• Remembering the existence of the term ‘compersion’ gives me hope that I may overcome some jealousy I have felt lately :) At the back of my mind I fear the only reason the girl I'm dating is into me is because of transference from her ex boyfriend who's vibe I apparently give off, convenience since I live close by, and the 'rebound' of a recent breakup

• Why would you take head of information that doesn't help you? it's up to you

• Effective Altruist? No, I participate in the effective altruism community because I'm Hindu and needa game the Karma yoga system. Why not outreach to Hindu communities, not just skeptics groups?

• Yoga is dangerous. Don't do it as a substitutde for physical therapy rehabilitation exercises (like for back pain!). > An extensive survey of yoga practitioners in Australia showed that about 20% had suffered some physical injury while practicing yoga. In the previous 12 months 4.6% of the respondents had suffered an injury producing prolonged pain or requiring medical treatment. Headstands, shoulder stands, lotus and half lotus (seated cross-legged position), forward bends, backward bends, and handstands produced the greatest number of injuries.[239]

• [MAXMINCON Principle(bama.ua.edu/~sprentic/607 outline-maxmincon.html)

• 'Neuropsychological research about the order of events in brain functioning has revealed that emotions precede reason and perception and hence some emotional repsponses and memories may be formed without any conscious thoughts (LeDoux 1998). Therefore, the cofounders of the Human Givens Institute argue that it is the emotional arousal that causes blacka nd white thinking (HGIPRN 2009). It is widely known that evidence-based CBT is underpinned by the premise that the opposite cocurs, that is, thoughts precede emotions. However, arguably, and in line with LeDoux's (1998) findings, and the APET model which drew upon them, there area great number of things that practioniers may do before challenging faulty thinking, as this may be too taxing to begin with for young people. Order of events in brain functioning

• Organ donation registered-only party

• Australians can sense the lack of good governance, and minor parties are becoming increasingly popular (among some voters) because none of the major parties (LNP, ALP, Greens) are able to represent those voters. When you think about it, a system of democracy that isn’t able to deal with a diverse votership can’t be that good at the end of the day.

• What is the evidence for and against slum clearance?

• I recently used Doodle to schedule a meeting. It only let's you schedule for particular days, whereas need to meet lets you schedule by the hour - way better, instant regret

• Anyone remember that monopoly pc game with the nice music?

• will rough skateboard grit that scratches your hands when you carry it toughen them..is that even bad?

• don't reuse floss

• isn't the nurturant parent model blatantly the best parenting style, obviously?

• heard of dynamic deconstructive therapy for BPD?

By repeatedly recounting recent social interactions, identifying emotions, and putting them into perspective, DDP is hypothesized to activate higher-level cortical pathways, thereby strengthening them and remediating deficits in how emotions are processed in the brain. The analogy used is to physical therapy following stroke; physical therapy repeatedly activates motor neuron pathways in the brain, thereby strengthening them and restoring control over muscle functioning and voluntary movement.

• My favourite colour combination: blue and beige

• song: Röyksopp - Eple

• Jay Chou 周杰倫【夜曲 Ye Qu】-Official Music Video

• can you explain how neurogenesis-based treatments for depression would work...to a ten year old?

• Why can't I get my receipts sent me to by email, itemised, rather than paper copies. My bank card could carry that detail.

• I wish my mum would understand this fact sheet on family violence :'(

• Violent virtue:

'Tetlock uses a different “functionalist metaphor” to describe his work on how people react to threats to sacred values—and how they take pains to structure situations so as to avoid open or transparent trade-offs involving sacred values.[21][22][23][24] Real-world implications of this claim are explored largely in business-school journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, California Management Review, and Journal of Consumer Psychology. This research argues that most people recoil from the specter of relativism: the notion that the deepest moral-political values are arbitrary inventions of mere mortals desperately trying to infuse moral meaning into an otherwise meaningless universe.[25][26][27][28] Rather, humans prefer to believe that they have sacred values that provide firm foundations for their moral-political opinions. People can become very punitive “intuitive prosecutors” when they feel sacred values have been seriously violated, going well beyond the range of socially acceptable forms of punishment when given chances to do so covertly'

• political psychology or psychological politics?

Tetlock has a long-standing interest in the tensions between political and politicized psychology. He argues that most political psychologists tacitly assume that, relative to political science, psychology is the more basic discipline in their hybrid field.[30][31] In this view, political actors—be they voters or national leaders—are human beings whose behavior should be subject to fundamental psychological laws that cut across cultures and historical periods. Although he too occasionally adopts this reductionist view of political psychology in his work, he has also raised the contrarian possibility in numerous articles and chapters that reductionism sometimes runs in reverse—and that psychological research is often driven by ideological agenda (of which the psychologists often seem to be only partly conscious). Tetlock has advanced variants of this argument in articles on the links between cognitive styles and ideology (the fine line between rigid and principled)[32][33] as well as on the challenges of assessing value-charged concepts like symbolic racism[34] and unconscious bias (is it possible to be a “Bayesian bigot”?).[35][36][37][38] Tetlock has also co-authored papers on the value of ideological diversity in psychological and social science research.[39][40] One consequence of the lack of ideological diversity in high-stakes, soft-science fields is frequent failures of what Tetlock calls turnabout tests.[41][42][43]

Tetlock argues it is virtually impossible to disentangle the factual assumptions that people are making about human beings from the value judgments people are making about end-state goals, such as equality and efficiency.

• Why syncretism outperforms ideologies - syncretists are foxes and ideologues are hedgehogs

• When Flux is implemented, it will take the form of an app you can access right from your computer or smartphone. You’ll be given a vote on every bill put before Federal Parliament, and can use that vote immediately on the issue at hand, give it to a trusted third party to cast on your behalf, or save it for an issue you care more passionately about later. We seek to dismantle political apathy, by empowering the disenfranchised, and motivating a new generation of innovative Australians to take responsibility for their society. We are excited about a democracy for the information age. One which fosters constructive criticism, encourages innovation, and empowers our best and brightest.

Important to the goal of increasing one's wealth while managing the risk of losing it.

Given this definition, I don't see why only stocks and bonds qualify.

The word is used to mean different things in different contexts.

True, but given that you said "cash and CDs" I thought your idea of cash excludes deposits. Still, there are more asset classes than equity and fixed income.

What's the criterion of importance?

...other things that return principal plus interest like cash

Um.... I hate to break it to you...

what portion of your money is in stocks and bonds

There are more financial assets than just stocks and bonds.

My employer changed their donation matching policy such that I now have an incentive to lump 2 years' donations into a single year, so I can claim the standard deduction during the year that I don't donate, thereby saving around $1200 every 2 years. I've been donating between 10 and 12.5 percent for the last few years. This year I would be donating around 21%. Has anyone here been audited because they claimed a large fraction of their income as charitable contributions? How painful was the experience? I doubt it's worth paying $1200 to avoid, but I thought I'd ask.

Are index funds still a good idea if you don't live in the US? In Australia for example, due to differences in things like capital gains tax rates, the existence of franking credits, tax exempt options like your main residence, and whatever else I'm not aware of, I'm not sure.

Some people may make arguments for morality based on things similar to Coherent Extrapolated Volition. I don't find those arguments convincing. I help people I don't know because when I think about the alternatives, I prefer the world in which one fewer person is suffering to the one where I'm better off in whatever way (e.g., I have more money in my bank account) because I didn't help. That preference is based on empathy, which was evolved, but I don't particularly care where it came from. At some point that preference gets outweighed by selfish preferences, which is why I haven't given all of my money away.

I don't think maximally helping others is a particularly good way to maximize your own quality of life unless you already want to do that. Both (a) and (b) are true, but if your goal is maximizing your own quality of life you're almost certainly going to do better if you focus on that directly. At least, in my particular case, there's some amount of warm fuzzies I get from helping people and from identifying as someone who tries to effectively help people. So in that way my quality of life is improved. But I think that if I wanted to I could get that amount of fuzzies at a lower cost.

How does a rationalist determine the value of helping other people they don't know, i.e. why is QALY something worth maximizing? Is it an efficient and sustainable way of improving one's own quality of life because (a) humans have empathy built-in and (b) philanthropy is a socially rewarded meme?

What are the forms of math called where you can compare numbers, such as to say that 3 is bigger than 2, but can't necessarily add numbers - that is, 2+2 may or may not be bigger than 3?