Reddit Enhancement Suite

If anyone cares, I could probably port this to work on LW without too much trouble. Optimistically it'd just involve opening up the source and replacing reddit.com with lesswrong.com. More realistically, there'd probably be a lot of baked-in assumptions about DOM structure that'd need to be updated to have the UI enhancements make sense.

Anyway, this is mostly just a straw poll to see how many others would be interested in such a thing.

Takeaway seems to be: stay light on your feet; keep everything in the short term, but build habits that will serve you in the long term; make sure you're always doing something that holds your interest.

http://somebeautifulplace.tumblr.com/post/6074297771/enhanced-autodidactism-for-the-chronically-lazy-and

This was originally going to be a comment on Zvi's excellent "How I Lost 100 Pounds Using TDT", but it ran rather long, so I expanded it to a top-level post. Hope no one minds.

The issue I took with Zvi's post was that there seemed to be a general assumption being made -- not just in the post, but in comments -- about improvements in health outcomes coming from sacrifices in food-related hedonic outcomes. This would make sense if we were all on some efficient frontier between nutrition and enjoyment of food. I think for most of us¹ this is blatantly false.

So then, here are three steps aimed simply towards enjoying food more.² Eat better food. Eat food you actually like. Pay attention when you eat. These steps may themselves mildly improve your health outcomes, but they are intended primarily to help you enjoy food. You can of course combine them with efficient trades between hedons and nutrition, and wind up doing drastically better for both.

We used to have a monthly off-topic thread for stuff rationalists might like to talk about that really has no bearing on rationality. Here's a new one.

ETA: Original off-topic thread

A while back I did a couple of posts on the care and feeding of young rationalists. Though it is not new, I recently found a truly excellent post on this topic, in Dale Mcgowan's blog, The Meming of Life. The post details a survey carried out on ordinary citizens of Hitler's Germany, searching for correlations between style of upbringing, and adult moral decisions. 

Everyday Germans of the Nazi period are the focus of a fascinating study discussed in the PBB seminars and in the Ethics chapter of Raising Freethinkers. For their book The Altruistic Personality, researchers Samuel and Pearl Oliner conducted over 700 interviews with survivors of Nazi-occupied Europe. Included were both “rescuers” (those who actively rescued victims of persecution) and “non-rescuers” (those who were either passive in the face of the persecution or actively involved in it). The study revealed interesting differences in the upbringing of the two groups — specifically the language and practices that parents used to teach their values.

Non-rescuers were 21 times more likely than rescuers to have been raised in families that emphasized obedience—being given rules that were to be followed without question—while rescuers were over three times more likely than non-rescuers to identify “reasoning” as an element of their moral education. “Explained,” the authors said, is the single most common word used by rescuers in describing their parents’ ways of talking about rules and ethical ideas.

Thought the community might enjoy this:

Jinnetic Engineering

Alt-rockers They Might Be Giants explain/advocate empiricism in a record aimed at young children.