D_Malik

Here's some blue-sky speculation about one way alien sapients' civilizations might develop differently from our own. Alternatively, you can consider it conworlding. Content note: torture, slavery. Looking at human history, after we developed electronics, we painstakingly constructed machines that can perform general computation, then built software which approximates the workings...

I'd like to solicit advice since I'm starting at Stanford this Fall and I'm interested in optimal philanthropy. First off, what should I major in? I have experience in programming and math, so I'm thinking of majoring in CS, possibly with a second major or a minor in applied math....

Thus spake Eliezer: > A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly...

Warning: armchair evopsych speculation follows. Related to: Summer vs Winter Strategies A couple months ago, I had a large amount of tedious work to do. Whenever I sat down to do it, I would be distracted by other, less mentally straining or more interesting tasks. I decided to try an...

This post is about two Anki plugins I just wrote. I've been using them for a few months as monkey patches, but I thought it might help people here (or at least the 20% that are awesome enough to use SRSs) to have them as plugins. They're ugly and you...

Spaced repetition systems use math to determine the optimal way to study things. This post is about an idea I've been trying for a few months for improving SRS for some subjects. SRSs usually use a pretty rigid system of asking questions and demanding answers. I think that for many...

Often, there are questions you want to know the answers to. You want other people's opinions, because knowing the answer isn't worth the time you'd have to spend to find it, or you're unsure whether your answer is right. LW seems like a good place to ask these questions because...