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You know... purposely violating Godwin's Law seems to have become an applause light around here, as if we want to demonstrate how super rational we are that we don't succumb to obvious fallacies like Nazi analogies.
In response to
How To Actually Change Your Mind eBook (In Order)
Note that a nicely formatted and typo-corrected version of The Sequences is currently being prepared for PDF, Kindle, and iBooks.
Is there any editing being done? In my opinion, a lot of essay 'refactoring' could be of use here for Eliezer's writing.
In response to
What is the evidence in favor of paleo?
Modern highly processed food is optimized to our sense of taste, to the extent that they can be called superstimuli. They are also correspondingly unhealthier, on many metrics. (I suppose this is the part in contention... I don't have any sources for this claim, sorry.)
The paleo diet, as well as the Atkins diet and other diets, inadvertently 'works' because highly processed foods tend to be carb-based (crackers, cookies, chips, sugary cereals, sugary yogurts, sugary soft drinks, sugary baked goods), and are thus excluded.
In response to
[LINK] Strong AI Startup Raises $15M
Would be nice to have details of their algorithmic approach, instead of some nebulous buzzword like 'Recursive Cortical Network'. I suppose it does hint somewhat at neural networks...
Their website also seems to emphasize the wrong thing - emphasizing the potential of visual processing algorithms and such. I would be more worried about whether their team is smart/visionary/revolutionary enough to make significant headway on such a difficult problem. Because they're emphasizing the 'wrong' things, it sets off my 'Solyndra' alarms.
In response to
Enjoy solving "impossible" problems? Group project!
Idea: Understand the human psychology that leads to the stability of the concept of currency/money.
In response to
Idle speculation about anchoring and the Facebook IPO
RolfAndreassen, if you have a theory that allows you to predict particular inefficiencies in very liquid markets like stocks, then you could easily make huge amounts of money (PM me if you need help doing so). The fact that you haven't done so (if, in fact, you haven't) puts your particular hypothesis in a reference class of hypothesis that aren't even worth considering seriously.
While I agree with your sentiment, I think this is just begging the question - you are rejecting this speculation by assuming homo economicus.
In response to
Mentioning cryonics to a dying person
Heavy use of dark arts, not logic or rationality is your best, if flimsy, hope.
You might be able to sell it as a really expensive burial of his wife to the conspiracist grandpa, and to both of them together as a glimmer of hope of them reuniting in the after(cryo)life. You might be able to use what Alicorn suggested on your grandfather, if you spin it right. Think about other arguments they (not you) might find convincing enough to spend a few hundred thousand dollars on. Is either of them big into lottery or gambling? What other biases that can be exploited are they prone to? Might guilt-tripping her by describing how you and your mom would miss her (with no hope of ever seeing her again) much more than the money. Compare voluntary death to suicide. As the saying goes, if you are not cheating you're not trying hard enough.
As for your mom, "the future isn't likely to want her" is likely not her true rejection. See if you can dig deeper.
Or you can let her go as she wishes, and hope that some of the resulting inheritance will allow you to start your own cryo insurance.
I imagine the author has written this with a healthy dose of self-irony. I applaud him for being so forthright about what we should all do as advocates of cryonics.
In response to
Mentioning cryonics to a dying person
Am I the only one who finds this about as distasteful as the rabbi who goes around a hospital ward trying to solicit deathbed conversions?
If a cryonics decision is to be made, it should be made when the person is not under duress.
In response to
Natural Laws Are Descriptions, not Rules
This seems to be taking down a straw man, and far from "challenging a central tenet of LW: reductionism", you perfectly describe it and expound on it, if a bit wordily. At least in my mind, it's very obvious that physical 'law' is a map-level concept. Physicists themselves have noticed that for a map-level concept, physical 'law' fits the territory so amazingly well, that they have written articles such as "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
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It's posts like this that remind me that the sequences are vast, excellent, and most importantly of all, not particularly organized at the moment.
Every so often, Lukeprog or others will make a small effort towards collating the sequences, but the resulting product disappears into the ether of Discussion archives.
Talk is cheap, but somebody really needs to do something about the sequences to make them more accessible and visible to a newcomer. The LW wiki index of the sequence is incomplete, and seems like it hasn't been changed since 'Tetronian' created it six months ago.