The healthcare startup scene suprises me.

Why doesn't the free home doctor service put free (bulk-billed) medical clinics out of business?

Why did MetaMed go out of business?

One of our cats (really, my cat) escaped a few days ago after a cat carrier accident. In between working to find her and having emotional breakdowns, I find myself wanting to know what the actual odds of recovering her are. I can find statistics for "the percentage of pets at a shelter for whom original owners were found", but not "the percentage of lost pets that eventually make it back to their owners by any means." Can anyone do better? I don't like fighting unknown odds.

Additionally, if anyone has experienced advice for locating lost pets -- specifically an overly anxious indoor cat escaped outdoors -- it would be helpful. We have fliers up around the neighborhood, cat traps in the woods where we believe she's hiding, and trail cameras set up to try and confirm her location. Foot searches are difficult because of the heat and terrain (I came back with heat exhaustion the first day). I guess what I'm specifically looking for from LW is "here is something you should do that you're overlooking because bias X/trying to try/similar."

I recommend that you contact local shelters and search their lost & found sections. Craigslist also has a good lost & found section.

Useful info here, even if you don't live in Boston: http://www.mspca.org/adoption/boston/lost-and-found/lost.html

Despite Yudkowsky's obvious leanings, the Sequences are not about FAI, nor [etc]...they are first and foremost about how to not end up an idiot. They are about how to not become immune to criticism, they are about Human's Guide to Words, they are about System 1 and System 2.

I've always had the impression that Eliezer intended them to lead a person from zero to FAI. So I'm not sure you're correct here.

...but that being said, the big Less Wrong takeaways for me were all from Politics is the Mind-Killer and the Human's Guide to Words -- in that those are the ones that have actually changed my behavior and thought processes in everyday life. They've changed the way I think to such an extent that I actually find it difficult to have substantive discussions with people who don't (for example) distinguish between truth and tribal identifiers, distinguish between politics and policy, avoid arguments over definitions, and invoke ADBOC when necessary. Being able to have discussions without running over such roadblocks is a large part of why I'm still here, even though my favorite posters all seem to have moved on. Threads like this one basically don't happen anywhere else that I'm aware of.

Someone recently had a blog post summarizing the most useful bits of LW's lore, but I can't for the life of me find the link right now.

Thanks!

Phatic is a great term, definitely adopting for use in my own vocabulary!

I had seen a comment on the open thread asking about in which part of the body people felt their "sense of self" and if it changes, and I wanted to contribute "that's so bizarre to me, I've never felt a sense of self anywhere, but I find this discussion interesting" but realized it added nothing to their discussion and stopped myself. I might be more phatic in the future though, now that I have a friendly disclaimer to use. :)

I remember hearing a quote somewhere on LW saying something like "pain/discomfort is what you feel when you level up". Does anyone know what the actual quote is? Where it was said?

I don't have anything to add to the discussion, but in the interest of being phatic I just want to say that this is a great introductory post -- welcome to LessWrong!

Seeking writing advice: how to keep writing

I've been having some shoulder pain for the past couple of weeks, which I've seen a doctor for. I've also noticed that I haven't actually written anything new for my novel, "S.I.", for almost that long, and have just been posting chapters from my buffer to the forum I post them in.

Given my previous attempt at writing long fiction ("Myou've Gotta Be Kidding Me"), I anticipate two likely courses. One, pain sucks, and when it goes away, my writing motivation will return, and I'll get back into the swing of things. Or two, my writing engine has run out of motivation-fuel for this story generally. In the latter case, I think I can avoid leaving the story entirely unfinished, though there would still be all sorts of dangling plot threads and unsolved mysteries; I should be able to muster up enough typing to have my protagonist finally feel overwhelmed by everything she's facing, retreat to Elliot Lake, and jump to my intended finale. It's far from a perfect solution, but seems better than putting the story on permanent hiatus (or more formally cancelling it) without any finish at all, as I ended up doing with "Myou've".

I'm hoping it's the first course. What I don't know... is if there's any way I can tweak the odds to /favour/ the first course.

Any ideas?

Has anyone here ever had the "location" of their sense of self change? I ask because I've recently read that while some people feel like "they" are located in their heads, others feel like "they" are in their chests, or even feet. Furthermore, apparently some people actually "shift around", in that sometimes they feel like their sense of self is in one body part, and then it's somewhere else.

I find this really interesting because I have never had such an experience myself; I'm always "in my head", so to speak--more precisely, I feel as though "I" am located specifically at a point slightly behind my eyes. The obvious hypothesis is that my visual sense is the sense that conveys the most information (aside from touch, which isn't pinned down to a specific location), which is why I identify with it most, but the sensation of being "in my head" persists even when I have my eyes closed, which somewhat contradicts that hypothesis. Also, the fact that some people apparently don't perceive themselves in that place is more weak evidence against that hypothesis.

So, any thoughts/stories/anecdotes?