Does modafinal literally eliminate akrasia for you? I need to get me some of that.

I think that was one factor Yvain mentioned. The other two I think are more damning to the whole idea of rationality as winning.

One is that most people who are successful are rational when they need to be in their field, without having to make a formal study and be rational all the time.

The other idea is that rationality is only a small small slice of what makes you successful, and that there are probably a ton of other factors that help even more.

One idea that Yvain didn't mention (and actually wrote a blog post arguing against) is that maybe rationality is a red queen game. The more you study it, the more tricky your mind gets at rationalizing it's irrationalities. That view is explored here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/06/bias-is-a-red-queen-game.html

I have seen that before, I think was a lw rationalist project but I'm not sure. From what I remember the web page was pretty dull, so maybe that make it fail(or prevent it to grow).

P.S. I will post a link If I can find the site.

Yesterday, I was surprised when I treated a patient (for a heart attack) to find that he later ended up in the ER. I've only treated a handful (exactly five!) with MI-like symptoms, and none of them had his low heart rate or controlled breathing. Surprise meant my model needed to be updated, and a quick look at this showed me that I really only needed two symptoms to be wary.

Physicians and other healthcare providers in the 'algorithmic' camp (vs 'clinical') essentially forecast diagnosis through probability-based predictions. Algorithms are also referred to simply as 'flowcharts' and as part of standard operating procedure. Medical algorithms incorporate a large number of established heuristics in a standardized manner, and have been shown to dramatically increase diagnostic accuracy. The medical branch of the military has access to a wealth of patient data, and they create algorithms based on that data.

In the private sector, there's Medal, Apervita, Syapse and others. There's a few private companies 'democratizing healthcare data' for a price. There's even more information from health insurance providers, which tend to have their own healthcare data companies, which organizations can also access for a price.

DXplain uses Bayesian logic for diagnostics, and is open to physicians. TXdent does the same for dental care. Adjuvant! is publicly available to healthcare providers and exists for cancer patients. eMedicine is pretty great, but nigh useless to the layperson, other than a better version of WebMD, even though it's a service offered by the same company. If you wanted to improve self-care, you might be able to get some mileage out of CATmaker, but it assumes you're a provider, and I doubt a layperson would get use out of it. Tripdatabase is a curated database, mostly with links to studies from NIH, so you'll encounter the paywall either way.

There's also CDSS, which, while acknowledged as effective, is having problems with implementation due to the state of IT in healthcare.

Disease models exist primarily to forecast infection rates and risks. In addition to census data, there are publicly available datasets for infectious diseases.

All this to say that I suspect the specialists in your post are obfuscating the problem.

• Medical datasets are not freely available to every medical institution.
• Not every provider employs information gleaned from this data.
• Algorithmic, probability based care is essentially controlled by a few companies.

Solve the problem, and you close part of the gap in English speaking countries. If you can read Dutch or Russian, you might be able to get access to all of the above (albeit with more geographically limited datasets) for free, but I don't really know.

If you want to identify health risks for yourself, cross reference the probability of infection in your meatspace community with your own demographic (parents, habits, location, age, general health, medical history) information and take appropriate preventive measures.

Has anyone read anything about Applied Information Economics?

Still reading through the Abercrombie's The First Law series. It's not a conflict between Good and Evil, it's not a conflict between Good and Good (one Orson Card would consider more interesting). It's a conflict between roughly equally "evil" people and/or groups. This holds externally, as well as internally: even the characters themselves (well, the smarter ones in the series, anyway), have no illusion about being more "objectively moral" than their opponents.

I find this pretty rare. And refreshing. Even HPMoR has a clear Good vs Evil narrative, which I dislike. Thus I've been rooting for HPMoR!Quirrell throughout the story, up until the last arc, where he holds the idiot ball and seems to be forced to take various inexplicable actions, completely out of character.

Abercrombie's portrayal of war as brutal is extremely graphic. Sort of like in Saving Private Ryan. Certainly more graphic than, say, in GoT, flaying and all. I am not normally a fan of visual violence, but the way he does it does not turn me off. Your mileage may vary.

There are several minor things I dislike about the series. One is that a few characters are visibly bent to follow the narrative, or because the author likes or dislikes them (Jezal, Shivers and Gorst come to mind). Another is that the same (uncommon) way to express a certain emotional state is repeated rather often, sort of like in Brandon Sanderson's novels, where a hard-to-perform physical action of raising just one eyebrow is a near universal way of expressing surprise or incredulity.

On the whole, I am surprised how little recognition Abercrombie gets, given the quality of his writing.

what kinds of things do you have remembered in the repository? (can you make a list?)

This thread is one of the top-voted on the nootropics subreddit & looks like it has a few interesting ideas: How do smart people really think?

This is not a well thought out post, in keeping with the nature of the subject matter. Less Wrong does seem to encourage solidified thoughts rather than subconscious reactions. A good thing, I think, but difficult all the same. Ideas follow.

• An IRC-style (not necessarily chat) section which has neither votes nor a delineation between post and comment. An area for LWers to post thoughts as they occur. Restrict formatting of these posts to plain text. Not a design choice, so much as to encourage train-of-thought style conversation.
• Why upvotes at all? Why not a well defined rating scheme, in addition to use of belief tags in standalone Main and Discussion posts?

Have a good, working knowledge of what diabetes looks like, and various cardiac issues.

How do you expect people who are not doctors or nurses to acquire that?

I consistently misinterpret what people are saying when in the heat of the moment, and get upset about it. For instance, I was recently playing Warframe with a couple friends, and one playfully grumbled at me for getting killed; and I got really upset in response, thinking they were being deliberately cruel.

This is quite an annoying habit for me given the people I hang around (they lack tact), and I'm doing my best to solve it. I suspect I'm falling prey to the Mind Projection fallacy and thinking them heated when I am, which only escalates it.