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Television and Movies Thread
In response to
January 2014 Media Thread
I watched 'Oz the Great and Powerful'. I really liked the pro-innovation / science-inventory / mind-over-might themes.
Really good idea. Would attend.
In response to
Meetup : NewYork - Humanist Culture Open Mic
This sounds pretty awesome. Sadly nothing LW seemed to be going on in NY when I visited earlier in the month (sadly no-one married me so I'm back in the UK), but I'm excited to hear about an active musical-participatory branch of Less Wrongers.
I'm a pianist/performer currently undergoing a painful transition to composer/lyricist. I'd like to write musicals to broadcast various rationalist, effective altruist, existential crisis and pro-open borders messages, probably delineated to some degree. I'd like to get in touch with people who do similar things!
Is this open mic night popular? What are people's experience of the intersection between music and rationality?
In response to
Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health
What if the very tools that I use to make decisions are flawed?
Everybody's tools are flawed. This blog exists because it seems reasonable to believe that the tools are good enough to do bootstrapping so that the flaws are smaller.
I'm going to write about some things which have helped me which may or may not be of use to you. I've worked on compassion-- it's tempting for me to believe that I'm the only defective person in the universe, and then try to fix myself. Coming in with that attitude is part of the problem, maybe even most of it. I'm better off to the extent that I can view my current state with a neutral or (much harder) benevolent attitude and work from there.
Also, it helped to realize that my current state has seven billion years of universe behind it. I can change for the better, but whatever is wrong isn't some intrinsic personal defect, and it isn't all my mother's fault either.
Also, it helped to realize that my current state has seven billion years of universe behind it. I can change for the better, but whatever is wrong isn't some intrinsic personal defect, and it isn't all my mother's fault either.
File under "warm-fuzzy pseudo-platitudes that don't set off my thoroughly-trained self-dishonesty detector"; a near-empty category!
In response to
Recovering the 'spark'
I can relate to this a lot, and I'd find it very useful to see how someone else monologues about it. Just to take another step meta here, a framework for doing the sort of thing ('re-calibration'?) you want to do in itself would be a useful akrasia-kick for people who for whatever reason haven't gotten to the stage of automating how to get out of the inefficiency slump.
In response to
September 2012 Media Thread
Music Thread
Regina Spektor, I've been discovering her stuff over the last few months and I've reached the point where I know roughly all of it. As I think is expected in this thread, all I can really offer here is possibility that blog-reading choices vaguely correlate with musical preferences. Her lyrics are pretty non-inane, especially upon repeated listening. Her variance of musical style is pleasing to me, makes it fun to play and listen to. Nothing especially Less Wrong-y, but I might be forgetting something. Though I don't think I know any composer at all who's (consistently) Less Wrong-y. She has a wild imagination and has written songs about being robots. She's one of those artists whose discography is a tapestry of varied and wonderful worlds that I can never really appreciate unless I'm in the process of listening to it, always a process of both rediscovery and familiarity. (She often writes in the first-person as non-Regina people, from fiction, the bible, or anonymous people; more than half of her songs are probably from the perspective of a different person). There are also lots of moments in her various songs that strike me in the right way, that capture some complex emotion I had never put into words, which gives her songs a sense of salience and intelligence. Some especially enjoyable songs: Us very uplifting, makes you think; Call Them Brothers the man singing is her husband, I like the eeriness; The Party, uplifting, pretty; All the Rowboats, she makes cute noises, quite fast. Back of a Truck, from her unusually jazzy first album.
Disclosure: I play and especially like piano so appear to be skewed towards liking such artists.
In response to
[SEQ RERUN] Optimization and the Singularity
Just me, or is this like the most convincing article on this subject? Certainly it has the best verbal illustration of the theory. Very neat.
In response to
Facebook worries me.
How do others here feel?
I feel fine. Thanks.
In my opinion the food industry having a monopoly on what we eat, just as Google and Facebook will have a monopoly web content. Is this a risk on society?
By definition, "the food industry" is that set of all suppliers that supply food to consumers. It shouldn't surprise us that they have a "monopoly", because if there were another supplier, they too would be part of the "food industry". In general, tautologies aren't cause for concern. Also, both Google and Facebook can't possibly have a "monopoly" on web content. If there are two of them, there is a duopoly (but there are, in fact, many more than just those two).
What does this have to do with rationality exactly (or unexactly, if you prefer)?
+1 for
In general, tautologies aren't cause for concern
This would have been a useful phrase during philosophy classes.
Thanks for the acknowledgment :) I have quite a few friends of "its complicated" gender, I think it kind of gives you all superpowers in the sense that you are so much more aware of a very large and frequently used set of assumptions most people are making, and exceptions to them - you are forced to see more of the structure of the matrix just by virtue of being who you are. Please let me know if you ever make it to out to California.
You're welcome :) yes, in that sense it does confer (by confer I mean involuntarily foist upon you) a handful of learning opportunities, especially as you grow up with a wider view of gender-stuff. I'm not certain I'd go back in time and choose the norm, for the variety having an extra order of weirdness.
Though fitting in with weirdness never seemed like it'd be a huge problem with Less Wrong.
I totally will, thank you.
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Well done! Awesome idea. Will be thinking of ways I can contribute as well as attend.