Psychology/biology:

• "Ann Roe's scientists: original published papers" (One of the very few data sets, excluding TIP/SMPY, of extremely intelligent people. I am still reading through them but one impression I get is that the education system in America when most of them were growing up around 1910-1920 was grossly inadequate and unchallenging; many of them seem to only drift into their field when they happen to run into a challenging course in college. Quite a few mention incredibly little access to books and severe poverty (although interestingly, they all come from what are clearly middle/upper-class descent families, even if in some cases they are so poor as to be unable to afford shoes). Smart kids are so much better off these days with Internet access to anything at all they want to read. As I've noted in reading biographies of American scientists, the academic environment pre- and post-WWII is strikingly different than the pressure-cooker race to the bottom we are familiar with now. Relative underperformance in grades compared to females is also a running theme. With the chemists and physicists, home chemistry kits seem to have been nigh universal - which is something that sure doesn't happen these days!)
• "Gifted Today But Not Tomorrow? Longitudinal Changes in Ability and Achievement in Elementary School", Lohman & Korb 2006 (Challenges in gifted education in elementary or earlier: IQ scores are unstable and so regression to the mean implies that few children in G&T programs will grow up to be gifted.)
• "Is Education Associated With Improvements in General Cognitive Ability, or in Specific Skills?", Ritchie et al 2015
• "Understanding the Improvement in Disability Free Life Expectancy In the U.S. Elderly Population", Chernew et al 2016 (Adult disability-free life expectancy continues to increase, due in large part to eye surgery improvements; vision is probably, like falling, the proximate cause of a lot of health issues.)
• "Nicotine Contents in Some Commonly Used Toothpastes and Toothpowders: A Present Scenario", Agrawal & Ray 2012 (/not sure if harmful or helpful)

• vision:

  • Orthostatic hypotension: when you stand up and feel like you are about to faint & your vision becomes totally obscured by silver mist
  • Visual snow: when you see the world slightly fuzzy and noisily, like very gentle translucent static on a TV screen
  • Closed-eye hallucination with phospenes: when you close your eyes and see a colored background with blobs and lights, especially in a pitch-black room or at night

Technology:

• "Preparing for the Worst: The Space Insurance Market's Realistic Disaster Scenarios", Robin et al 2016
• "37 Million Compilations: Investigating Novice Programming Mistakes in Large-Scale Student Data", Altadmri & Brown 2015 (commentary)
• "Climb Mount Improbable" (JS reimplementation of Dawkin's evolutionary computation)
• Edward Teller's "Atom Alphabet" (1946)
• XKCD's "Missing 11th of the Month" (The treachery of Google Ngrams)

Economics:

• "The Future of Agriculture"
• "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody" (Clay Shirky; A decade on... Twitch streaming, Minecraft, Snapchat... Not so much wikis or blogs anymore. Still tons of TV, though, especially the poor.)
• Feeder of lice

Philosophy:

• Oceanus's speech from Hyperion by John Keats

Fiction:

• "Is the Great Attractor a Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann?", Tomotani 2016
• The Neu Jorker (I particularly liked the profile of a woman's courageous journey towards equestrianism, an investigation into some knotty issues, and a retrospective of the role of capes in NYC's crime reduction over the past 3 decades.)

I read that in the FAQ as well. ... Weirdly enough, taking that option would make me just feel guilty. I would have gone there, I would have learned, and then I would have said "well this is nice and all but is not as great as I envisioned - it's kinda like counting to 10 instead of immediately screaming at people, and that's not worth all this" - whilst I did get what was offered - lessons, boarding, food, people to talk to... I don't know how to put it. It feels like I'd be hurting other people just to fix my own mistake.

I'm going to the CFAR workshop that starts May 18th, and want to ask anyone who went to previous workshops about what you would have recommended to your pre-workshop self to do before and during the workshop? What would you have done differently? Thanks for any advice, and I'll convey it to fellow workshop attendees.

The 1920 didn't have the same idea of science that we have today. Maybe you mean General Semantics?

I saw a link in an open thread several months back about an organization in the past that was quite similar to the Rationality movement but eventually fell apart. It was science based self-improvement and people trying to make rational choices back in the 1920s or earlier. I've tried searching for the link again but can't find it. Does anyone know which one I'm referring to?

I was reading through a link on an Overcoming Bias post about the AK Model and came across the idea that, " the Social return on many types of investments far exceed their private return". To rephrase this: there are investments you can make such as getting a college education which benefit others more than they benefit you. These seem like they could be some good skills to focus on which might be often ignored. Obvious examples I can think of would be the Heimlich maneuver, CPR, and various social skills.

Do you know of any good low hanging fruit in terms of skills or time investments a person can make which can provide a lot of benefit to the people around them (company, family, friends, etc.) but don't actually benefit themselves?

Ok, this is something I have been thinking every time I see an Outreach Thread, and now I can't resist asking it:

When did LW become a proselytizing community?

And are we sure that it is a good idea to do a lot of outreach when the majority of discussion on the site is about why LW sucks?

It is an idea I generally hold true.

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other" -- Eric Hoffer

A herd of Dollys is a sorry thing to behold.

Of course this is all IMHO (I like weirdness and dislike vanilla).

It's about mental models. It says that the standard mental model isn't good at explaining reality. On the other hand the status model is better at explaining reality and therefore a better model to use. It's not the claim that the status model is perfect at predicting. Models don't need to be perfect at predicting to be useful.

In general Hanson tries to focus on expressing concepts clearly and arguing for them instead of making them complex by introducing all sorts of caviats.