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Diets are mindkilling. Someone who is or has been on a diet, or has someone important to them who has, will treat choice of and necessity of dieting as a purely affiliation/signalling game.
By that criterion, anything people can have an opinion on is "mindkilling". Yes, people are vulnerable to becoming entrenched in any way of thinking, but some are less vulnerable to such than others. And in my experience, diets are something people tend to be open to a variety of opinions on.
In response to
Nonmindkilling open questions
How about nutrition related questions? The exact wording of the question is tricky, but something like
"Will a low fat diet help most people lose weight?" isn't the kind of thing that inspires 0% or 100% responses.
Too vague; "a low fat diet" could be taken to mean replacing fats with carbs, replacing fats with proteins, or just eating less in general. Otherwise I think it's a fine idea.
If you can convince people to check a bookie's odds instead of asserting "WOO! Go team go! You're #1!" then I think you have succeeded in raising the sanity waterline...
Clearly cheering on a sports team and checking a bookie's odds fulfill two different functions. One is about signaling, whereas the other is about improving your knowledge.
Trying to convince someone to forsake one in favor of the other makes about as much sense as telling them to buy a Prius instead of learning to juggle.
Ah. Point.
It's still a good idea, though. If you changed it to, say, paleo vs. Okinawan diets, I think it would work fine.
In response to
New IRC channels
This kind of drama is an incredible waste of time, and absolutely should not be allowed to cross over into Less Wrong proper. Still, since this post exists, I guess I'll contribute my position.
Whether the kick and ban was warranted should be the question for discussion. Not the concept of moderation itself. Moderation policy is and should be established by precedent and discussion, not operator fiat.
The discussion going on between Burninate_ and Anubhav_ C, as cited by Jach, was not spam, was mildly interesting, and certainly should not have warranted kicks for either of them. Anubhav_C insulting Peacebringer was even less deserving of any operator activity, especially because the entire point of having an anonymous mod-bot is presumably to prevent the interference of ego and reputation! I believe that will be the consensus position. If such a consensus is established, I suggest that the operator who kicked them back down, admit an error, and stop this whole set of nonsense before it gets any worse. If the opposite consensus is reached, I suggest Anubhav back down, and likewise stop this ridiculous affair.
How, exactly, is this discussion a "waste of time"? If it is worth having an IRC channel, it is worth taking the time to ensure that it functions smoothly.
In response to
What math should I learn?
I second badger's recommendation of the Princeton Companion. In fact, I expect that reading it might give you some ideas of your own as to what math to study.
You say below that you are interested in "fundamental" mathematics. Based purely on that, I would recommend abstract algebra, number theory, or some sort of course in proofs.
Also, this might seem obvious, but go talk to a math professor if at all possible. Much of the answer to this question depends on what the specific courses open to you are.
In response to
On Saying the Obvious
Imagine a substantive Less Wrong comment. It's insightful, polite, easy to understand, and otherwise good. Ideally, you upvote this comment. Now imagine the same comment, only with "obviously" in front. This shouldn't change much, but it does. This word seems to change the comment in multifarious bad ways that I'd rather not try to list.
Uncharitably, I might reduce this whole phenomenon to an example of a mind projection fallacy.
I have a different explanation: this is a status defense mechanism. If you say something that other people find obvious, in a way that suggests that you didn't find it obvious, you lose status-points for not being as smart as them. By adding the word "obviously", you in effect say "please do not infer that I think this remark is a great discovery of mine (and thus that I am ignorant relative to you) from the mere fact that I think it needs to be stated explicitly".
As an added benefit, if the remark turns out not to be obvious to your audience, yet demonstrably true, you gain status for having been smarter than them.
You might think, then, that there is no downside to simply prefacing every statement you think is true with "obviously". Obviously, however ( :-) ), you have to avoid making it transparent what you're doing, and thus restrict your usage of "obvious" to particularly plausible cases. Calibrating this sense of plausibility with your own epistemic powers is one of many mysterious (in the sense of not being spoken about or taught explicitly) techniques of human status negotiation. (And heaven help you if you label "obvious" something that is false...)
There is no reason an action like this can't have a compound cause. I would guess that, in the hypothetical, the person is not actually thinking "Okay, I'll preface this with 'obviously' so that I look good." However, it is likely that, since saying "obviously" is high status, they wouldn't think too hard about whether the thing is in fact obvious - certainly not as hard as if they were about to say something low status.
I finished it, and felt much the same way. Like eutopia, I'd expect a frank conversation with a superintelligence to be deeply challenging; it would be very surprising if all the substantial advice one had for me turned out identical to what merely mortal soft transhumanists with environmental and social concerns are already saying. In fact, I wonder why the god of the story bothered; he's clearly not telling us anything we don't already know, and he isn't saying it in a way that'll substantially contribute to the meme's spread.
It would be very surprising if all the substantial advice one had for me turned out identical to what merely mortal soft transhumanists with environmental and social concerns are already saying.
Obviously a human author cannot foresee what "substantial advice" a transhuman intelligence would actually offer; therefore the story's god probably just functions as a mouthpiece for the author. I suggest you stop thinking about whether a superintelligent being would in fact say the things that character does, and start thinking about whether those things make sense on their own terms.
Except those of us who already like organ meat...
Well, you people are disgusting anyway :)
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I would normally visit even a Score:-22 post with 200+ comments, because I've found that such cases indicate a particularly awful post may be worth opening just to hunt for a few of the most excellent clarifications or rebuttals it elicited.
A warning to others: my heuristic was wrong in this case. Few comments here even hint at what the hell is going on, and those suggested nothing more interesting than some extremely unlikely theological or parapsychological beliefs that Will might have latched onto and desired to "protect" us from. You could find more interesting and plausible basilisks in Lovecraft's stories or Stross' Laundry novels.
Thanks for the info. I opened this post for the same reason as you, and now that I've read this I'm going to close it.