like clear and obvious biases; but in mild form. the kind that might affect you in split second judgements; then disappear leaving you wondering why you ended up making a certain decision. Can be hard to pin down.

I think we might have coined the term...

How was the xy problem possibly identified?

It's seems like the kind of abstraction that is impossible from object level analysis of others' questions or one's received answers.

this week on the slack discussions:

• Art and media - HPMOR readership and considering spoilers. A few movie clips. microbiases, "Secret Habitat" game and abstract art analysis. Quality VS quantity, one hit wonder - and what effort it would take to make one (200-500 hours maybe). " short-circuiting happiness in the brain; by - instead of spending money on a bed (normal thing), spend money on icecream (happy thing), even when you neeeed a better bed in your life. In order to trick your brain to being happier than it is."
• Bot test - We have a logging bot; and are building a prediction bot to help us keep track of predictions.
• Business and startups - Comparing startup ideas, Thesaurus for words that don't exist - i.e. "logicalness" so you can find a real synonym to use instead. Healthy fast food opportunities (why isn't fast food already healthy - people probably don't care about healthyness when buying fast food QED healthy fast food is not as great an idea as it sounds.), living on a super-limited budget. Mealsquares.
• effective altruism - provision of condoms to african nations to reduce the birth rate (and why that won't really work), looking to contact people within the EA movement who can explain what happened to the videos on the global conference, and maybe help us find the video in mountainview on x-risk. It's proving quite hard to do...
• goals of lesswrong - determining success of lesswrong, (ways to show the world we are actually doing well - get us a few famous people made out of lesswrong growth). LW needs a symbol, like a logo but super cool. considering "¬□⊥", "how to function as an adult" as an article, website or guide in how to do that. because often enough people end up legal adults without knowing these things. learning how to teach, the nature of local lw groups.
• human relationships - energy intake and exercise, alcohol and social lubrication, nootropics for improving social skills. establishing productive bandwidth with other intelligent humans. theories of confidence/prestiege/charisma (different but similar things that we defined in order to talk about them), fluids of human sexuality (and how much we don't know), owning/responsibility towards others/Significant others VS freedom and miscommunication around that, and the burden to communicate that is placed on people by their significant others. Polyamory. "twist yourself into noodles" (not sure what this related to), Smartphone to the rescue (reminders to do things i.e. remember birthdays, talk to friends who want to talk regularly, etc.)
• linguistics - methods of communicating understanding; or asking for clarification in speech. "Decision making is a process", consider the intention behind the words (not just the words) (caveat: be careful with this)
• open - running lw local groups, r/askscience, is stockholm syndrome real?, changing people's beliefs (specifically making atheists take up spirituality maybe), Aubrey de Grey and beard extension, Sidekicks, Meta: our channels, knowing things in advance does not decrease reported hedonic payoff. Too many messages to keep up with on the slack, sensory language and communication. And more - being the open channel, reasoning with the consultation of your feelings.
• parenting - guilty parents for not knowing things they should know... Chocolate chip game trials are going excellently, kid-proof dividers, sickness during pregnancy, dealing with kid's monsters, (putting it in the wardrobe VS patting it and feeding it to make it friendly - the kid's idea)
• philosophy - occam, occam as a rule/proof (but also not), bayes. CBT - cognitive behavioural therapy, ACT - acceptance commitment therapy.
• projects - https://tangoapp.herokuapp.com/ , some writings that are now lesswrong posts, how do I become a more interesting person, sleep post, AMA among friends on the slack.
• real life - dieting, work hours, sleep, mealsquares, secular solstice, allergies, human superpowers, negotiating with other humans, bikeshedding, how to make complicated decisions, cheap food, advice should be specific, how other people perceive you, and how they act on those perceptions, and the differences. wearable BP monitors, and more...
• resources and links - not much new here...
• RSS feeds - we get a bunch of rss feeds from around the leswrong sphere.
• Science and technology - evolution, space moths, facebook algorithms, chess, privacy in america, grey goo, successful businesspeople, getting data about the internet, cool cap for sleep
• scratchpad - a place to ramble, just in case any of the other places weren't the right place for it, or they were busy with other conversations at the time.
• welcome - introductions and also a discussion on wellbeing.

If you transfer the heat to the atmosphere, it won't leave the Earth+atmosphere system, so the net effect will be zero. To actually cool the earth, you'd need to heat the atmosphere enough to make parts of it escape Earth's gravity. Aside from problematic effects on weather, this would be really hard because the upper atmosphere is very thin and so has low heat capacity and low heat conductance.

I was thinking about direct-radiation heatsinks: the inner part made of super-heat-conductive material that transports heat from ground level to a huge radiator fan in outer space, insulated by an outer layer on the way up (otherwise you lose all the heat to the atmosphere). But it would have to be both superconducting and very, very large.

Also, the cooling effect would be localized at the bottom end, so what would you stick it into? A volcano?

it'd say "this bot detected the claim that vaccines cause autism, which is in conflict with the view held by The Lancet, one of the world's most prominent medical journals".

In that case, I don't see the point. After all, anti-vaxxers don't deny that there are prominent medical professionals who don't agree with their position. They, however, suspect that said professionals are doing so due to a combination of biases and money from the vaccine industry.

No; thanks! Can you remember instances of people he put in each cluster? I'd think Mozart would be a young master, and Beethoven an old genius.

I don't know that anybody gets better over time in literature, at least technically. I wonder whether there's any correlation between a novel's (rank order / total number of novels) and its status. An analysis would be muddied by the anecdotally-observed effect that the more critically acclaimed an author's novels are, the slower he writes them. (Seems to be cause-effect, since the long interval, or cessation of writing, usually comes after the critically acclaimed novel.)

See also Moldbug's commentary about how Thomas Carlyle was once considered the greatest writer in English after Shakespeare, but was then so utterly cast out of the canon, because of his reactionary political views, that Moldbug only discovered him because of the advent of Google Books.

Re. originality in popular music, see this video. Don't miss the section starting at 2:39. This video by the Axis of Awesome is fun, too.

I'd thought the first video was going to be this one!

I'm sympathetic to the idea that pop music is decreasingly original & novel, but these videos are pretty slender evidence for it. The problem with invoking these videos is that they're sampling on the dependent variable: they pick out small subsets of recent country songs or recent pop songs which go together attention-grabbingly well. But precisely because they go together attention-grabbingly well, they're very likely unrepresentative of country/pop music as a whole.

(Also, even ignoring the unrepresentative sampling, these videos mainly just mean that particular chord progressions are popular. Comments on the Axis of Awesome video mention how the sketch plays on the fact that I-V-vi-IV is a popular chord progression, which it is. But that speaks only to harmony, not melody or arrangement.)

A lot of pop music today is difficult to distinguish from music made in the 1990s. The difference between pop music in 1960 and 1964 was much larger than the difference between 1990 and 2015.

Those claims sound likely on first hearing, but I doubt them more as I think about them. It's easy to have the wrong idea about what charting pop music sounded like in a certain year.

One can think of 1964 and imagine the charts were being revolutionized by a deluge of songs as memorable & novel as "You Really Got Me", but looking at Billboard's top 10 singles for 1964, I have a hard time picking out even half a dozen which stand out to me like that. (Admittedly, that's more than I can pick out from the 1960 chart.)

As for 1990, I surprised myself twice over! After I started thinking to myself along the lines of, "new wave and hip hop were well established by then, and I guess it wasn't long before grunge became a big deal, so maybe there was a lot from those genres?", I checkity-checked myself by pulling up Billboard's 1990 list. When I saw New Kids on the Block, Michael Bolton, Rod Stewart, Tom Petty, Aerosmith, I thought, "oh, wow, yeah, right, guess I was wrong".

But then I looked again and saw more. Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" (Wikipedia: "incorporat[ing] dance-pop and industrial music, also using elements of hip-hop and funk rock"); Biz Markie's "Just a Friend"; Madonna's "Vogue" (Wikipedia: "a dance-pop and house song with notable disco influence" and "a spoken rap section"); Bell Biv DeVoe's "Poison" (Wikipedia: "in the style of new jack swing, a late-80s hybrid of R&B and hip hop"); Deee-Lite's "Groove Is in the Heart"; UB40's reggae-fication of The Temptations' "The Way You Do the Things You Do"; and Prince's "Thieves in the Temple" (Wikipedia: "a unique sound, starting quietly with echoed keyboards and vocals before the main section of the song booms in with a pulsating synth bass, syncopated drum machines, Middle Eastern melodies and opera-like layered vocals"). That last one's not on YouTube 'cause Prince and his record company are like super picky about people uploading his studio recordings.

It follows that my idea of the music crashing into the US charts in 1990 was patchy & incomplete. So who knows; maybe it is more different to today's US pop than 1960's was from 1964's? The test that'd answer that question would be taking a representative sample of charting songs from 1960 onwards and analyzing them systematically for diversity.

Mozart lived in the middle of neoclassicism. Novelty wasn't considered very important then. Beethoven's music was one of the watermarks in the rise of the importance of novelty.

Re. originality in popular music, see this video. Don't miss the section starting at 2:39. This video by the Axis of Awesome is fun, too. Pop music, like popular literature, doesn't have the same pressure for novelty. Mainstream pop music today has little stylistic novelty; that gets shunted into sub-genres. A lot of pop music today is difficult to distinguish from music made in the 1990s. The difference between pop music in 1960 and 1964 was much larger than the difference between 1990 and 2015.

Why do I find nasal female voices so sexy? Even languages that emphasise nasality are sexy to me, like Chinese or French, whereas their language group companions with other linguistic similarities do not (e.g. Spanish in the case of French). Is there anything I can do to downregulate my nasal voice fetish?