Comment author: majus 19 April 2011 03:02:46PM 1 point [-]

I'll have to miss this one. Anti-serendipity; I NEVER leave town, except, apparently, next Saturday. Hope there's another one soon.

Comment author: majus 08 February 2011 11:10:05PM *  7 points [-]

My deficiency is common manners. I think it's a lack of attention to the world outside of my own thoughts. I've been known to just wander away from a conversation that is clearly not over to the other participants. I notice a sneeze about 10 seconds too late to say "bless you!". I'm appropriately thankful, but assume that's clear without my actually saying or writing something to convey the feeling. Depending on the context, my preoccupation leads me to be perceived as everything from a lovable nerd to an arrogant jerk. It's something I'd like to change.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 February 2011 03:33:41AM 4 points [-]

How do you write a will?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Procedural Knowledge Gaps
Comment author: majus 08 February 2011 05:00:59PM *  0 points [-]

You can get a warm fuzzy feeling from doing it yourself with a downloaded form (say from Nolo) or a cheap app (like WillMaker), but there are subtle ways to mess up, so professional advice is highly recommended. Doing it yourself, you may tend to shy away from thinking about low-probability or painful scenarios, and you don't get to debug it by changing it and trying again. A will is just one part of estate planning, and sometimes a will isn't needed (if the estate is in a trust, its beneficiaries take precedence). Usually you'll need to coordinate the will and your insurance coverage, at a minimum. But don't procrastinate; you can really get burned by having no will at all. In Texas, for example, if you die married and intestate (no will), and you have kids by a previous marriage, your spouse is legally bound to give half of the estate to his/her step-children immediately. Probably not what you would have planned.

Comment author: Tesseract 03 November 2010 10:24:21AM 5 points [-]

If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen to look like oxen, and each would make the gods’ bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.

Xenophanes

Comment author: majus 03 November 2010 06:40:15PM 2 points [-]

Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu "If triangles had a god, he would have three sides." [Lettres Persanes, no 59]

Comment author: majus 14 September 2010 09:51:22PM 28 points [-]

I'm a relatively new lurker, still working through the Sequences. It strikes me that patrissimo's disaffection and resultant call to action are targeted at "the more advanced students", or where I hope to be at some point. To use a shop-class analogy, once you've finished Shop 101, sitting around reading back issues of Woodcrafts magazine wil be lower ROI than designing and building a Mission chest of drawers. But until you've been through the basics, "go build" is less productive and potentially dangerous. I 've discovered that reading LW has helped me notice a common thread in my haphazard intellectual explorations, and align my current ones. So a follow-up question I'll pose in 2 parts is: a) is it a fallacy to presume one must walk before learning to run?, and b) if not, how can one judge when it's time to "go build"?

Comment author: majus 08 September 2010 02:32:50PM 30 points [-]

This is a classic time-management issue, often titled "ants vs. elephants", e.g. using your time to tackle small tasks you can complete easily for some immediate gratification instead of investing in the large ones with big payoff. In my own experience, it almost feels like tasks have an "activation energy". I have a list of prioritized goals, but if I'm low in energy I avoid the big but important tasks and do something relatively mindless like reading Science News or doing a sudoku. In college I used to despise myself for not being able to study on Saturday. Finally I accepted it, and used Saturdays for relaxing. I know you are not suggesting I should still despise myself, or somehow trick myself into not needing down-time. But I think this "energy effect" may partially explain why we don't always choose optimal tasks.

Comment author: majus 13 August 2010 05:00:55PM 6 points [-]

I've been lurking on LW for a couple of months, trying to work through all of the major sequences. I don't remember how I discovered it; it might have been a link in the BadAstronomy blog. I studied astronomy in school and grad school and end up becoming a software engineer, which I've done for almost 30 years now. Most of the content here resonates powerfully with the intellectual searching I've been doing my whole life, and I'm finding it both stimulating and humbling. Spurred by what I've read here, I've just acquired Judea Pearl's "Causality" and Barbour's "The End of Time", and I'm working through the Jaynes book on bayesian probability (though the study group seems pretty inactive). There's a lot of synchronicity going on in my life; much of my software work over the last decade has involved causality graphs and Bayesian belief networks, but I hadn't taken the time to delve very deeply into understanding the underlying fundamentals. I recently read Lee Smolin's "The Trouble With Physics", and he mentioned Barbour's work as a possibly promising new direction, so reading Eliezer's comments on it struck a chord. Finally, I'm becoming increasingly aware of transformative change in society (though I wouldn't go so far as to anticipate the Singularity any time soon) and trying on new ideas and concepts that might make me more successfully adaptive, like those found in Seth Godin's blog and books or Pamela Slim's "Escape from Cubicle Nation". I recognize a similar leap facing me here: if I come to believe that the Singularity/AI are "real", can I stop lurking and take meaningful action?

Comment author: majus 18 June 2010 07:35:27PM 7 points [-]

Newton focused on forces and gravity. Later physicists generalized newtonian mechanics, coming up with formalisms for expressing a host of different problems using a common approach (Lagrangian mechanics with generalized coordinates). They weren't losing precision or sacrificing any power to anticipate reality by having an insight that many apparently different problems can be looked at as being essentially the same problem. A cylinder accellerating down a ramp as it rolls is the same problem as a satellite orbiting the L5 lagrangian point. Another unification was Maxwell's equations for electrodynamics, which unified and linked a large number of earlier, more focused understandings (e.g. Ampere's law, Coulomb's law, the Biot-Savart law).

One more example: a physics-trained researcher studying the dynamic topology of the internet recognized a mathematical similarity between the dynamics of the network and the physics of bosons, and realized that the phenomenon of Google's huge connectedness is, in a very real sense, following the same mathematics as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Eliezer's post seemed to denigrate people's interest in finding such connections and generalizations. Or did I miss the point? Are these sorts of generalizations not the kind he was referring to?

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