nice videos of cats (or dogs, or birds, or maybe horses -- those are the species she recognizes already), please give me the links. Specifically, the videos of animals moving and making sounds, without human commentary, preferably more different individuals of the same species. Thanks!

[-]Gleb_Tsipursky9y00

Here's a video for your daughter of our cat doing super-silly stuff.

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke9y50

I am very happy that the meta thread is over in the open thread. Very good idea!

[-]PhilipKolbo9y40

Building/Making objects for my pockets, artistry, and everyday life makes me happy.

For example, I recently created an earplug carrying case out of a contact lens case. I cut up, sanded, engraved, and painted the case. It is now a matte black, small, and efficient container, replacing the oversized and ugly case the earplugs came with. Every time I pull it out of my pocket before I play drums it makes me smile.

Has anyone customized or made anything that makes them very happy?

Also, I love SquirrelInHell's #LessWrongMoreNice, so I'm putting it here.

[-]Viliam9y10

Most of my work is virtual (as I sometimes say: "when they turn off the electric power, my whole life's work will be lost"), so I also feel great whenever I do something in the "real space".

[-]username29y40

What are your favorite puns?

[-]roystgnr9y90

"Before you use Australia's social policies to explain its high crime rate, remember to adjust for con founders."

"I, for one, like Roman numerals." (can't find the original source)

[-]Sabiola9y80

He asked her to conjugate, but she declined.

[-]NancyLebovitz9y70

I don't have my puns ranked but here's one I like:

I thought I saw a whale but it was a fluke.

[-]TheAltar9y30

I think weird sun twitter is really great and any of you that are weird suns are really great.

[-]knb9y20

I found this to be a cheerful video, about people working on fusion. (It's a promo, so dark arts warning applies.)

[-]Viliam9y00

Related TED talk (different company).

[-]Gleb_Tsipursky9y20

I'm happy about spring here in Columbus, OH. We recently moved to a new place and I just cut the grass here for the first time (we didn't have any grass to cut in our previous place). Domesticity feels nice :-)

[-][anonymous]9y20

https://soundcloud.com/user8536070/power-remix-ft-jay-z-swizz-beatz

[-]JohnC2015_duplicate0.344997729640454059y00

hahaha..Well, what can I say? The title says it all - this is "Anything that makes you happy" LOL :)

The spirit of the rules will always be there, you just have to play with them :)

This is a fun, informative read! :)

[+]avwenceslao9y-60

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