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If you really hate repairs, doesn't it make much more sense just to lease yourself?
My real solution was not to own a car at all. Feel free to discount my advice appropriately!
In response to
Open thread, Nov. 30 - Dec. 06, 2015
There is a LW post about rational home buying.But how to rationally buy a car?
I don't have the knowledge to give a full post, but I absolutely hate car repair. And if you buy a used car, there's a good chance that someone is selling it because it has maintenance issues. This happened to me, and no matter how many times I took the car to the mechanic it just kept having problems.
On the other hand, new cars have a huge extra price tag just because they're new. So the classic advice is to never buy a new car, because the moment you drive it off the lot it loses a ton of value instantly.
Here are a couple ideas for how to handle this:
Buy a car that's just off a 2 or 3 year lease. It's probably in great shape and is less likely to be a lemon.There are companies that only sell off-lease cars.
Assume a lease that's in its final year. (at http://www.swapalease.com/lease/search.aspx?maxmo=12 for example) Then you get a trial period of 4-12 months, and will have the option to buy the car. This way you'll know if you like the car or not and if it has any issues. The important thing to check is that the "residual price" that they charge for buying the car is reasonable. See this article for more info on that: http://www.edmunds.com/car-leasing/buying-your-leased-car.html
There are a ton of articles out there on how to negotiate a car deal, but one suggestion that might be worth trying is to negotiate and then leave and come back the next day to make the purchase. In the process of walking out you'll probably get the best deal they're going to offer. You can always just come back ten minutes later and make the purchase--they're not going to mind and the deal isn't going to expire (even if they say it is).
In response to
Open Thread August 31 - September 6
Tumblr user su3su2u1 (probably most known to LWers for his critiques of HPMOR's scientific claims, and subsequent fallout with Eliezer) has an interesting post about MIRI's research strategy. I think it has some really good ideas. What do other folks think?
It seems like a lot of focus on MIRI giving good signals to outsiders. The "publish or perish" treadmill of academia is exactly why privately funded organizations like MIRI are needed.
The things that su3su2u1 wants MIRI to be already exist in academia. The whole point of MIRI is to create an organization of a type that doesn't currently exist, focused on much longer term goals. If you measure organizations on the basis of how many publications they make, you're going to get a lot of low-quality publications. Citations are only slightly better, especially if you're focused on ignored areas of research.
If you have outside-view criticisms of an organization and you're suddenly put in charge of them, the first thing you have to do is check the new inside-view information available and see what's really going on.
In response to
Open Thread, Jul. 6 - Jul. 12, 2015
I seek a pointer to material which may help me with a problem I am having. I have noticed that certain claims make me angry and defensive. I find this troubling because while I am convinced that a subset of those claims is wrong, I am unsure regarding the complement. Nevertheless, because I become angry and defensive, I simply cannot evaluate claims which belong in the complement. (Well, rather, I "evaluate" those claims by knocking down arguments in their favor and declaring victory over my opponents which is not particularly helpful in finding the truth.)
You might want to examine what sort of in-group out-group dynamics are at play here, as well as some related issues. I know I run into these things frequently--I find the best defense mechanism for me is to try to examine the root of where feelings come from originally, and why certain ideas are so threatening.
Some questions that you can ask yourself:
- Are these claims (or their claimants) subtly implying that I am in a group of "the bad guys"?
- Is part of my identity wrapped up in the things that these claims are against?
- Do I have a gut instinct that the claims are being made in bad faith or through motivated reasoning?
- If I accept these claims as true, would I need to dramatically reevaluate my worldview?
- If everyone accepted these claims as true, would the world change in a way that I find threatening or troubling?
None of these will refute the claims, but they may help you understand your defensiveness.
I find it helpful to remind myself that I don't need to have a strongly held opinion on everything. In fact, it's good to be able to say "I don't really know" about all the things you're not an expert in.
In response to
Stupid Questions July 2015
There was recently a lethal heat wave in Karachi.
If you go about 1000 meters below the surface of the ocean, the water gets very cold.
Why don't people try to cool off hot places by piping cold water up from the ocean? Or just bubbling air through the deep water?
Geothermal or similar cooling requires a pretty significant capital investment in order to work. My guess is that a basic air conditioning unit is a cheaper and simpler fix in most cases.
The problem is that even that fix may be out of the reach of many residents of Karachi.
Why haven't we? We are very far from being in a steady state.
Maybe the elder civs aren't either. It might take billions of years to convert an entire light cone into dark computronium. And they're 84.5% of the way done.
I'm guessing the issue with this is that the proportion of dark matter doesn't change if you look at older or younger astronomical features.
You can't just get rid of heat. To locally cool something, you have to heat up something else by more than the amount you cool the cold thing such that in the net you are actually heating the universe more.
Of course - which is why I mentioned expelling a coolant/reaction mass. Today's computers use a number of elements from the periodic table, but the distribution is very different than the distribution of matter in our solar system. It would be very unusual indeed if the element distributions over optimal computronium exactly matched that of typical solar system.
So when constructing an advanced low-temp arcilect, you could transfer heat to whatever mass is the least useful for computation and then expel it.
Limiting heat flow in and out of a cold object is quite possible. But if its DOING anything it will generate heat.
In theory with advanced reversible computing, there doesn't seem to be any hard limit on energy efficiency. A big arcilect built on reversible computing could generate extremely low heat even when computing near the maximal possible speed - only that required for occasional permanent bit erasures and error corrections.
It would be very unusual indeed if the element distributions over optimal computronium exactly matched that of typical solar system.
But if it were not the optimal computronium, but the easiest to build computroniom, it would be made up of whatever was available in the local area.
In response to
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 108
META: I'd like to suggest having a separate thread for each publication. These attract far more interest than any other threads, and after the first 24 hours the top comments are set and there's little new discussion.
There aren't very many threads posted in discussion these days, so it's not like there is other good content that will be crowded out by one new thread every 1-3 days.
In response to
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapters 105-107
Quirrel seems on the road to get the Philosopher's Stone. It's certainly possible that he will fail or Harry ( / time-turned Cedric Diggory) will manage to swipe it at the last minute. But with around 80k words left to go, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of story left if Harry gets the stone in the next couple of chapters.
I draw your attention to a few quotes concerning the Philosopher's Stone:
His strongest road to life is the Philosopher’s Stone, which Flamel assures me that not even Voldemort could create on his own; by that road he would rise greater and more terrible than ever before. (Chapter 61)
“It’s not a secret.” Hermione flipped the page, showing Harry the diagrams. “The instructions are right on the next page. It’s just so difficult that only Nicholas Flamel’s done it.” (Chapter 87)
“I was looking to see if there was anything here I could figure out how to do. I thought, maybe the difficult part about making a Philosopher’s Stone was that the alchemical circle had to be super precise, and I could get it right by using a Muggle microscope—” “That’s brilliant, Hermione!” The boy rapidly drew his wand, said “Quietus,” and then continued after the small noises of the rowdier books had died down. “Even if the Philosopher’s Stone is just a myth, the same trick might work for other difficult alchemies—” “Well, it can’t work,” Hermione said. She’d flown across the library to look up the only book on alchemy that wasn’t in the Restricted Section. And then—she remembered the crushing letdown, all the sudden hope dissipating like mist. “Because all alchemical circles have to be drawn ‘to the fineness of a child’s hair’, it isn’t any finer for some alchemies than others. And wizards have Omnioculars, and I haven’t heard of any spells where you use Omnioculars to magnify things and do them exactly. I should’ve realized that!” (Chapter 87)
So we have multiple mentions of the possibility of creating a Philosopher's Stone. We also have Quirrel's promise not to kill anyone within Hogwarts for a week. And Flamel may still be out there, with the knowledge of how he created the Stone in the first place.
All this leads to the possibility that Quirrel gets ahold of the current Philosopher's Stone, and Harry learns enough in seeing the stone in person to be able to recreate it using a combination of magic and technology.
You can't transfigure anything that doesn't exist yet, so just having a Stone doesn't mean an instant singularity. You can't just will a superwizard or an AI into existence. This leaves plenty of space for a war between two sides, both of which have permanent transfiguration at their disposal.
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Similar to some of the other ideas, but here are my framings:
Virtually all of the space in the universe have been taken over by superintelligences. We find ourselves observing the universe from one of these rare areas because it would be impossible for us to exist in one of the colonized areas. Thus, it shouldn't be too surprising that our little area of non-colonization is just now popping out a new superintelligence. The most likely outcome for an intelligent species is to watch the area around them become colonized while they cannot develop fast enough to catch up.
A dyson-sphere level intelligence knows basically everything. There is a limit to knowledge and power that can be approached. Once a species has achieved a certain level of power it simply doesn't need to continue expanding in order to guarantee its safety and the fulfillment of its values. Continued expansion has diminishing returns and it has other values or goals that counterbalance any tiny desire to continue expanding.