cupholder

Reaching?

This one felt quite LW-relevant:

If $1 million makes you happy, that doesn't mean $10 million will make you 10 times as happy.

It's good to be reminded now and then that dollars are not, in fact, utilons.

The lack of an automatic repair mechanism makes things hairier, but while frozen, the radiation damage will be localized to the cells that get hit by radiation. By the time you get the tech to revive people from cryonic freezing, you'll most likely have the tech to fix/remove/replace the individual damaged cells before reviving someone. I think you're right that radiation won't be a big limiting factor, though it may be an annoying obstacle.

I don't know so much about C-14, but wouldn't potassium decay's effects be small on timescales ~10,000 years? The radioactive natural isotope K-40 has a ridiculously long half life (1.25 billion years, which is why potassium-argon dating is popular for dating really old things) and only composes 0.012% of natural potassium. Potassium's also much less abundant in the body than carbon - only about 140g of a 70kg person is potassium, although admittedly it might be more concentrated in the brain, which is the important part.

ETA - I did calculations, and maybe... (read more)

This is a nice example of the slipperiness I sometimes notice when I think about how one could test an ev. psych hypothesis. My first thought after reading your comment was 'but won't all those factors be just as correlated with unhappiness and depression as with genetic fitness? Surely there's a less complex explanation here: unhappy people don't like living as much, so they try killing themselves more.'

Then I thought a little more and realized that could also have an ev. psych basis: maybe we evolved to kill ourselves more when we're unhappy with life. B... (read more)

'Why would I need to demand evidence? My wife freely gives me evidence of her love, all the time!'

Maybe the salesman mostly sells temporary life insurance, and just means that no clients had died while covered?

I'm sorry, this is just an open thread comment, not a top-level post. Aren't we allowed to just chat and get feedback without thoroughly contemplating a subject?

There's nobody compelling you to reply to the comments you feel are too thoroughly contemplating a subject.

The tree metaphor reminds me of this...

Who's right? Who knows. It's a fine opportunity to remain skeptical.

Bullshit. The 'skeptical' thing to do would be to take 30 seconds to think about the theory's physical plausibility before posting it on one's blog, not regurgitate the theory and cover one's ass with an I'm-so-balanced-look-there's-two-sides-to-the-issue fallacy.

TV-frequency EM radiation is non-ionizing, so how's it going to transfer enough energy to your cells to cause cancer? It could heat you up, or it could induce currents within your body. But however much heating it causes, the... (read more)

Does the lack of a response from EY imply that he's not interested in that sort of change and, if so, is it EY who would be the one to make the decision?

I wouldn't read anything into the lack of response, EY often doesn't comment on meta-discussion. In fact I'd guess there's a good chance he hasn't even seen this thread!

I guess it might be worth raising this in the Spring 2010 meta-thread? Come to think of it, it's been 4+ months since that meta thread was started - it may even be worth someone posting a Summer 2010 meta-thread with this as a topic starter.

I had a houseguest for a few days recently, a long-time reader who has only written a handful of comments, and I commented to him that the quality of discussion on LW is worse than it has ever been, and his reply was, "Well, yeah if you are talking about WrongBot."

I think your houseguest might not have read a representative selection of LW posts; their assessment doesn't ring true for me. I haven't read WrongBot's top-level posts closely (nothing personal - the evolutionary psychology stuff just isn't that interesting to me), but I've skimmed ... (read more)

Enthusiastically seconded.

The only change I'd make is to hide editorial comments when the post leaves editing (instead of deleting them), with a toggle option for logged-in users to carry on viewing them.

Unfortunately, most of the busy smart people only looked at the posts after editing, while the trolls and people with too much free time managed the edit queue, eventually destroying the quality of the site and driving the good users away. It might be possible to salvage that model somehow, though.

I think it is. There are several tricks we could use to... (read more)

Upvoted for raising the topic, but the approach I'd prefer is jimrandomh's suggestion of having all posts pass through an editorial stage before being posted 'for real.'

I'm open to suggestions for how I might improve the introduction to the article to make the article more palatable.

I was going to suggest this, but I see you've already added it: thanks for editing in your definition of capitalism at the top of the post. When I first read the post, that was something I thought would improve it. Like SilasBarta I thought it was a bad idea to leave unclear what you were counting as capitalism.

I think that's a clever idea that deserves more eyeballs.

Done. I'm looking forward to either Nancy's substantive reply and apology, or your concession that the issue might be a bit more complicated.

It seems to me that the issue's already been complicated because you've already replied to Nancy impolitely. Now that's happened, it is not really realistic to expect a substantive reply and apology from her simply because you (I, if we're being pedantic) rephrased some of your original remarks more tactfully.

Okay, but the part Nancy ignored when she replied bore directly on (and obviated!) her comment, so she sh

The rudeness is in how she completely ignores the explanation I just gave in the parent comment, of why wide feet would lead to people being prejudiced against you, which obviates her question.

There's no explicit question in the comment of NL's I think you're thinking of, so I imagine you mean that the statements in her comment could be read as implying an already-answered question, which makes the comment rude. That hardly registers on my rudeness detector; unless it's part of a systematic pattern of behavior, it's innocuous IMO.

Still, let me pretend I... (read more)

I don't think I'm capable of answering that question, since I'm not seeing the 'rudeness' in the parent comment posted by Nancy to which your linked comment replies. At any rate, I didn't find that particular comment of yours obnoxious except for the 'pity party' snark, which I basically just wrote off as your usual level of prickliness.

Did you find it obnoxious when Nancy outright ignored the part of the comment where I explained why having wide feet would lead to others being prejudiced against you? Or just the fact of me mentioning this ignoranc ... er, "act of ignoring".

Neither. I found the manner in which you mentioned it obnoxious, not the mention qua mention.

This is what always gets me: no one cares when someone doesn't read a comment and yet still replies to it -- well, to a version of it. Yet when someone points out the rudeness of doing so -- well, then that perso