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A tangential note on third-party technical contributions to LW (if that's a thing you care about): the uncertainty about whether changes will be accepted, uncertainty about and lack of visibility into how that decision is made or even who makes it, and lack of a known process for making pull requests or getting feedback on ideas are incredibly anti-motivating.
In response to
LessWrong 2.0
This is probably the single most important obstacle to making a better LW on the technical side.
SSC is heavily dependent on comments, to the point where they are arguably not even secondary any more.
Interesting.
I find the comments at SSC to be useless. I mean, there may or may not be good content in there, but it's nearly impossible to read/participate in those comments so I just don't use them or read them or look at them.
Maybe like 1 out of 10 posts, I'll find myself heading towards the comments and giving up after 5 minutes.
In response to
A Map of Currently Available Life Extension Methods
The example of Rita Montalchni is incredibly interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Levi-Montalcini). She administered a nerve growth factor (NGF) as eye drops and lived for 101 years while her twin sister died when she was 91. (Bearing in mind the average life duration difference of twins is six years, we can conclude that she gained about four years.)
Actually, all we can conclude is that you have managed to find a single anecdote to support your point. (Sidenote: according to the link she died at 103 years of age.)
After reading turchin's post on my phone last night, I was going to make this same point when I got to my PC this morning.
While turchin calls this "incredibly interesting", it seems pretty uninteresting to me. The very least of reasons being that the average life duration difference between twins being six years can easily mean vast swaths of twins die at the same age difference Rita Montalchni did.
because the ride sidebar is filtered out habitually, or why?
And where is the stupid question?
I suppose it's because of my habitual blocking out of sidebars, coupled with the fact that it's all the way at the bottom of the sidebar.
In response to
Should there be more people on the leaderboard?
Embarrassingly, I never realized the leaderboard existed and I've read LW from day one.
"Go back and not have children"
Ehh, I don't think that's a valid question to ask someone with kids. It's effectively, "would you prefer your children not be alive right now?" Or, "do you consider your children mistakes now that you've raised them?".
I'm not sure what the optimal way to phrase the question would be but maybe:
"If your biological age was reset to 20, would you start another family?" Or "If you could give advice to the parallel universe you who is 25 years younger, would you tell him to have kids?"
Hmm, those still aren't great.
This is a good point, but I did a poor job conveying the actual question asked by Gallup, which was:
If you had to do it over again, how many children would you have, or would you not have any at all?
Which, at least, is a little better than what I implied.
How does this compare to the general population of a similar age?
According to Gallup, 53% of people 18-40 (I'm 37) have children, and another 40% who don't want to.
Also according to Gallup and contrary to the implications in the original post, only 7% of all those aged 45+ with children would go back and not have children.
In response to
Why people want to die
Not a comment on the argument in the post which seems like it could be roughly correct, but just to throw this out there:
I guess I'm even weirder than the typical LW'er.
Not only am I interested in a wide variety of subjects, I'm also married with a kid. The optimal raising of my child is just one of a wide variety of subjects I'm interested in on a deep level.
I also want to live forever.
In response to
Autism, or early isolation?
If lack of social skills were the only part of autism this might be onto something. But autism tends to be a cluster of symptoms, which aren't explainable by a lack of social interactions. For example, autistic people tend to have different sensory perception. I would not expect that symptom to appear from early isolation.
Note that JonahSinick is referring to intellectually gifted individuals who refer to themselves as having autism or Aspergers. Most nerdy people I know who refer to themselves so have never had any sort of formal diagnosis.
My guess is that, if the hypothesis of the post is true, many intellectually gifted people may tend to refer to themselves as autistic when they are not.
In other words, the fact that real autism involves other symptoms does not necessarily disprove the hypothesis of this post.
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I think the difference between playing and spectating sports gets glossed over in lots of "sports are dumb" conversations.
I do not care at all about watching other people play sports. It's super boring.
Playing sports ball with people you enjoy being around is quite rewarding.