i tend to express ideas tersely, which counts as poorly-explained if my audience is expecting more verbiage, so they round me off to the nearest cliche and mostly downvote me

i have mostly stopped posting or commenting on lesswrong and stackexchange because of this

like, when i want to say something, i think "i can predict that people will misunderstand and downvote me, but i don't know what improvements i could make to this post to prevent this. sigh."

revisiting this on 2014-03-14, i consider that perhaps i am likely to discard parts of the frame message and possibly outer message - because, to me of course it's a message, and to me of course the meaning of (say) "belief" is roughly what http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Belief says it is

for example, i suspect that the use of more intuitively sensible grammar in this comment (mostly just a lack of capitalization) often discards the frame-message-bit of "i might be intelligent" (or ... something) that such people understand from messages (despite this being an incorrect thing to understand)

I think that for the purposes of assessing the claim in question ("Eggs and whole milk are very nutrient dense"), unfortified versions of those foods should be considered. Otherwise, we should also regard cereals and many other foods as "very nutrient dense", simply because manufacturers decide to fortify them in all sorts of ways. (And I note that it's generally not a good idea to obtain your nutrients from supplements when you can obtain them from real food instead.)

In any case, even if we used data for fortified milk, it would still be false, in my opinion, that "whole milk is very nutrient dense." Vitamin D levels make a minor contribution to overall nutritional density.

I don’t care if you start with an exercise habit of one pushup a week, but you must do something.

Beeminder Beeminder Beeminder. Having an email reminder to exercise, and a penalty for not doing so, has been tremendously helpful for me- I now actually lift weights three times a week, as compared to just when I remembered to do so on my own.

It looks like all the participants are consequentialists in good standing. The argument is over whose model of the world more accurately predicts consequences.

A part which seems missing in the discourse -- probably because of politeness or strategy -- is that there are more than two sides, and that people on your side don't necessarily share all your values. When someone tells you: "Harry, look how rational I am; now do the rational thing and follow me in my quest to maximize my utility function!" it may be appropriate to respond: "Professor Quirrell, I have no doubts about your superb rationalist skills, but I'd rather use my own strategy to maximize my utility function." Your partner doesn't have to be literally Voldemort; mere corrupted hardware will do the job.

On the battlefield, some people share the common goal, and some people just enjoy fighting. Attacking the enemy makes both of them happy, but not for the same reasons. The latter will always advocate violence as the best strategy for reaching the goal. (The same thing happens on the other side, too.)

And an imporant part of the civilizing process Scott described is recognizing that both your side and the other side are in a constant risk of being hijacked by people who derive their benefits from fighting itself, and who may actually be more similar to their counterparts than they are to you. And that miraculous behavior which shouldn't happen and seems like a losing strategy, is actually the civilized people from the both sides half-knowingly forging a fragile treaty with each other against their militant allies and leaders.

Which feels like a treason... because it is! It is recognizing that there is some important value other than the official axis of the conflict, and that this value should be preserved, sometimes even at cost of some losses in the battlefield! -- This is what it means to have more than one value in your utility function. If you are not willing to sacrifice even epsilon of one value to a huge amount of the other value, then the other value simply does not exist in your utility function.

So, officially there is a battle between X and Y, and secretly there is a battle between X1 and X2 (and Y1 and Y2 on the other side). And people from X1 and X2 keep rationalizing about why their approach is the best strategy for the true victory of X against Y (and vice versa on the other side).

Civilization is a tacit conspiracy of decent people against psychopaths and otherwise defective or corrupted people. Whenever we try to make it explicit, it's too easy for someone to come and start yelling that X is the side of all decent people, and Y is the side of psychopaths, and this is why we from X have to fight dirty, silence the heretics in our own ranks and then crush the opponents. So we stay quiet amidst the yelling, and then we ignore it and secretly do the right thing; hoping that the part of conspiracy on the other side is still alive and ready to reciprocate. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; but on average we seem to be winning. And I wouldn't trade it for a "rationalist" pat on shoulder from someone I don't trust.

Heh. So: Harry <Rational>, or Rational (Harry), or (Rational) Harry (for C-style casting)? That would be amusing to see. It does seem slightly less readable, though.

I don't subvocalise, and when I learned that other people do I was very surprised. A data point for subvocalisation being a limit on reading speed: I read at ~800wpm.

I'm not sure if stimulants are adequately described as turning money into time. They generally speed up time perception, meaning that you experience the same period of time as subjectively shorter. Sure, you get more stuff done in it, but still... The formulation is perhaps misleading.

Doesn't work for me. I feel much worse for a about a week after using it.

You'd go pretty far just telling the audience the character was unintelligent, by giving them unintelligent status markers. Give them a blue-collar career, and very low academic achievement, while also coming from a stable family and average opportunity.

It's been a while since I watched it, but do you think Ben Affleck's character in Good Will Hunting was rational, but of limited intelligence?

There are scattered examples of this sort of "humble working man, who lives honest and true" throughout fiction.