Wow, this is such a great news for me. I listen to a lot of lectures and podcasts.

Took the survey and actually liked it :)

Why didn't Eliezer give a talk?

A guy who works for a book publisher once told me that they pay about 8 euro's per 1000 words to a good translator for books they translate from foreign languages. So by this calculation you can have a 100.000 words text translated in Romanian for 800 euros.

May the Force be with you! :)

This should be in main.

Also, in the spirit of having enjoyed others' anecdotes about how they have managed to avoid lateness; I got into the habit of setting my alarms two hours before I have to be to class; this gives me a half hour of hitting the snooze button, a half hour to dick around on the internet, and a half hour to have coffee and breakfast if I am okay with arriving five minutes late to class; and these totals are all flexible, allowing five minutes of lateness around 1-2 sigmas (which is fine); I've never been more than 15 minutes late to class since (except when my alarm fails to go off).

For example, should mankind vigorously pursue research on how to make Ron Fouchier's alteration of the H5N1 bird flu virus even more dangerous and deadly to humans...

Trivially speaking, I would say "yes".

More specifically, though, I would of course be very much against developing increasingly more dangerous viral biotechnologies. However, I would also be very much in favor of advancing our understanding of biology in general and viruses in particular. Doing so will enable us to cure many diseases and bioengineer our bodies (or anything else we want to engineer) to highly precise specifications; unfortunately, such scientific understanding will also allow us to create new viruses, if we chose to do so. Similarly, the discovery of fire allowed us to cook our food as well as set fire to our neighbours. Overall, I think we still came out ahead.

I think it is very important to keep in mind that it is not very relevant to judge if someone is good at predicting stuff simply by dividing all the predictions made by the ones that turned out to be correct.

I predict that tomorrow will by Friday. Given that today it is Thursday, that's not so impressive. So my point is that it is more important to look at how difficult to make was that prediction and what the reasoning behind it is.

And I would also look and see if I can find improvements in the predictions that are made, if the person making the predictions actually learns something from the mistakes that he/she made in the past and applies the things that are learned to the new predictions he/she makes from that point on.

This is really helpful if it actually works. Thank you!

Hello there people of LessWrong. I'm a 24 years old dude from a small country called Romania who has been reading stuff on this site since 2010 when Luke Muehlhauser started linking here. I'm a member of Mensa and got a B.A. in Management.

I have to admit that there are more things that interest me than there is time for me to study them so I can't really say I'm an expert in anything, I just know a lot of things better than most other people know them. That's not very impressive I guess but I hope that in 5 years from now there will be at least one think I know or do at an expert level.

My plan is to start my own company in the next few years and I think I know how to make politics to actually work. I love defining rationality as winning as you guys do and I think that I win more now, after reading articles on this website. Hopefully with time I might be able to contribute to the community too, there are some things that might just make LessWrong better.