Comment author: Username 25 August 2015 11:22:21PM 1 point [-]

Scott Adams tweeted that you can't be with someone less happy than you. I'm trying it anyway.

Does anyone have any experience with this? In particular, is there a way to not always sacrifice my happiness for theirs at rapidly diminishing rates of return until we are equally (un)happy?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open Thread - Aug 24 - Aug 30
Comment author: philh 24 August 2015 03:40:59PM *  -1 points [-]

Supplemental questions that I don't know the answers to: how significant are the effects of inbreeding? Are they often so bad that it would be better for an inbred child to never have existed? How does that compare to having non-inbred children with known high risks of genetic defects? To what extent can the effects be tested for (both before and during pregnancy)?

I'd be very surprised if inbreeding was so bad that careful consensual incestuous sex, with the intent of getting an abortion if pregnancy does occur, wasn't worth the risk.

Edit: Okay, inbreeding seems to be much worse than I'd anticipated.

Comment author: Username 24 August 2015 06:11:28PM 1 point [-]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7404730.stm

Professor Alan Bittles, director for the centre for human genetics in Perth, Australia has collated data on infant mortality in children born within first-cousin marriages from around the world and found that the extra increased risk of death is 1.2%.

In terms of birth defects, he says, the risks rise from about 2% in the general population to 4% when the parents are closely related.

Comment author: Username 24 August 2015 04:26:33PM 5 points [-]

Heh. Qualify this under "crazy ideas". Chinese tech companies are motivating programmers by hiring cheerleaders. It would be interesting to know if this increases productivity. Do cheerleaders help improve results sports teams?

Comment author: Clarity 24 August 2015 12:17:28PM *  1 point [-]

How many of the following do you identify with, strangers?

 Is preoccupied with details, rules, lists, order, organization, or schedules to the extent that the major point of the activity is lost.
Shows perfectionism that interferes with task completion (e.g., is unable to complete a project because his or her own overly strict standards are not met).
Is excessively devoted to work and productivity to the exclusion of leisure activities and friendships (not accounted for by obvious economic necessity).
Is overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values (not accounted for by cultural or religious identification).
Is unable to discard worn-out or worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value.
Is reluctant to delegate tasks or to work with others unless they submit to exactly his or her way of doing things.
Adopts a miserly spending style toward both self and others; money is viewed as something to be hoarded for future catastrophes.
Shows rigidity and stubbornness.

For me it's the 1st, 6th, 7th and 8th

Now that I've recognised these personality traits, and being young, I can consciously overide them. Yay!

Comment author: Username 24 August 2015 01:10:45PM 1 point [-]
Comment author: AspiringRationalist 22 August 2015 08:26:45PM 2 points [-]

Meta sub-thread

Comment author: Username 23 August 2015 12:25:16AM *  3 points [-]

If there's one thing I enjoy about this site, it's reading practical advice from its members.

*fixed the 3AM typo

Comment author: Lumifer 22 August 2015 07:41:36PM 0 points [-]

he's actively trying to drive away people for disagreeing with his politics

No, I don't think so.

In the context of online debates, "actively trying to drive away" means things like threats, discussion of sexual inadequacies, and expressed desires for someone to die in a fire. That is not the case here.

And people who are that sensitive to their karma score are unlikely to be comfortable in LW anyway.

Comment author: Username 22 August 2015 11:06:27PM -2 points [-]

If Ra sees this as a voting game, getting into politically charged arguments with newbies and then down voting them is efficient.

They give him a target that lets him post a lot of replies, and with low karma they can't down vote him back.

He can use a second account to vote up 30% of his replies, giving him a good amount of karma at low risk of discovery.

He gets a chance to run off a newbie that doesn't agree with him.

And we all gain from this. We don't need users that can't ignore a troll.

Comment author: skilesare 19 August 2015 06:53:07PM 1 point [-]

Does anyone here have kids in school and if so how did you go about picking their school? Where is the best place to get a scientifically based 'rational' education.

I'm in Houston and the public schools are a non-starter. We could move to a better area with better schools but my mortgage would increase 4x. Instead we send our kids to private school and most in the area are Christian schools. In a recent visit with my schools principal we were told in glowing terms about how all their activities this year would be tied back to Egypt and the stories of Egypt in the old testament. I thought to my self that I didn't even think that Moses was a real person so this is going to get very interesting.

I wish they'd spend half as much time on studying science and psychological concepts that they do studying the bible...but what are you going to do?

Any ideas?

I should add that I did graduate from this same school although I did not go through grades 1-9 there...only high school, and that education was really top notch...but still an hour a day of bible class.

Comment author: Username 19 August 2015 07:23:47PM *  6 points [-]

My approach was very simple: find the best public school system in my area and move there. "Best" is defined mostly by IQ of high-school seniors proxied by SAT scores. What colleges the school graduates go to mattered as well, but it is highly correlated with the SAT scores.

What I find important is not the school curriculum which will suck regardless. The crucial thing, IMHO, is the attitude of the students. In the school that my kids went to, the attitude was that being stupid was very uncool. Getting good grades was regarded as entirely normal and necessary for high social status (not counting the separate clusters of athletes and kids with very rich parents). The basic idea was "What, are you that dumb you can't even get an A in physics??" and not having a few AP classes was a noticeable negative. This all is still speaking about social prestige among the students and has nothing to do with teachers or parents.

I think that this attitude of "it's uncool to be stupid" is a very very important part of what makes good schools good.

Comment author: Username 17 August 2015 10:35:18AM 2 points [-]

The Puzzle of the Self-torturer talks about transitive and intransitive preferences.

Comment author: Username 17 August 2015 10:13:26AM *  3 points [-]

Bentham’s Fallacies, Then and Now by Peter Singer

Bentham collected examples of fallacies, often from parliamentary debates. By 1811, he had sorted them into nearly 50 different types, with titles like “Attack us, you attack Government,” the “No precedent argument,” and the “Good in theory, bad in practice” fallacy. (One thing on which both Immanuel Kant and Bentham agree is that this last example is a fallacy: If something is bad in practice, there must be a flaw in the theory.)

Bentham was thus a pioneer of an area of science that has made considerable progress in recent years. He would have relished the work of psychologists showing that we have a confirmation bias (we favor and remember information that supports, rather than contradicts, our beliefs); that we systematically overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs (the overconfidence effect); and that we have a propensity to respond to the plight of a single identifiable individual rather than a large number of people about whom we have only statistical information.

1824 edition of the book

Comment author: Username 17 August 2015 10:09:18AM 3 points [-]

The good, the bad, and the ineffective: social programs in America

Do people know which social interventions work just from hearing about them?

To do a test, we made the following game. We've described ten major US social interventions, and you'll have to guess whether they had a positive effect, no effect or negative effect.

The interventions were taken from those reviewed by the Campbell Collaboration, which brings together all the highest-quality research that's available on major social interventions to decide whether they're effective or not. We chose the top ten interventions that were easiest to explain and had the clearest conclusions, so it's clear what the answers are. There's no trick!

View more: Next