That makes a lot of sense. Thank you.

Added: Much of the praise for baby Rudin suggests that trying to prove each theorem before having seen the proof, is one of the best ways to become a good mathematician. Can you comment on my thought that, after having read a more verbose book, I won't have that same experience? Or is that approach going to work with most real analysis books, so that I could still try to prove everything before it is explained?

I have some time this summer to spend learning maths, and I was going to begin studying real analysis with Rudin's "Principles of Mathematical Analysis". I have heard it is the best book if you have the time to study thoroughly, which I do (three almost uninterrupted months, although I plan to learn lots of other maths too). As someone who is mathematically able, but has not done Real Analysis (and will not study it at university) what is your recommendation that I read?

Added: My info comes from the incredivly positive amazon reviews, and the less positive Best Textbooks LW thread.

Suppose we have a set S of n elements, and we ask people to memorize sequences of these elements, and we find that people can generally easily memorize sequences of length k (for some definition of "generally" and "easily"). If we then define a function f(S) := k log n, how will f depend on S? Have there been studies on this issue?

The Second Congo War is estimated to have had killed up to 5.4 million people, although not directly through violence. Do casualties include wounded (so not just deaths?), because in that case a few more wars would fit the bill.

I agree with you about popular books. But I am wondering about the term "insight porn"--does it do anything besides put a negative connotation on the process of obtaining new insights? (If "insight porn" refers to useless insights, would it be appropriate to say something like "pure math is full of insight porn"? :P)

Meta: Should we be encouraging people to read popular books? Popular books have their place, but there is a common failure mode where people read popularizations, get their daily fix of insight porn, and go away without having learned anything substantial.

Reading popular books on the same subject have sharply decreasing marginal utility, and I'm guessing that the kind of person who reads LW is the kind of person who has already read enough popularizations that reading another is probably a waste of time.

Frankly who cares?

If people are actually interested in signaling to their social circle, they will ignore geeky Givewell and do a charity walk for a local (for-profit) hospital instead.

Start a trend of wearing necklaces with one bead for each life you saved

I would consider anyone who would do this (based on the dollar amount of donation) to be terribly pretentious and, frankly, silly.

To other Internet forums:

I think evidence-updating is kinda common, what striked me as really new here is tabooing.

So that one. Not getting too hung up about terms / categories. I would be happy enough if at least the habit of doing a quick round of taboo whenever anyone feels a discussion is too attached to terminology would be widespread on places like Reddit.

For example, I kinda like economics. This is why I absolutely hate it people use "capitalism" as a flag to rally for or against, and then quality goes down the drain, it all becomes a playground fight. We all know (or if engaging in these issues, then should) that it unpacks to two different and unrelated terms, one is broadly a voluntary transactions based system, and the other is a specific distribution of property where most people don't have any so they need jobs offered by those who have. It would be so easy to not use this word just use the appropriate unpacking.

There is something about all this tabooing thing that reminds me of when I used to be a fairly active Buddhist. Similar things were done.

Personal life, living better:

Tough question, but probably not trying to be "clever". That is, not ranking solutions on the complexity or how sophisticated they look but more like accepting, taking, or coming up with "boring advice". There is a HUGE urge to show off your brain sparkles if you have an IQ over 120 and this can be highly counter-productive. It is really humiliating and enlightening to see how more efficient people can be who are not trying to be too clever. I know a guy who is a textbook average mind, works in a warehouse, likes football, not much else. They wanted to live in the UK and did it so that he moved, got a job, and then his girlfriend follow a few months later. Anyway he figured it is time to lose some weight and he was not much into cooking anyway, so he just filled a big tupperware every 2-3 days with sliced cucumbers and tuna from cans and that salad was the only thing he ate. It was, of course, very efficient, having found two of the least calorie dense foods that exist. And yet there are intelligent people who struggle with their weight for decades with the most complicated insulin response based diets. Committing hard to something simple is often the best - just the problem is that it lacks glory, hence, motivation...

Well, for a start there's the Rationalist Masterlist currently hosted by Yxoque (MathiasZaman here on LW). You could announce your presence there and ask to be added to the list, or just lurk around some of the blogs for a while and send anonymous asks to people to get a feel for the community before you set up an account.

I think if we follows this chain of questions, what we'll find at the end (except for turtles, of course) is the question "Why is the universe stable/regular instead of utterly chaotic?" A similar question is "Why does the universe even have negentropy?"

I don't know any answer to these questions except for "That's what our universe is".