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One uses a typewriter apostrophe ('), the other doesn't (`).
No, bbleeker is saying that "Hawaii" (no apostrophe) is in both lists.
In response to
Low Hanging fruit for buying a better life
It seems like most of the big ideas have been covered, so here's a small one.
Rock climbing equipment (shoes and harness) and membership to a climbing gym. It's different, fun, gets you exercise and exposure to more/different people.
Do most climbing gyms have walls (or whatever) that can be climbed without a belaying partner? Or is it usually pretty easy to find a just-for-that-day partner among whoever happens to be at the gym when you are?
In response to
Open thread, Dec. 29, 2014 - Jan 04, 2015
I answered "sort of", but I've thought about it more and now think "not at all" may have been a better answer. I think the two Scotts are talking about a real problem but the main commonalities between my experience and theirs are:
- not particularly successful with women (I was single for most of high school and have been single for long stretches of my adult life)
- afraid to let people know I was interested in them
- depressed about lack of romantic success
and I don't think it's particularly controversial that those are common straight male nerd experiences (or common experiences for other demographics, especially the second and third things on the list). The controversial thing is whether these problems were caused or worsened by feminist ideas, which in my case was not true at all.
Possibly relevant:
- I am about ten years older than both Scotts.
- I did not "go to college" in the sense of earning a degree. (I took a bunch of music classes at a community college -- i.e., a college without dorms. I never attended anything like the sexual-assault prevention workshops Scott Aaronson mentions.)
And here's the Internet Archive's copy of Ozy's original "Cis By Default" post.
Edit: And now they've reposted it to their current blog.
In response to
Group Rationality Diary, January 1-15
I've been learning to solve a standard 3x3 rubik's cube, which isn't a very useful skill but it is something I have a hard time with, both in terms of having very little skill with spatial reasoning and having a general mental block that makes me very adverse to this kind of thing. I think it's been good to push myself out of my comfort zone and grapple with something I've labeled as too hard for me to do with a good bit of success.
I've also being trying to reduce my sugar intake which is pretty hard for me especially around holidays and when I feel generally crappy. I've always had a very hard time regulating how much sugar I eat in a healthy way. Since I've been realizing what a problem it is, I've been trying harder to permanently kick my addiction and improve my health. I've found that vanilla scented candles helps reduce my desire to snack on sugar and that it's also much easier to resist buying sugary food than resist it once it's in my house so I've been trying to be better about that.
I learned to cube with the Rubiety Society method (developed by Alice Yu and friends), which makes the necessary algorithms easier to remember by turning them into stories (along the lines of "family drops kids off at summer camp", where each step in the story corresponds to a cube move).
In which direction? :) and do you think you can say anything about what was said in a way that would help close the gap? Thanks!
I was pretty frustrated by the neuroscience prof's reluctance to speak in terms of predictions -- of what he'd expect to see as the result of some particular experiment -- but you did great at politely pushing him in that direction, and I can't think how you could have done better.
In response to
Rationality Quotes - September 2009
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-Bertrand Russell
In response to
Rationality Quotes December 2014
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-- Bertrand Russell
In response to
Rationality Quotes December 2014
"Hah! Please. Find me a more universally rewarded quality than hubris. Go on, I'll wait. The word is just ancient Greek for 'uppity,' as far as I'm concerned. Hubris isn't something that destroys you, it's something you are punished for. By the gods! Well, I've never met a god, just powerful human beings with a lot to gain by keeping people scared."
-- Lisa Bradley, a character in Brennan Lee Mulligan & Molly Ostertag's Strong Female Protagonist
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Wow! Thank you so much for your time and effort in typing out that reply!
Well, About 3-5 percent of the best students in a cohort can expect to get First Class Honours. It basically means 97th percentile, or 95th percentile, depending on the quality of the students. The 75th to 95th percentile can expect to get Second Class Honours.
I must admit that this question stunned me. I don't actually know. What first came to my mind is that it is some sort of algorithm (case 1: two integers that divide cleanly, case 2: two integers that divide to make a fraction, case 3: an unknown ...) that has useful applications (e.g. it is useful to know that you can divide 6 apples by 3 people to allocate 2 to each person). This is my shot at a definition: division is an operation that gives the ratio of number/function F and another number/function G. The ratio can be determined by seeing how many of G can be added together to comprise F. It can be a fraction/real number/complex number/function. Argh. I am stumped. This definition seems like Swiss cheese.
I recommend chapter 22 ("Algebra") of volume 1 of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Here's a PDF.
My summary (intended as an incentive to read the Feynman, not a replacement for reading it):
We start with addition of discrete objects ("I have two apples; you have three apples. How many apples do we have between us?"). No fractions, no negative numbers, no problem.
We get other operations by repetition -- multiplication is repeated addition, exponentiation is repeated multiplication.
We get yet more operations by reversal -- subtraction is reversed addition, division is reversed multiplication, roots and logarithms are reversed exponentiation. These operations also let us define new kinds of numbers (fractions, negative numbers, reals, complex numbers) that are not necessarily useful for counting apples or sheep or pebbles but are useful in other contexts.
Rules for how to work with these new kinds of numbers are motivated by keeping things as consistent as possible with already-existing rules.