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It's an interesting point but exceedingly simplistic, more so these days than ever before.
What about "the more you think in training", or "the more you learn in training"?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying the value of sweat (excerise, fitness, etc), I'm just saying it's not even close to the whole equation.
"Sweat" here is a standin for generic effort, whether it's actual physical sweat or not depends on what exactly you're training for.
In response to
Absolute denial for atheists
Okay, now for my attempt to actually answer the prompt:
Your supposed "taste" for alcoholic beverages is a lie.
Summary: I've never enjoyed the actual process of drinking alcohol in the way that I e.g. enjoy ice cream. (The effects on my mind are a different story, of course.)
So for a long time I thought that, hey, I just have weird taste buds. Other people really like beer/wine/etc., I don't. No biggie.
But then as time went by I saw all the data about how wine-tasting "experts" can't even agree on which is the best, the moment you start using scientific controls. And then I started asking people about the particulars of why they like alcohol. It turns out that when it comes any implications of "I like alcohol", I have the exact same characterstics as those who claim to like alcohol.
For example, there are people who insist that, yes, I must like alcohol, because, well, what about Drink X which has low alcohol content and is heavily loaded with flavoring I'd like anyway? And wine experts would tell me that, on taste alone, ice cream wins. And defenses of drinking one's favorite beverage always morph into "well, it helps to relax..."
So, I came to the conclusion that people have the very same taste for alcohol that I do, it's just that they need to cook up a rationlizations for getting high. Still trying to find counterevidence...
Your turn: convince me that you really, really like the taste of [alcoholic beverage that happens to also signal your social status].
A relatively simple way to test whether you actually like the taste of alcohol specifically: take a reasonable quantity of your favorite alcoholic beverage, beer/wine/mixed drink/whatever, and split it into two containers. Close one, and heat the other slightly to evaporate off most of the actual ethanol. Then just do a blind taste test. This does still require not lying to yourself about which you prefer, but it removes most of the other things that make knowing whether you like the taste hard.
I personally don't care enough to try this, but just the habit of thinking "how could I test this?" is good.
In response to
Timeless Identity
"If cryonics were widely seen in the same terms as any other medical procedure, economies of scale would considerably diminish the cost"
To what degree are these economies of scale assumed? Is it really viable, both practically and financially, to cryogenically preserve 150,000 people a day?
Is there any particular reason to suspect that investing this sort of funding in to cryonics research is the best social policy? What about other efforts to "cure death" by keeping people from dying in the first place (for instance, those technologies that would be the necessary foundations for restoring people from cryonics in the first place)?
I see cryonics hyped a lot here, and in rationalist / transhuman communities at large, and it seems like an "applause light", a social signal of "I'm rationalist; see, I even have the Mandatory Transhumanist Cryogenics Policy!"
Mandatory link on cryonics scaling that basically agrees with Eliezer:
He's not trying to define art in accord with on our collective intuitions, he's trying to find the simplest boundary around a list of examples based on an individual's intuitions.
I would argue he's trying to find the simplest coherent extrapolation of our intuitions.
Why do we even care about what specifically Eliezer Yudkowsky was trying to do in that post? Isn't "is it more helpful to try to find the simplest boundary around a list or the simplest coherent explanation of intuitions?" a much better question?
Focus on what matters, work on actually solving problems instead of trying to just win arguments.
In response to
comment
by
[deleted]
on
An inflection point for probability estimates of the AI takeoff?
Isn't it just the law of large numbers?
This isn't even related to the law of large numbers, which says that if you flip many coins you expect to get close to half heads and half tails. This is as opposed to flipping 1 coin, where you expect to always get either 100% heads or 100% tails.
I personally expected that P(AI) would drop-off roughly linearly as n increased, so this certainly seems counter-intuitive to me.
In response to
Hunger can make you stupid
Whenever you're screaming "Error", I suggest you stop and figure out whether you're hungry, thirsty, tired, or hurting before trying to find a problem in your thinking itself
If you learn to eliminate errors even under pressure, wouldn't that make you stronger?
It depends on what you're trying to do, working in bad conditions/under pressure is good for training but bad for actually getting things done. Ironically this seems to mean that you should work harder to have good conditions when you're under more time pressure/in a worse situation overall.
In response to
Rationality Quotes: April 2011
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This one really needs to have been applied to itself, "short is good" is way better.
(also this was one of EY's quotes in the original rationality quotes set, http://lesswrong.com/lw/mx/rationality_quotes_3/ )
More people confirming a story is certainly epsilon more evidence that the story is correct (Because more people confirming a story being evidence that it is false is absurd).
A more interesting question is, what is the magnitude of epsilon in a case like the one described here? This is in principle testable, but I certainly don't know exactly how to go about testing it.
To my knowledge, this is how it works, but I might be missing a detail or two (never had to do it completely on my own).
1) Start with the car with the dead battery first. Expose the terminals of the battery - usually there are plastic covers to prevent anything from touching the metal terminals. Connect the jumper cables to both of these terminals. Jumper cables have a red side and a black side. You don't have to match red with the positive or negative terminal, but you will have to remember how you matched them. I.e., remember whether red is positive or negative.
2) Now go to the car with the good battery and make sure it's started and running. Connect the jumper cables to the terminals of the battery of that car in the same way that you connected them to the first car. I.e., if the red side was connected to the positive terminal on the first car, do the same on the second car.
3) Wait. It takes a few minutes to recharge a dead battery.
4) Try to start the car with the dead battery. You can do this with the jumper cables still connected. If it doesn't work, return to 3)
5) If it starts, disconnect the jumper cables.
A couple of things: don't touch the metal ends of the cables or the battery terminals. You could be in for a shock.
If the battery of a car dies, it's likely because the alternator, which recharges the battery, went out. Because of this, it's a good idea to give the dead battery a decent charge before disconnecting so that the car you're giving a jump can make it to wherever it's going (hopefully a mechanic!).
edit: and it's not my fault if you use these instructions and get caught in an infinite loop :)
It's slightly better to specifically connect the other end the cable connected to the black side of the dead battery last, and to connect it to the frame of the car with the live battery instead of to the black terminal in that car.
The goal here is to make the last connection, the one that completes the circuit and can generate sparks, away from either battery, because lead-acid batteries can sometimes release hydrogen gas, which can cause fires or explode. The chances of this actually happening are pretty low, but there's no reason not to be careful. The end of the black cable connected to the running car is the only one that can be attached away from batteries, so that's the one used.
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Well, I've been systematically (if desultorily) reading all of LW from the beginning. So I got to your comment and, given the local norm that it's just fine to respond to a comment or post from years ago, responded to it. I presume bcoburn saw my comment in "Recent Comments", went to your original and felt like responding too.
This is, indeed, exactly what happened.