Would anybody listen to an almost-almost-molested woman? It's not awful or something, and I do not need it, would probably feel down regardless of that thing, but still. Please.

Edit: thank you a lot. I have written to some of people who agreed to listen, and if anything rough happens to anybody here, I could listen, too.

What do you actually want to do with your life? There are careers like politics where personal connection that are gathered during university years are very important.

There are other careers such as starting a startup where personal connections with high status people might not be central and a lot of the YC founders don't have them.

Either there's some sort of self-selection, or do graduates from there have better prospects than graduates of 'University of X, YZ'?

Why "either or"?

You seem to think that people that are not completely satiated are automatically cranky. That doesn't match my observation.

Also you may have multiple dishes. For example we mostly start with a collaboratively prepared soup - which thereby will be the right size by construction. Later we have some snacks or sweets or fruits. First the fresh ones, later if needed packaged ones.

But there is a difference between having an amount appropriate to avoid crankiness and more than can be eaten.

That calories are used as social lubricant irks me a lot. I understand why it was so in the past, but we live in a world filled to the brim with food, do we really need tens of thousands of calories at any social gathering?
The answer is obiously not, indeed it would be beneficial to lower the amount circulating... But as Lumifer spotted and wannabe rationalists often overlook, what appears as waste and irrationality is actually a situation optimized for status.
Ignoring status is almost always a bad idea, BUT: we can always treat it as just another contraint.
Given that we need to optimize for status and waste reduction, what could we do?

• coordinate with a charity to pick-up the leftovers
• use food that can be easily refrigerated and consumed gradually later
• have food in stages, so that variety masks lack of abundance (and pressure people into eating leftovers)
• repackage leftovers and offer them as parting gifts ...

These are just from a less than five minute brainstorming session, I'm sure someone invested in this would come up with much more interesting and creative ideas.

This write-up is about my most recent exercise: Do a Non Gender-Conforming Thing

Don't spend your idiosyncrasy credits frivolously.

I don't like this idea, but people, please do not downvote Daniel just because you disagree. Downvote thumb is not for disagreements, it's for comments that don't add anything to the discussion.

The above-mentioned researchers are skeptical in different ways. Andrew Ng thinks that human-level AI is ridiculously far away, and that trying to predict the future more than 5 years out is useless. Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio believe that advanced AI is far from imminent, but approve of people thinking about long-term AI safety.

Okay, but surely it’s still important to think now about the eventual consequences of AI. - Absolutely. We ought to be talking about these things.

So what?

(EDIT: In case you don't know, username2 is an anonymous account that anyone can use, created after some jerk changed the password to the Username account formerly used for that purpose.)

The sudden very positive karma is extremely suspicious.