it helps us in everyday conversations and discussions about the way the world works and should work.
The question is whether that's true or whether the word creates more confusion than it helps. In particular the context of health care is that it's about making sick people normal again.
Preventing illness also falls under the umbrella of health care, at least where I live.
And even if it didn't, it's still clear what (most) people mean with the word even if the word doesn't mean what you want it to mean.
I started a thing back in March called the LessWrong Digest. First of all, to you and/or anyone else reading this who signed up for it, I'm sorry I've been neglecting it for so long. I ran it for a few weeks in March, but I was indisposed for most of April, and it's been fallow since then. It contains highlights from the blogs of rationalists who post off of Less Wrong. It doesn't contain Tumblrs yet. I'll restart it tonight. I intend to build upon it to have some sort of rationalist RSS feed. I don't know how many other rationalist Tumblrs or blogs it would include, but lots. Hopefully I can customize it.
Anyway, it's my goal to make bring such projects to fruition so no rationalist under the sun cannot be found, no matter how deep into the blogosphere they burrow.
If you want, I can help with the tumblr part of this. If you don't need help with the tumblr part, but want to be pointed in the right direction, I host the Rationalist Masterlist with most of the tumblr rationalists on it.
Also keep in mind that tumblr tends to have a very low signal-to-noise ratio.
Within an hour, I have thought of so many potential criticisms or reasons that my post might come across as lame that I am totally demoralized. I save my post as a draft, close the tab, and never return to it.
It doesn't help that even the most offhand posting is generally treated as if it was an academic paper and ~~reviewed~~ skewered accordingly :-p.
Agreed. This is, for me, one of the main advantages of posting on tumblr. You still get the feedback you want from clever people and criticism, but that criticism doesn't feel quite as bad as it would here, because everyone realizes that tumblr is a good space to test and try out ideas. Less Wrong feels, to me, more like a place where you share more solidified ideas (with the Open Thread as a possible exception).
I think we need to abolish the concept of healthcare. Everything is healthcare, so it is a null term. There is nothing that has no health effects e.g. due to stress.
Everything is math, but that doesn't mean that the word "biology" isn't useful. Even if healthcare isn't a perfect word or even a perfect concept, it helps us in everyday conversations and discussions about the way the world works and should work.
I have joined the ranks of LWers with tumblrs.
Also, interested in discussion on conversational tops and bottoms.
Slate Star Codex fulfills this niche for me.
The lack of up- and down-voting and the limited threading kills it value for me, personally.
Can comforting lies be justified in certain circumstances or do the downsides of this thinking habit always outweigh its benefits? (Example: Someone takes homeopathic remedies to cure pain and benefits from the placebo effect.)
Knowing about the placebo effect doesn't stop the placebo effect from kicking in.
Anyway, I'd say that there are moments when comforting lies may be worth it, but I don't trust my ability to know when those moments are happening and it would raise my overall believability if I was found out.
But even the police can be ethically problematic in a way that the fire service isn't. It is debatable if all laws are worthy of enforcement. The fire service (and related, disaster mitigation services etc.) does not really have such dilemmas, I think they clearly accumulate so much positive karma that even if some aspects of their acitvities are questionable they are still having a very positive sum.
Oh yes, absolutely. That's the main reason I'm not in law enforcement right now. Just wanted to point out that the analogue position exists and that it seems likely that such coordination positions exist within other (sorta similar) organizations.
I wonder if military-style but non-aggressive organizations exist? They would make sense... wait a bit, I have an idea. Are there backoffice, analytical jobs in the fire service? Not a frontline fireman/firewoman, but something sort of a strategist. Making plans for national disasters, stuff like that, but still a bit uniform-wearing stuff with ranks and whatnot.
Those jobs exist in the police force and I would be very surprised if most countries didn't have something like what you describe.
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Emotionally -- for the feeling that something new and great is happening here, and I can see it growing.
Reflecting on this: I should not optimize for my emotions (wireheading), but the emotions are important and should reflect reality. If great things are not happening, I want to know that, and I want to fix that. But if great things are happening, then I would like a mechanism that aligns my emotions with this fact.
Okay, what exactly are the "great things" I am thinking about here? What was the referent of this emotion when Eliezer was writing the Sequences?
When Eliezer was writing the Sequences, merely the fact that "there will exist a blog about rationality; without Straw Vulcanism, without Deep Wisdom" seemed like a huge improvement of the world, because it seemed that when such blog will exist, rational people will be able to meet there and conspire to optimize the universe. Did this happen? Well, we have MIRI and CFAR, meetups in various countries (I really appreciate not having to travel across the planet just to meet people with similar values). Do they have impact other than providing people a nice place to chat? I hope so.
Maybe the lowest-hanging fruit was already picked. If someone tried to write Sequences 2.0, what would it be about? Cognitive biases that Eliezer skipped? Or the same ones, perhaps more nicely written, with better examples? Both would be nice things to have, but their awesomeness would probably be smaller than going from zero to Sequences 1.0. (Although, if the Sequences 2.0 would be written so well that they would become a bestseller, and thousands of students outside of existing rationalist communities would read them, then I would rate that as more awesome. So the possibility is there. It just requires very specialized skills.) Or maybe explaining some mathematical or programming concepts in a more accessible way. I mean those concepts that you can use in thinking about probability or how human brain works.
Internet vs real life -- things happening in the real world are usually more awesome than things happening merely online. For example, a rationalist meetup is usually better than reading an open thread on LW. The problem is visibility. The basic rule of bureaucracy -- if it isn't documented, it didn't happen -- is important here, too. When given a choice between writing another article and doing something in the real world, please choose the latter (unless the article is really exceptionally good). But then, please also write an article about it, so that your fellow rationalists who were not able to participate personally can share the experience. It may inspire them to do something similar.
By the way, if you are unhappy about the "decline" of LW because it will make a worse impression on new people you would like to introduce to LW culture -- point them towards the book instead.
Adding: if you would like to see a rationalist community growing, research and write about creating and organizing communities. (That is an advice for myself, when I will have more free time.)
Something I feel Yudkowsky doesn't really talks about enough in the Sequences is how to be rational in a group, as part of a group and as a group. There is some material in there and HPMOR also offers some stuff, but there's very little that is as formalized as the ideas around "Politics is the Mindkiller/Spiders/Hard Mode," or "the Typical Mind Fallacy."
Something Yudkowsky also mentions is that what he writes about rationality is his path. Some things generalize (most people have the same cognitive biases, but in different amounts). From reading the final parts of the Sequences and the final moments of HPMOR I get the vibe that Yudkowsky really wants people to develop their own path. Alicorn did this and Yvain also did/does it to some extent (and I'm reading the early non-Sequence posts and I think that MBlume also did this a bit), but it's something that could be written more about. Now, I agree that this is hard, the lowest fruit probably is already picked and it's not something everyone can do. But I find it hard to believe that there are just 3 or 4 people who can actually do this. The bonobo rationalists on tumblr are, in their own, weird way, trying to find a good way to exist in the world in relation to other people. Some of this is formalized, but most of it exists in conversations on tumblr (which is an incredibly annoying medium, both to read and to share). Other people/places from the Map probably do stuff like that as well. I take this as evidence that there is still fruit low enough to pick without needing a ladder.