Just wanted to update that the two parties in Bangalore have been merged. Either of those links will point to the same location and time details, but just in case you're still editing the list.

So Mr. White was the one who was Lucius? Not Mr. Counsel, the one Voldemort chided for not conquering the country in his name and limiting himself to the Wizengamot?

What made Harry certain of that?

This meetup is updated to 9:00 PM IST on 14th March. Details updated at the meetup.com link.

Yes I didn't mean Ng. "Diss" is sort of unfortunate phrasing, he just wants to get work done. Sorry for being unclear.

He doesn't "diss UFAI concerns", he says "I don’t know how to productively work on that", which seems accurate for the conventional meaning of "productive" even after looking into the issue. He doesn't address the question of whether it's worthwhile to work on the issue unproductively, illustrating his point with the analogy (overpopulation on Mars) where it's clearly not.

Yeah. Beeminder doesn't work for me either - nor do most online punishment-based motivators.

My problem with it is that it doesn't punish you for failing to do the thing you need to do. It punishes you for failing to record the fact that you did the thing you need to do.

So if you're time-poor (like me) and still managed to do the thing... but didn't have time to go online and tell beeminder that you did the thing... you still get punished. :(

This question bothers me so much that once I get to be a good enough programmer I actually want to build a website that will connect adult beginners with each other so that maximum learning can happen with minimal embarrassment and no interaction with children. A system where you can trade tutoring ("I'll teach you the violin if you'll teach me painting") or simply pay for classes, with some way to rate and view the quality of each person's teaching would be useful.

As long as there is no larger system like that, I'd suggest that your best bet is to find a friend or acquaintance who is good at whatever you want to learn and offer them something they want but wouldn't ask for, whether it's money or a favor. That way, you get to learn things at a personalized pace while building a friendship.

My hearing has always tested as fine. I like some visual art, although I'm well below average in this. I do get pleasure in seeing beautiful things. I've never experienced music as beautiful and to my mind music being beautiful seems like a category error.

Tiger meat would be much more expensive than beef, but there's still enough of a market for it to keep tigers from going extinct.

Situational awareness is further lauded by elite military units, police trainers, criminals, intelligence analysts, and human factors researchers. In other words, people who have to make very important-- often life-or-death-- decisions based on limited information consider situational awareness a critical skill. This should tell us something-- if those individuals for whom correct decisions are most immediately relevant all stress the importance of situational awareness, it may be a more critical skill than we realize.

While agreeing with the general idea in the post- that SA is important, I think you are slightly overstating the case by calling it the zeroth skill. Where SA helps is in helping you collect more information for your decision making process, but we the world has a lot of data that could be collected. Not all information has the same value for decision making.

In any case, as a person with low SA, I'm interested in seeing the rest of this sequence. What would be helpful, if you've also thought of it is: is this a skill that you can "switch off" when it's not required? If I were in a setting where it's safe to do so, it could be of value to turn off SA and focus more on - a book perhaps, or my own thoughts.