Moderately on topic:

I'll occasionally take "drugs" like airborne to boost my immune system if I feel myself coming down with something. I fully know that they have little to no medicinal effect, but I also know the placebo effect is real and well documented. In the end, I take them because I expect them to trigger a placebo effect where I feel better, and expect it to work because the placebo effect is real. This feels silly.

I wonder whether it is possible to switch out the physical action of taking a pill with an entirely mental event and get this same effect. I also wonder if this is just called optimism. Lastly, I wonder if I truly believe that "drugs" like airborne are able to help me, or just believe I believe, and am unsure what impact that has on my expectations given the placebo effect.

He wanted a sin and you gave him a cos.

It seems we have a new avatar for Clippy; the automated IKEA furniture factory

Nice game, good to see someone making it easy to just practice being well calibrated.

My calibration started off wonky, (e.g. was wrong each of the first six times I claimed 70% certainty) but quickly improved. Unfortunately, it improved suspiciously well, I suspect I may have been assigning probabilities with my primary goal not being scoring points, but instead with trying to get that bar graph displayed every 5 or 10 questions to even out. It's a well designed game, but unfortunately at least for me the score wasn't the main motivator, which is a problem because the score is the quantity that increases by being helpfully well-calibrated. Anyone else have a similar experience?

Took the survey, plus the IQ test out of curiosity, I'd never had my IQ tested before.

Along similar reasoning, do we know how well the iqtest.dk test correlates with non-internet tests of IQ? Getting a number is cool, knowing it was generated by a process fundamentally different than rand(100,160) would be even better

Are you familiar with "Today I Die"? (also available on App Store) Seemed appropriate.

Not too long ago I wanted to write a poem to express a poem to express a certain emotion, defiance toward death, but it only occurred to me recently that it might be LW appropriate. I took a somewhat different path than "do not go gentle..." but you can judge yourselves how it went. Posted in the open thread as I feel it is relatively open to random stuff like this. (Formatting screwy because I'm not used to the format here yet)

Defiance

I am afraid

 All about me the lights blink out
Seeing their fate I’m filled with fear
I want to run, I want to shout
Perhaps this time someone will hear

I am dust

 Dancing mannequin of the wind
I cannot see what strings bind me
I have lived and laughed, loved and sinned
Never knowing if I was free
But no more!

I am alive

 Bind me no more, you dust! This mind
knows the fires of love and life
Any dust that burns this bright
Is not cold enough to truly bind

I am human

 Two arms, two legs, a mind of steel
Latest line of nature’s skyward stride
But so much more, to think and feel
In the land where no dreams have died

I am mankind

 I am not, nor was ever alone
With loving brothers at my side
I’ll shout the truth this love has shown
The joy for which so many cried

And I am rising The life we feel is more than death

 The love is worth more than the fear
And one day we’ll kill you, little death
If it takes mankind a thousand years
So take me if you will and can
Though I’ll fight you the whole way
Soon will come the age of man
That day when a child can say
that

I am not afraid

The biggest obvious flaw with online education, from what I can tell, is that it's harder to keep people motivated when they're doing their work from their living room, and/or aren't literally surrounded by peers working on the same projects, and don't have as personal a connection with their teacher.

What existing tools do we have to combat this and how well do they work, and are there alternatives in development?

'I don't understand this' usually means 'Would somebody please explain?'.