I guess you meant for that link to go somewhere else.
I don't think HungryHobo meant it to go anywhere in particular. It looks like a dummy link with the spoiler in its title attribute so the spoiler appears when the link's hovered over.
Disclaimer: politics is the mind-killer.
LW used to be politically neutral; I'm not sure it is so anymore. A large part of the user base is American, and the current presidential election season is spilling into LW far more than previous seasons ever did. And the current wave of populist, nationalistic, libertarian/individualist ideology which seems to be very popular in the USA is being represented in the general atmosphere of LW.
It would be great if a temporary ban on political subjects could be set and enforced until at least the current election season is over.
LW used to be politically neutral; I'm not sure it is so anymore.
I reckon LW's more politically neutral (in kilobug's apparent sense) now than it was in 2014, but that that's mainly attributable to the fall in traffic. (I'd guess LW's less politically-neutral-in-the-apparent-kilobug-sense than I felt it was in 2013.)
(I also think that as I understand the term "politically neutral", LW was never politically neutral, because the idea of a politically neutral institution is probably incoherent in the first place. I upvoted kilobug anyway because I think they mean something else by "politically neutral", and in any case I agree with the rest of their comment.)
And the current wave of populist, nationalistic, libertarian/individualist ideology which seems to be very popular in the USA is being represented in the general atmosphere of LW.
LW's always had a big, big libertarian/individualist streak. In the first survey back in '09, a plurality (45%) called themselves libertarians. That's actually been diluted over the years as more conventional left-wingers have drifted in.
I remember reading somewhere that talent often runs in families (with examples, which unfortunately I forgot)... but now I think the original article was probably about things like musical talent.
Quick look at Wikipedia:
- Marie Curie - parents: teachers
- Albert Einstein - father: salesman / electrician; mother: ?housewife?
- Alan Turing - father: civil servant; mother: ?housewife?
Okay, you have a point.
Although if we go looking for descendants rather than ancestors...
Irène Joliot-Curie (12 September 1897 – 17 March 1956) was a French scientist, the daughter of Marie Curie and Pierre Curie and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. This made the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date.[1] Both children of the Joliot-Curies, Hélène and Pierre, are also esteemed scientists.[2]
Well, no posts are deleted. If you look at Main and sort chronologically, you can go through and count articles per time and what fraction of them are math-heavy (which should be easy to check from a once-over skim).
I think this is pretty much accepted wisdom in the rationalsphere. Several people, online and in person, have said things to the effect of "Tumblr is for socializing, private blogs are for commenting on whatever the blogger writes about, and LessWrong is for math-heavy things, quotes threads, and meetup scheduling." But if you doubt it, you can absolutely check.
I know I could check; I was more wondering whether you, or someone you knew, had checked yourself/themselves.
I think it's quite possible that Discussion has had a higher maths density over the last two or three months, mainly because of Stuart Armstrong posting his run of ideas from his AI risk retreat. Aside from that, though, I'm doubtful that LW's had a strong rise in maths density over the last few years. To me it feels like an idea that's probably more truthy than true.
It's possible the LW diaspora has concrete evidence on this and I haven't encountered it. I look at rationalist Tumblr only intermittently and I don't have Facebook, so I would likely have missed it.
The usual formulation has "irresistible" rather than "unstoppable" and I always took it that (1) "irresistible force" means something that substantially affects everything it interacts with, (2) "immovable object" means something on which no force has a substantial effect, and (3) "meets" means "interacts with in the way forces in this general class interact with objects in this general class".
So if they "pass through each other", that means the object remained immovable but the force wasn't in this case irresistible.
(It's an amusing answer, though.)
The usual formulation has "irresistible" rather than "unstoppable"
You forgot the citation!
Back when LW was more active, there was much lower math density in posts here.
Is that true? How do we know?
I spent a month in a farming village in China about 15 years ago. Farmhands there made about $8 a day during the growing season, and little during the winter. They would be supporting a family of 4 or more, so that would be under $2 a day on average. Yet prices for rent and food were so low that, if you considered only the essentials, they were making better wages than many people in America. They were poor if they wanted to buy manufactured goods, and poor in that certain standards (clean air, quiet neighbors, reliable electricity) were unavailable even for the rich. Most of them had indoor toilets (with nasty open sewers) and television (the true necessity). I don't know about the price of fuel or electricity.
My point is that using the exchange rate to compute how many dollars a day someone makes in a country in which the exchange rate is only used to price things that the locals don't buy is very misleading.
My point is that using the exchange rate to compute how many dollars a day someone makes in a country in which the exchange rate is only used to price things that the locals don't buy is very misleading.
I believe the World Bank defines poverty in terms of PPP-adjusted incomes for that reason.
I'm a mad scientist, not a real one. I can't make a complex model that predicts the effects of heating up the mesosphere by a degree in terms of changes in both outgoing heat radiation, reflection and absorption of sunlight, etc. I can only make a very simple model of radiating directly into space from a really, really, really big mad space radiator.
So you may well be right; I don't know.
Fair enough, haha. I figured there was a non-trivial chance you were right and I was wrong, because it's been years since I studied this stuff systematically and my memory of it isn't great.
"When you are looking for something beautiful and satisfying, it's much harder to find the ugly truth." Penn Jillette, in his book "Oh, God, No" , talking about showing how magic tricks are done.
the great tragedy of Science–the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact
— T. H. Huxley, "Biogenesis and Abiogenesis"
(I thought someone might've posted this under Rationality Quotes before, but Google just finds paraphrases in other threads.)
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I don't think it's going to be very difficult to discover Eugene's new account once he makes it. The real difficulty is making it not worth his while to keep coming back.
I don't count myself as either a rationalist or a community member here, so this is an opinion of a somewhat sympathetic outsider (take it for what it is). But I think you guys should find a way to throw the nrx out, and let them start their own community. I think they are going to do more harm than good in the long run. Yvain started to clean house already on his blog, because he noticed the same.
Seconded.
FWIW, I think of anyone who posts here regularly as a Wronger! (I know, I know, you disagree with other people here about how to do causal inference and about the insightfulness/worthiness of academics — but disagreeing with the rest of the gang on some specific topic is pretty common, I reckon, and not nearly enough to get you kicked out of the treehouse.)
This I disagree with. The only neoreactionaries I remember being obnoxious enough here to raise a real stink are Eugine_Nier and Jim, and Jim hasn't posted here since 2012. That's too thin a basis for kicking out a particular political group, especially since Eugine_Nier being here has had some benefit. (I have occasionally seen them shake people out of misconceptions.) It's just that Eugine_Nier's abuse of the voting system outweighed/outweighs that benefit. (That wasn't Eugine_Nier's only downside, but it was the big one.)