Ooooh, thanks. I'm not surprised to find out about the status-improv link, with Johnstone as the point of departure in my investigation.

But follow the hyperlinked term "Status" in the page you linked to, and what do I read?

Status is a character's sense of self-esteem.

Hey all.

Basics: 23 NY "Self-taught" Mixed Background. I'm mainly interested in group rationality.

I've read OB, on and off, since late '07 and LW since the beginning. Almost never comment either. I still don't know a chunk of the jargon. Can't tell sometimes if I don't understand a post, or the jargon is confusing me to think I don't, when I already may understand the topic.

I'm weary of blogs. I think a popular blog/blogger creates a cult of personality. It raise its author's status far too high. That makes them high status stupid. And us low status stupid. And subsequently this botches any true community creation attempt.

There is an interesting party game played with cards that for some reason I only remembered just now. Here is how I recall it.

You take a group of people and assign each of them a card from the deck, Ace high, deuces low. You give everyone a headband so that they can carry the card around on their foreheads, where others can see it but they can't. You have the group mill around talking to each other, instructing them to take into account the rank of the person they're talking to. After some time you ask people to pocket their cards, mill around some more, then line up in what they think is the order corresponding to their rank.

To the extent that this order reflects the card ranks, we can conclude that social interactions act as a carrier for information that allows people to sense a linear hierarchy. (I can't remember, when I played it, how close the match was.)

Sure. "Known to be toxic" was probably too glib a way to put it, Phil should provide a cite and I shouldn't have repeated it uncritically. But even if this was just someone's hypothesis without much experimental evidence behind it: the concept of vitamin poisoning isn't a new one. There are publicized daily intake tolerable upper levels for lots of vitamins. Hypervitaminosis A, E. I don't know what kind of evidence backs these claims up but presumably people in the field are aware of this kind of thing. I'm not saying "These are the toxicity levels. This is why the meta analysis is wrong." I'm saying "People are hypothesizing vitamin toxicity at certain levels. Why the hell would you run an analysis that couldn't even in principle take that into account?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Saturated_fat_intake_and_disease_-_Claimed_associations

...doesn't look as though scientists were "randomly making things" up to me.

I've often described learning in terms of 'clicking'.

It's most memorable to me when thinking about hard problems that I can't solve right away. It feels like something finally puts the last piece of the puzzle in place and for the first time I can 'see' the answer.

When trying to teach people, I've noticed that some people have a very obvious 'click response'- they'll light up at a distinct moment and just get it from then on.

Other people show no sign of this, yet claim to learn. I still haven't figured out what is going on here. The possibilities I can think of are: 1) Their learning process involves no clicking 2) They hide the click to make it sound like they've known it all along because they'd be embarassed at how late their click is 3) They're faking it, and don't really get it.

For me though, learning about cryonics and the intelligence explosion idea didn't seem very 'click like' since it just seemed obviously true the first time I heard about it, rather than there being a delay that makes the evaporation of confusion more satisfying. I suspect the learning mechanism is actually the same though.

On OB/LW this primarily takes the form (started by Eliezer, I think) of embedding a link to a previous article in every other sentence, which certainly comes off as intimidating, at least to me.

It's interesting to see how that comes across to you. When I include links one of my motivations is actually to towards less exclusiveness. Something along the lines of "I'm using this term but acknowledge that it is in group jargon. Here's the several pages of text I saved reproducing for anyone who wants it." I usually associate the in group status game with making it difficult to get information and so ensuring that you can gain status through every piece of knowledge the newcomers must aquire. Why show them where to learn stuff when you could be shooting them down every time they speak?