WedgeOfCheese

Data point: I'm millennial (born 1992) and have a pretty strong aversion to phone calls, which is motivated mainly by the fact that I prefer most communication to be non-real-time so that I can take time to think about what to say without creating an awkward silence. And when I do engage in real-time communication, visual cues make it much less unpleasant, so phone calls are particularly bad in that I have to respond to someone in real time without either of us seeing the other's face/body language.

If I had to take a wild guess at why this seems to be gene... (read more)

My rough first attempt at explaining the apparent paradox of poverty continuing to exist despite a ~100x increase in productivity:

Humanity as a whole may have gotten 100x more productive, but most people aren't able to individually contribute 100x more value to the economy (at least not in a way that they are monetarily compensated for).  It seems like the increase in productivity largely takes the form of finding more efficient ways to coordinate the efforts of many people (e.g. factories) rather than individuals being able to produce more value on t... (read more)

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/47

n00bs UNITE! :D

Awesome, thanks! I'll be there :)

I live about 2 hours away and was thinking I might like to come, but I'm not real familiar with how LW meetups work. Are they open to pretty much anyone (i.e. is it a problem that I'm just a lurker and don't really know anyone)? Anything in particular I have to do to sign up? How long do the meetups usually last?

As Eliezer says, on short time scales (days, weeks, months) we change our minds less often than we expect to. However, it's worth noting that, on larger time scales (years, decades) the opposite seems to be true. Also, our emotional state changes more frequently than we expect it to, even on short time scales. I can't seem to recall my exact source on this second point at the moment (I think it was some video we watched in my high school psychology class), though, anecdotally, I've observed it to be true in my own life. Like, when I'm feeling good, I m... (read more)

One thing I think would be cool would be some sort of audio-generating device/software/thing that allows arbitrary levels of specificity. So, on one extreme, you could completely specify a fully deterministic stream of sound, and, on the other extreme, you could specify nothing and just say "make some sound". Or you could go somewhere in between and specify something along the lines of "play music for X minutes, in a manner evoking emotion Y, using melody Z as the main theme of the piece".

Thanks! As for "confusing questions", some thing I've had long-term interests in are: ethics, consciousness, and trying to wrap my mind around some of the less intuitive concepts in math/physics. Apart from that, it varies quite a bit. Recently, I've become rather interested in personality modeling. The Big-5 model has great empirically tested descriptive power, but is rather lacking in explanatory power (i.e. it can't, afaik, answer questions like "what's going on in person X's mind that causes them to behave in manner Y?" or "... (read more)

I did this and I might try doing a few more pieces like it. You have to click somewhere on the screen to start/stop it.

I'm a college student studying music composition and computer science. You can hear some of my compositions on my SoundCloud page (it's only a small subset of my music, but I made sure to put a few that I consider my best at the top of the page). In the computer science realm, I'm into game development, so I'm participating in this thing called One Game A Month whose name should be fairly self-explanatory (my February submission is the one that's most worth checking out - the other 2 are kind of lame...).

For pretty much as long as I can remember, I've en... (read more)

Could you expand on this? It's not clear to me how this is the case.

Oddly enough, I get much angrier at my computer for not working than I ever do at other humans. Though I wouldn't say I often get "offended" by either. I wonder how common this is?

I believe what army means is that some people mistakenly use evo-psy to make claims along the lines of "we have evolved to have [some characteristic], therefore it is morally right for us to have [aforementioned characteristic]".