whales

When water freezes, it expands. Thus, my latest invention places a weight on a column of water, then freezes the water to lift the weight, doing work. By using a weight heavy enough that the work done is greater than the energy expenditure to freeze the water, I create a...

Economics has a rich language for talking about market failures. Situations involving things like externalities, asymmetric information, public goods, or principal-agent problems can all result in room for improvement. In practice these situations haven't turned out to be fully tractable, but they're broadly recognized for what they are. We can...

Recent discussion on naming concepts mostly focuses on arguments in favor, noting only a few caveats, as LW user Conor Moreton in Why and How to Name Things: > What you lose by the proliferation of jargon is ease-of-entry and cross-cultural intelligibility and hard-drive space in the brains of people...

(Below I attempt to reproduce a chart I can't [?] embed, from Models and Analogies in Science by Mary Hesse; I don't know how it will display on all screens, but the source is this image at the top of the cross-post version here.) At an elementary level we can...

[Summary: Say you use a fair test to predict a quality for which other non-tested factors matter, and then you make a decision based on this prediction. Then people who do worse on the test measure (but not necessarily the other factors) are subject to different error rates, even if...

“Thinking on the page” is a handle that I’ve found useful in improving my writing (and my introspection more generally). When I write, for the most part, I’m trying to put something that I already feel is true into words. But when I think on the page, the words are...

I previously discussed the potential relevance of therapeutic and instructional models of metacognitive training to LW-style rationality skills. As an attempted concrete realization of what this connection could look like, I ran a self-experiment in which I counted instances of noticing confusion. Below I elaborate on the motivation and design...