Aren't antiperspirants unhealthy?

I have a couple of questions:
1) Does the $3900 cost primarily cover the cost of the workshop itself, or is it mostly used as a revenue source for CFAR to keep the doors open year-round?

2) What advantages does the weekend retreat system offer that other systems don't, specifically distance learning?

3) Are there any plans to expand into distance learning, for example into the Khan Academy, edX, Udacity model?

Everything you've mentioned sounds great, but I'm inherently skeptical of a weekend retreat format. After all, even gay cure camps 'work' and have their testimonials; how do you control for the self-help effect? Additionally, it seems odd to me to be building a program around teaching rationality in-person, when every other educational institution is trying to move in the opposite direction. I'm just curious about why you've chosen to structure the program the way it is.

Interesting.

I don't know the mechanism of action, but it seems unlikely that this is acting as an antibiotic to have this effect.

More likely that minocycline is acting directly as a stimulant-blocker, dopamine-blocker or oxytocin-blocker.

Next experiment: examine the effect of stepped doses of modafinil and nasal administered oxytocin to see if they might 'rescue' the sweetness of the honey trap.

You're absolutely right. I've had a spot of trouble finding a source of fiber that won't expand and turn my version of soylent into a gelatin.

We could just have a meta thread on Less Wrong.

Bitcoin seems more relevant than Craigslist, PayPal, or other tech startups because it involved major technical and conceptual/philosophical advances on the existing state of the art, and these advances didn't originate from nor was likely funded/supported by academia, government or industry. Also, its social impact seems larger - if Craigslist or PayPal didn't exist, something essentially identical would have been created very soon anyway, but if Bitcoin didn't exist, another Bitcoin may not have been created for another decade, and/or may have been created with very different characteristics, for example it might have been coded with a monetary policy that emphasized price stability instead of a fixed supply of money.

I would consider Bitcoin to have failed with regard to its monetary policy (because the policy causes high price volatility which imposes a heavy cost on its users, who have to either take undesirable risks or engage in costly hedging in order to use the currency). (This may have been partially my fault because when Satoshi wrote to me asking for comments on his draft paper, I never got back to him. Otherwise perhaps I could have dissuaded him (or them) from the "fixed supply of money" idea.) I don't know if it's too late at this point to change the monetary policy that is built into the Bitcoin protocol or for an alternative cryptocurrency to overtake Bitcoin, but if it is, then Bitcoin is similar to self-improving AI in that it may be critical to get the first one right and it offers evidence on how hard it is for an individual or small group working outside the mainstream to do that.

Since I have a personal connection with Bitcoin I'm probably tempted to read more into it than I should relative to other evidence such as other tech startups. I'm curious what your impression is after reading the above, and whether there is other specific evidence that I should be paying more attention to.

I have heard that the acquittal of Amanda Knox has been overturned. The sources I have found have mentioned the possibility that Knox could be extradited from the US back to Italy and don't rule that out as a possibility. I am hoping someone with an interest in the Knox case (Komponisto) or someone familiar with US laws could tell me whether that is a possibility.

This is relevant to me since simply labeling Italy as a corrupt state that I wouldn't ever visit costs very little (I have no particular reason to visit Italy). However if Knox is (or even could be) extradited from the USA then that is a problem with the legal system of the United States of America, not just of Italy. The USA is a place I may consider returning to so isn't so easily written off. The prospect of extradition means visiting a country carries all the risks of flaws in that country's legal system as well as all flaws in any country with which it has extradition treaties (subject to whatever filtering the details of those treaties entail).

I am also interested in whether the criticism of the wikipedia coverage is accurate. Wikipedia is a source that I frequently rely on for information. Anything which should increase or decrease the amount of trust I place in wikipedia as a source is useful to me.

You can hire remote assistants (typically in the Phillipines) to do this for you via a Skype window for about $1/hour. I thought someone from here was doing that?

At this point, let's not taunt people with the right kind of mental pathology to be made very uncomfortable by the basilisk or meta-set of basilisks.

As far as I can tell the entire POINT of LW is to talk about various mental pathologies and how to avoid them or understand them even if they make you very uncomfortable to deal with or acknowledge. The reasons behind talking about the basilisk or basilisks in general (apart from metashit about censorship) are just like the reasons for talking about trolley problems even if they make people angry or unhappy. What do you do when your moral intuitions seem to break down? What do you do about compartmentalization or the lack of it? Do you bite bullets? Maybe the mother should be allowed to buy acid.

To get back to meta shit: If people are complaining about the censorship and you are sick of the complaints, the simplest way to stop them is to stop the censorship. If someone tells you there's a problem, the response of "Quit your bitching, it's annoying" is rarely appropriate or even reasonable. Being annoying is the point of even lameass activism like this. I personally think any discussion of the actual basilisk has reached every conclusion it's ever really going to reach by now, pretty reasonably demonstrated by looking at the uncensored thread, and the only thing even keeping it in anyone's consciousness is the continued ballyhooing about memetic hazards.

Just to be charitable to Eliezer, let me remind you of this quote. For example, can you conceive of a reason (not necessarily the officially stated one) that the actual basilisk discussion ought to be suppressed, even at the cost of the damage done to LW credibility (such as it is) by an offsite discussion of such suppression?

No. I have watched Eliezer make this unforced error now for years, sliding into an obvious and common failure mode, with mounting evidence that censorship is, was, and will be a bad idea, and I have still not seen any remotely plausible explanation for why it's worthwhile.

Just to take this most recent Stross post: he has similar traffic to me as far as I can tell, which means that since I get ~4000 unique visitors a day, he gets as many and often many more. A good chunk will be to his latest blog post, and it will go on being visited for years on end. If it hits the front page of Hacker News as more than a few of his blog posts do, it will quickly spike to 20k+ uniques in just a day or two. (In this case, it didn't.) So we are talking, over the next year, easily 100,000 people being exposed to this presentation of the basilisk (just need average 274 uniques a day). 100k people being exposed to something which will strike them as patent nonsense, from a trusted source like Stross.

So maybe there used to be some sort of justification behind the sunk costs and obtinacy and courting of the Streisand effect. Does this justification also justify trashing LW/MIRI's reputation among literally hundreds of thousands of people?

You may have a witty quote, which is swell, but I'm afraid it doesn't help me see what justification there could be.

Sure does. Then again, it probably sucks more being Laocoön.

Laocoön died quickly and relatively cleanly by serpent; Cassandra saw all her predictions (not just one) come true, was raped, abducted, kept as a concubine, and then murdered.