Maybe "value loading" is a term most people here can be expected to know, but I feel like this post would really be improved by ~1 paragraph of introduction explaining what's being accomplished and what the motivation is.
As it is, even the text parts make me feel like I'm trying to decipher an extremely information-dense equation.
I suppose fire risk isn't a huge deal if you're using portable breathing tanks, but you do still need to investigate health impacts.
Yeah, I'm well-aware of the dangers of oxygen fire (from learning about the Apollo program); oxygen tanks are probably how this would be implemented. Of course, I'm not sure that the benefit could possibly justify the expense of oxygen tanks but just the result would be interesting. (Perhaps one could justify some sort of oxygen alarm.)
Actually, I don't think oxygen tanks are that expensive relative to the potential gain. Assuming that the first result I found for a refillable oxygen tank system is a reasonable price, and conservatively assuming that it completely breaks down after 5 years, that's only $550 a year, which puts it within the range of "probably worthwhile for any office worker in the US" (assuming an average salary of $43k) if it confers a performance benefit greater than around 1.2% on average.
These tanks supposedly hold 90% pure oxygen, and are designed to be used with a little breathing lasso thing that ends up with you breathing around 30% oxygen (depending on the flow rate of course).
Since 30-40% oxygen concentrations seem to increase word recall by a factor of 30-50% and reduce reaction time by ~30%, improve 2-back performance by ~15%, and improve mental arithmetic accuracy by ~20% for 3-digit numbers, it seems pretty likely that the overall benefit of oxygen supplementation while working could be greater than breakeven.
I have used that term for this, but it's not very precise: the Wikipedia entry has the monster absorbing positive utility rather than threatening negative, and there's no mention of self-modification.
The self-modification isn't in itself the issue though is it? It seems to me that just about any sort of agent would be willing to self-modify into a utility monster if it had an expectation of that strategy being more likely to achieve its goals, and the pleasure/pain distinction is simply adding a constant (negative) offset to all utilities (which is meaningless since utility functions are generally assumed to be invariant under affine transformations).
I don't even think it's a subset of utility monster, it's just a straight up "agent deciding to become a utility monster because that furthers its goals".
When in doubt, try a cheap experiment.
Make a list of various forms of recreation, then do one of them for some amount of time whenever you feel the need to take a break. Afterwards, note how well-rested you feel and how long you performed the activity. It shouldn't take many repetitions before you start to notice trends you can make use of.
Although to be honest, the only conclusive thing I've learned from trying that is that there's a large gap between "feeling rested" and "feeling ready to get back to work on something productive".
I have no idea if I'm a special snowflake or not, but FWIW, I do spend a significant fraction of my day typing...and have no preference between a good membrane or mechanical keyboard.
I would be interested in reading more of the evidence about RSI reductions, though.
I realized upon further consideration that I don't actually have any evidence regarding keyboards and RSI, so here are the most relevant results of my brief research:
There's about 4 or 5 additional promising results from Google Scholar, but I think I've learned as much about keyboards as I care to at the moment. If you want to read further I found that the most promising search terms were "buckling spring carpal tunnel", and "effects of keyboard keyswitch design".
Overall the evidence seems to vaguely back up the folk wisdom that mechanical keyboards can help to lessen one's chances of getting a hand injury like carpal tunnel, but there doesn't appear to be anything conclusive enough to warrant using a mechanical keyboard for that alone (and there's probably a lot more benefit to be had from an ergonomic layout than from the keyswitches). I still judge it worth the $60 extra in my own case, but that's probably just the sunk costs and techno-hipsterism talking.
On keyboard utility: I've been using the a mechanical keyboard for 3 years and enjoy typing on it more than a membrane switch (generic). Prior to this one regular keyboard lasted me about 8 months; at maybe $15 for a cheap keyboard compared to $70 for this, $15/8 months - $80/x months gives a breakeven time of 3.5 years. (IBM/unicomp Model M keyboards can last for decades)
If you have a problem with keyboard durability then mechanical keyboards have slight positive utility, otherwise I would only recommend them if you noticeably preferred typing on one.
Edited to add: The research on repetitive strain injury (thanks wgd!) along with anecdotes of faster typing definitely make this low hanging fruit. Updated to strong recommendation.
I'm going to disagree with the weakness of your recommendation. I may be falling prey to the typical mind fallacy here, but I feel that everyone who types for a significant fraction of their day (programming, writing, etc) should at least strongly consider getting a mechanical keyboard. In addition to feeling nicer to type on, there's some weak evidence that buckling-spring keyboards can lower your risk of various hand injuries down the line, and even a slightly lessened risk of RSI is probably worth the $60 or so more that a mechanical keyboard costs, even ignoring the greater durability.
I'd be concerned about posts like "the rational rationalist's guide" being moved to main. It's an amusing post, but I really don't think it meets the standards I would want for the main blog. And it is quite highly upvoted. I think this shows that just going by upvotes may be insufficient.
I'm not particularly attached to that metric, it was mostly just an example of "here's a probably-cheap hack which could help remedy the problem". On the other hand, I'm not convinced that one post means that a "Automatically promote after a score of 10" policy wouldn't improve the overall state of affairs, even if that particular post is a net negative.
I've been getting the feeling lately that LW-main is an academic ghetto where you have to be sophisticated and use citations and stuff. My model of what it should be is more like a blog with content that is interesting and educational, but shorter and easier to understand. These big 50-page "ebooks" that seem to get a lot of upvotes aren't obviously better to me than shorter and more to-the-point posts with the same titles would be.
Are we suffering sophistication inflation?
I feel like the mechanism probably goes something like:
An appropriate umeshism might be "If you've never gotten a post moved to Discussion, you're being too much of a perfectionist."
The problem, of course, is that there are very few things we can do to reverse the trend towards higher and higher post sophistication, since it's not an explicit threshold set by anyone but simply a runaway escalation.
One possible "patch" which comes to mind would be to set it up so that sufficiently high-scoring Discussion posts automatically get moved to Main, although I have no idea how technically complicated that is. I don't even think the bar would have to be that high. Picking an arbitrary "nothing up my sleeve" number of 10, at the moment the posts above 10 points on the first page of Discussion are:
Which means that in the past week (May 25 - June 1) there have been 13 discussion posts gaining over 10 points. If all of these were promoted to Main, this would be an average post rate of just under 2 per day, which is potentially just around the level which some might consider "spammy" if they get the Less Wrong RSS.
Personally, though, I would be fully in favor of getting a couple of moderately-popular posts in my feed reader every morning.
My "ick" sense is being set off pretty heavily by the idea of people publicly professing their faith in a shared set of beliefs, so this post makes me deeply uncomfortable. At best something like this is a self congratulatory applause light which doesn't add anything, at worst it makes us less critical and leads us further towards the dreaded c word.
I disagree. From checking "recent comments" a couple times a day as is my habit, I feel like the past few days have seen an outpouring of criticism of Eliezer and the sequences by a small handful of people who don't appear to have put in the effort to actually read and understand them, and I am thankful to the OP for providing a counterbalance to that.
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
The Shangri-La diet has been mentioned a few times around here, and each time I came across it I went "Hmm, that's cool, I'll have to do it some time". Last week I realized that this was in large part due to the fact that all discussions of it say something along the lines of "Sugar water is listed as one of the options, but you should really do one of the less pleasant alternatives". And this was sufficient to make me file it away as something I should do "some time".
I'm not in any population which is especially more strongly disposed to getting diabetes than average, I already drink a soda every other day or so, drinking sugar water is something I would consider quite pleasant, and I'm around 40 lbs over my target weight, so I decided that getting whatever benefit there was to be had from the sugar water was a better outcome than deciding on a less pleasant method and failing to actually get started yet again.
Over the first few days I saw a slight drop in my weight (though still more than the "MORE WILLPOWER!" method had accomplished over the same interval the last time I tried that), and some appetite reduction which may have just been imagined. Unfortunately, I ran out of sugar 4 days in, and wasn't able to buy more for a couple days. By the time I did, my weight had risen to above where I started. So I have no idea whether this is a success or not, but I'm still proud that I managed to get past the whole "But it's not optimal!" roadblock and try a cheap (in terms of willpower) test.