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I should say that research shows people had better outcomes recovering from break ups when they started dating someone. I'm not sure if this is because it makes you feel wanted, because of selection bias (more people who dated were ready to date), or because the new relationship itself. On the other hand, overwhelming colloquial knowledge has it that rebound relationships are not a good idea, but I couldn't find actual any evidence to that effect. I'm not totally sure which to believe; the science is strong evidence from a small sample size, colloquial evidence is weak evidence from a huge sample size.
Update on the Brain Preservation Foundation Prize
Brain Preservation Foundation President Kenneth Hayworth just wrote a synopsis of the recent ongoings from the major two competitors for the BPF prizes. Here is the summary:
Brain Preservation Prize competitor Shawn Mikula just published his whole mouse brain electron microscopy protocol in Nature Methods (paper, BPF interview), putting him close to winning the mouse phase of our prize.
Brain Preservation Prize competitor 21st Century Medicine has developed a new “Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation” technique–preliminary results show good ultrastructure preservation even after storage of a whole rabbit brain at -135 degrees C.
This work was funded in part from donations from LW users. In particular, a grant to support the work of LW user Robert McIntyre at 21st Century Medicine that the BPF was able to provide has been instrumental.
In order to continue this type of research and to bolster it, BPF welcomes your support in a variety of different ways, including awareness-raising, donations, and volunteering. Please reach out if you would like to volunteer, or you can PM me and I will help put you in touch. And if you have any suggestions for the BPF, please feel free to discuss them in the comments below.
Interesting data and makes sense. My intuition is that colloquial knowledge is positing a short run vs long run trade-off, in so far as you're more likely to settle in a rebound relationship, and then this could set you up for another break-up and associated long-term unhappiness. Short-term studies are not well-suited to address this.
In response to
We Should Introduce Ourselves Differently
Below is the current text (without links). I agree your sentence is helpful. Do you want to add it to the current page or replace the bias sentence?
In the past four decades, behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists have discovered many cognitive biases human brains fall prey to when thinking and deciding.
Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking.
Bayesian reasoning offers a way to improve on the native human reasoning style. Reasoning naively, we tend not to seek alternative explanations, and sometimes underrate the influence of prior probabilities in Bayes' theorem.
Less Wrong users aim to develop accurate predictive models of the world, and change their mind when they find evidence disconfirming those models, instead of being able to explain anything.
For more, see the Less Wrong about page.
In response to
Strategies and tools for getting through a break up
One of the best posts I've read on LW in awhile. Love the book metaphor.
Totally honest question here, and please feel free to not answer this if you'd rather not: how can you tell when a relationship is a rebound relationship?
I already am published. When we got the paper accepted, instead of congratulating me, he said "Now you need to get another one before you graduate."
Ugh, that's awful, sorry. It seems like you have a pretty complicated and frustrating situation -- feel free to PM me or email me (gmail: amckenz) if you want to talk more.
In response to
Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015
Repost due to lack of reply: I’m a fourth year PhD student in the life sciences, and I need mentorship, preferably from a Slytherin, or at least someone with a Slytherin hat. My advisor doesn’t want me doing “mercenary collaborations”, or quick experiments with researchers outside my field in exchange for secondary authorships. He says I need to focus on my thesis research in the next year so as to publish and graduate. Are there any academics in the LW readership who have the insight to tell me whether this is good advice or whether he just wants me pumping out papers with his name on them so he can get tenure?
I'm in a PhD program in the life sciences and although I haven't graduated myself (still in my first year), based on almost all of the advice I've read, this is good advice. The way to prove to your advisor that you deserve to be able to do quick secondary experiments with people outside of your field is to submit a paper of your own, and then you can do those experiments in the interim while you're waiting for the reviews. That said, I don't think I'm all that Slytherin (although I admit that this is what a Slytherin would say).
Thanks for pointing this out. I'd seen their site before but could get no solid details on how they'd actually accomplish the 'backups'. How'd you come across those details?
Oops, didn't realize that those (big picture) details weren't on their website. I think if you're curious you should contact them.
In response to
What are the resolution limits of medical imaging?
Here's an interesting link: http://www.brainbackups.com/
[some big picture narrative redacted]
In response to
Open thread, Mar. 23 - Mar. 31, 2015
Does the harm of smoking scale linearly? I went from about 15 cig a day to about 3, without any effort, at some point it just made me feel sick and nauseous if I wasn't having it with/after coffee. Consider the problem 80% solved? Stupid question, but why do people talk about the harm of smoking in general, instead of weighting it with dose? Because most people cannot before a pack a day? I too was on my to that if not for the new nausea effect. One study suggests linearity for one effect at least for men but probably nobody has a firm idea whether overally all of the effects are linear or not, but why shouldn't they be? At this point the only reason to not stop completely is that coffee generates a strong smoke craving.
The search term "pack years" may be helpful to you. Dose is definitely considered important.
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Would you mind summarizing the summary? :) I'm not familiar with the science but would like to understand the gist of why the work of those two competitors is important.
Sure. Basically, there are two groups, each of which has made a major contribution:
1) Shawn Mikula and his group. They have made substantial progress (some would say, almost solved) of how to make the neuronal connections and other brain structures such as white matter tracts in a full mouse brain traceable using electron microscopy. Electron microscopy is the lowest level of imaging currently feasible, and can clearly resolve structures that are thought to be key to memory such as synapses.
2) The 21CM group, including Robert McIntyre. They have developed a totally new method of preserving a brain that should yield both highly practical and technical sound preservation. In a sense it combines the methods discussed by Gwern in his article Plastination vs Cryonics, because it first uses a method traditionally associated with "plastination" (glutaraldehyde perfusion), and then uses a method traditionally associated with cryonics, i.e. perfusion with a cryoprotective agent and then low temperature storage and, presumably, vitrification, which means that damage from ice crystal formation should be avoided and the brain should turn a glass state.
Apologies if this is still too technical and I'm happy to answer any follow-up questions. Many key steps remain but this is progress worthy of celebrating and, in my view, supporting.