Do you mean the pronouns used to address your character are automatically edited to be what you want?

It would be interesting if people could put up lists of the pronouns they prefer, and that would give them a tool for roughly judging how much trouble people are willing to go to to appear to be on their side.

Are there any games which encourage a you/thou distinction?

What are your favorite puns?

It turns out that a lot of color blind people can see their difficult colors a little bit, and technological aid helps.

http://wearecolorblind.com/article/oxy-iso-glasses-review/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-eyewear-could-help-people-with-red-green-color-blindness/

They don't seem to help (most?) people as much of the more enthusiastic early reviews said, but aren't totally useless, either.

so it is still possible to run out of the resources

Yes, but I would rather see this as a sign that you hit a wall with your motivation-creating skill, than a limitation on how much motivation you can have or how quickly you can achieve it. There seems to be plenty of evidence for people having success spirals that are very quick and powerful.

Also, the correct meta-strategy when you have little motivation seems to be to direct as much of it as you can towards exploring ways to get more motivation. I expect most people are not strategic about their motivation, so I point it out whenever I can.

[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

It makes a lot of sense that the nature of questions regarding the "beginning" of the universe is nonsensical and anthropocentric, but it still feels like a cheap response that misses the crux of the issue. It feels like "science will fill in that gap eventually" and we ought to trust that will be so.

Matter exists. And there are physical laws in the universe that exist. I accept, despite my lack of imagination and fancy scientific book learning, that this is basically enough to deterministically allow intelligent live beings like you and I to be corresponding via our internet-ed magical picture boxes. Given enough time, just gravity and matter gets us to here—to all the apparent complexity of the universe. I buy that.

But whether the universe is eternal, or time is circular, or we came from another universe, or we are in a simulation, or whatever other strange non-intuitive thing may be true in regard to the ultimate origins of everything, there is still this pesky fact that we are here. And everything else is here. There is existence where it certainly seems there just as easily could be non-existence.

Again, I really do recognize the silly anthropocentric nature of questions about matters like these. I think you are ultimately right that the questions are non-sensical.

But, to my original question, it seems a simple agnostic-ish deism is a fairly reasonable position given the infantile state of our current understanding of ultimate origins. I mean, if you're correct, we don't even know that we are asking questions that make sense about how things exist...then how can we rule out something like a powerful, intelligent creative entity (that has nothing to with any revealed religion)?

I'm not asking rhetorically. How do you rule it out?

I think it probably matters a lot what people are conforming about. If it's about perception (which line is the same, which color is different) and several people all say the same thing that's different from what I thought I saw, I can see myself starting to doubt my perception. If it's about memory (what is the capital of Rumania?) I'd start thinking I must have misremembered. But if 4 people all said that 2+2=5, I'd realise the experiment wasn't about what they said it was.

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but... Less Wrongers, do you believe in falling in love after 20-25? For me it seems that I am no longer able to feel anything as intensely as I was able to feel when I was 18. I don't know what happened. I am not saying that people over 25 don't love, just that it is no longer the same thing. Maybe I'm just generalizing from one example, but although I am still young, I feel like I've lost something significant. Can you relate to any of that?

An interesting article I found a long time ago. Scroll down to the tables. I've found these tables extremely interesting. Way better than the descriptions of what the different personality traits are supposed to mean.

E.g. Openness seems to be your measure of liberal vs conservative/ red tribe vs blue tribe stuff.

Conscientiousness measures focus/akrasia/ADHD.

Introversion is obvious, but what it correlates to is interesting. Extroverts are interest in parties, but introversion correlates very strongly with "nerd" culture stuff.

Agreeableness is atheism vs religion. Might be more generally having contrarian opinions on things, I'm not certain.

Neuroticism is... well I don't really know what's going on there.