I am learning HTML/JS and frontend development more generally, initially using Bootstrap as my tutor. I'm starting with a generic familiarity with Natlab/Python but no prior web dev experience.
In fact, Einstein was pretty politically active and influential, largely as a socialist, pacifist, and mild Zionist.
Thank you for your work, Aureliem.
This is true; however keeping a website running is still very, very cheap compared to almost anything else the government does, including functions that are continuing as usual during the shutdown.
If web apps are too high maintenance, that does not explain the shutdown of government Twitters (example: https://twitter.com/NOAA, which went to the extra effort of posting that "we won't be tweeting 'cause shutdown.") I note with amusement however that the Health and Human Services Twitter is alive and well and tweeting about the ACA.
I suspect the TV show may end up reducing, if not the scope, at least the emotional empact of the harmful fallout of her anti-slavery actions. Pop culture tends not to play well with values dissonance. It is known.
So...you, the person who is low status because of not doing the useless status-enhancing thing, are going to try to expropriate status from the high-status useless people? Let me know how that goes!
The question is how correlated signalling is with actually valuable activities. Healthy societies have institutions that try to correlate social rewards with pro-social behavior; capitalism and academia are both examples of institutions that try to tie value-creation with changes in social status. However, no linkage is perfect and all signalling behaviors can be hacked to some degree. So you end up with an academia where grant-finagling and publication, in at least some fields, are largely divorced from producing meritorious work. Likewise PUA is an a...
Thank you for trying to impart useful, compounding knowledge, even when selling opium is almost certainly more lucrative in a middle-class neighborhood.
Then why is it that this difference, out of the many dimensions of differences that form up humankind, and the multitude of interest-group formation patterns that could have been generated, is the one that gets so much attention? It would be bizarre if an unbiased deliberation process systematically decides that one unremarkable axis (gender) is the one difference that should be discussed at great length and with very vigorous champions, while ignoring all of the other axes of diversity of human minds.
Now it is possible for one unremarkable axis to become...
Agreed that status is part of the explanation, and the recent devaluing of parenting effort vs. job effort is certainly contributory.
I'm not sure how to weigh your statement that jobs are now "easy and pleasant" (certainly they're physically less demanding and safer than in the past) with the prevalence of chronic stress and so on. Certainly your millionaire example is weak evidence that jobs are some combination of fun and statusful, though it has the same status-quo caveats as people thinking of the upside of death. Also note the great stress...
I seem to remember a study demonstrating that my political opponents are particularly vulnerable to this bias.
Important question considering the popularity of the Great Stagnation hypothesis. Current answers include pay down debt and investing in human capital, which is pretty vague unfortunately. Anyone have better ideas?
What's going on with fertility?
My comments on a Marginal Revolution post that linked to this Der Spiegel article about the ROI of different forms of fertility subsidies. (As of 2010, German fertility rates were 1.39 despite sizeable subsidies for family formation.)
Reshuffled my comments to make for easier contiguous reading:
...What I take away from the German article is that people REALLY don’t want to get married – or rather, [people really don't want to] avoid single parenthood. Thus bribing them to have two-parent households is really expensive. If yo
To claim that the activists were strong is pretty absurd. The activists failed for approximately a century, in a regime that did a very good job of returning to the status quo ante bellum, died repeatedly while I don't recall hearing of very many KKKers ever dying, and a partial victory at some point in some small town shows that they're 'strong'?...And then there's the selection biases here; how many activists do you ever hear of? How many movements? As all analyses of power acknowledge, there's a lot of chance & variation involved...
Certainly fluk...
Certainly flukes happen. But they are flukes. If activists were weak, their victories would be isolated and of short duration, quickly reverted.
Which is why the long hypothesized WWI did not happen after a fluke like a Serbian terrorist assassinating someone important, because all flukes are isolated and of short duration.
(Is that a simplified and facile claim? Yes. Is it more simplified and facile than your argument? No.)
...But if I lose some rounds, win one spin, and keep on winning thereafter, then something funny is going on. Or maybe I own the casin
In theory, little. In practice, compared to mainstream realpolitik, it's applied to domestic not international politics, and shows a greater appreciation for social and cultural power rather than quantifiable economic and military power.
That Communism would have fizzled in 1500 is a fact about the strength of non-Communist structures in the Middle Ages. That Communism succeeded in 1917 is a fact about the strength of pro- vs. anti-Communist structures at that time. Strength changes over time; that does not negate the fact that strength (probabilistically) determines victory.
What do those experiments mean specifically?
Seconded. Does this mean PUA or does it have a more long-term element?
Anyone doing well in life is a rationalist in the sense we use it on LW?
In other words, smart, reflective people are better at using those smarts and reflections to play monkey political games, maybe one meta-level up.
Of course, playing politics well is important to effectiveness in real life. Learning about rationality might make you a worse rationalist, but it probably helps you win at life, including if your goal is to, say, promote a movement that is positively correlated with rationality.
Apply Bayes to making decisions in real life, in ways that the cool people don't? That idea will never fly on LessWrong!
Ah, but this was less the case at the time the poll was made (the community has been growing in the meantime) and it was also not clear that this would be a Main as opposed to Discussion post. So that has to be factored into the probabilities.
I'm a male LWer with an infant daughter. I'd like to request some specific advice on avoiding the common failure modes.
Don't take your parenting approach from ideology, because it's not optimized for being a reflection of reality. (Extreme example here)
Relevant:
The “Anonymous Narratives by LW Women” thread will receive >100 comments,
The “Anonymous Narratives by LW Women” thread will receive >500 comments
Consider this easy-to-predict eventuality as an indictment of how incredibly ineffective and mindkilled LessWrong is about sex, for obviously ideological reasons (though we may disagree about which side it is that is mindkilled).
In addition to the problems already pointed out with this comment, another thing I'd like to address is:
(though we may disagree about which side it is that is mindkilled)
If one suspects that mindkilling is happening, the most likely result isn't that it is happening on one "side" but rather with pretty much both "sides"- thinking in terms of sides is already to some extent a sign of mindkilling. But large scale discussion is not, and better not be, in any reasonable setting a sign by itself of mindkilling but just evidence of levels of interest.
What's your line of thought that large numbers of comments are a clear indication of a mind-killed community?
Consider this easy-to-predict eventuality as an indictment of how incredibly ineffective and mindkilled LessWrong is about sex, for obviously ideological reasons (though we may disagree about which side it is that is mindkilled).
Doesn't follow. The base rate for getting more than 100 comments on a main, non-announcement article is already something like 70%.
glances at thread
Econ is the mind-killer.
I don't even think they're particularly vocal. I can recall like two loud Moldbuggians: Konk and Vlad_M, who is inactive and doesn't even mention Moldbug by name, to my knowledge.
I think it looks like these Moldbuggians are active because a lot of Moldbuggianism is deconstructing assumptions about how politics works. So there's a lot of mainstream ideological assumptions that aren't seen as ideological at all by most people (democracy is good, the media is an observer not a participant in government, etc) yet are seen as incorrect and/or political claims...
the media is an observer not a participant in government
I haven't read Moldbug, so maybe you mean something else by this than what it sounds like, but I don't think I know of anyone with an interest in politics who'd agree with this statement as written. Pretty much everybody thinks that the media has a huge influence on government, up to the point of often determining what decisions the government can make, and which politicians grow popular or fall out of favor. There's a reason why it's called the fourth estate.
I would certainly expect that the category "bad effects of lifestyle changes favored by highly educated researchers" would be understudied, relative to studying the nasty effects of poor-folks culture.
This response is such a strawman! No one's arguing that "the right to conduct sexual activities in any way without being judged" is a "sacred value" that "overrides any consequentialist concern for actually producing more effective rationalists." If every other post by Eliezer made specific, detailed reference to his dalmatian fetish, or if SIAI had a specific section of their website listing the fetishes and relationship styles of all their members, then yes, that would likely be problematic -- because it would be seriously, ...
There appear to be two major strains of response to this post:
The first response seems a case of wishful thinking - as though by believing really hardthat others share our local values, and outgroupping those who disagree with us, we could make it a PR posi...
So far, the evidence that this profile is a PR problem seems limited to a handful of negative comments on one Internet comment thread. Most of those comments are limited to the idea that the post is too boastful or too open, and thus unlikely to be successful in attracting women. And the same thread includes people with neutral or positive responses at roughly the same frequency (maybe a little lower, but the same order of magnitude). This evidence falls well below what I would consider sufficient to trot this issue out in public, much less to demand that ...
And let's certainly give credit where it's due, he handled the responses in the thread as well as could be expected under the circumstances - with deflecting humor rather than hurt anger.
Yeah, the billionaire class may be interesting but naturally I don't know much about it and at any rate it's mostly unattainable. The Ferris-style folks may be more interesting.
Another place to look is ethnic diasporas, but I don't really see a strong trend of ethnic ties superseding national ones. The incentives for success usually favor cultural assimilation over maintaining ethnic ties. (The aside one exception is Jews, who have some fairly unique history favoring cohesion).
yet I'm also a young no income white male and seeing some deeply disturbing kinds of language among the cool set with regards referring to my demographic. Seems pretty stage three-ish by Stanton's scale.
Would you mind sharing some of this evidence so we can assess its significance, Bayes style?
Minorities that do well economically end up targets of irrational hate. The memetic core for scapegoating for various problems that will only grow worse is clearly there and unlikely to be opposed strongly by any institution I'm aware of.
From an American point...
Of course you're technically correct. There are, and have been, terrible arguments for monarchy advanced in the past. But today, democracy is the high-status mode of governance, and so the terrible arguments generated by motivated cognition, such as this OP, are in favor of democracy, not monarchy.
Worrying about bad arguments for monarchy now is like someone worrying about bad arguments for evolution in a creationist school board meeting. Yes it could potentially be a problem, but this over-concern is hardly our biggest problem right now and is very likely itself generated by motivated cognition.
"You know, given human nature, if you lived in a country in which there was democracy, pretty soon someone would try to sound deep by inventing reasons that voting was a good thing. But if you lived in a universe in which democracy wasn't the high-status mode of governance, and asked them if they wanted it, with all its attendant consequences, they would say no. It would never occur to them to invent all the clever rationalizations that someone resigned to democracy would devise."
I am not convinced that this is morally superior to selling opium. This depends critically on how much use the marginal student actually gets out of English.
Now SAT tutoring, that is certainly morally inferior to selling opium. (Inferior, not equal, for obvious utility reasons.)
...and how much utility people actually get out of opium.
Yeah, there's a pattern where people latch onto a poorly-understood term as a curiosity-stopper around controversial disciplines. This is not to say that there aren't sophisticated critiques of mainstream perspectives, but most people who use the 201 arguments don't even understand 101 yet; they're just "warding off evil facts," as Cochran puts it.
Example: Economics - "Non-efficient markets!"
That's actually a really fascinating observation. Why is it okay to tell groups of people "You should delay childbearing by several years" but not okay to tell them "You should have fewer children"?
I wonder if this is because in near-mode, people model themselves as immortal, so sacrificing a few years is just consmuption-shifting and not an actual opportunity cost.
Eugenics wasn't considered crazy during its first wave of popularity.
And given that it was associated with the single biggest evil that modern society acknowledges - indeed, the only thing you can straight-facedly call "evil" without seeming really old-fashioned and unsophisticated, wouldn't it make sense that modern culture, having extirpated the offending government root and branch, would then proceed to salt the surrounding memetic ground within a 200 mile radius?
Heck, we now even have "creepy" associations with large well-coordinated military style ceremonies, something that every other country in the world did at the time.
Yeah, that's a good data point as well: people grumble but don't resist - kind of like how we treat the TSA.
Maybe our strong instincts are against regulation of sex, rather than childbearing. The two were tightly coupled in ancient times so we wouldn't need redundant intuitions.
I also rather like the alternative hypothesis of "Rich Western cultures are freaking insane."
Maybe our strong instincts are against regulation of sex, rather than childbearing.
But sex is heavily regulated! Just try to have sex with a prostitute, or your sister, or an underage girl, or your employee, or boss, or a mentally retarded person ...
You know, I was going to reply that obviously the answer is that people don't like intervention in evolutionarily ancient processes like who to marry and how many kids to have. Then I remembered that eugenics was hugely popular in the early 1900s, with only the "backwards, ignorant" Church railing against the "progressive, scientific" idea. This suggests that humans are willing to accept such intervention, at least to a similar extent to which they accept wealth redistribution ("I'll do it if I get to tell other people how to do ...
"Having more free time" and "being more stubborn" shouldn't win arguments, but they do in real life where arguments are mostly about status, so we translate the status dynamics online.
I prefer to feel in ways that reflect the world around me. As long as I also think this sort of thing is an attack, feeling that way is in accord with that preference whether it makes me happier or not. As long as I don't care to occupy a pushover role where I make myself okay with whatever happens to be going on
In any normal social context it would be reasonable to assume that this an overconfident statement deliberately made without caveats in order to enhance bargaining power. Which is fine - humans are selfish.
This being LW where there's a good chance that this was intended literally - this sort of rigidity was exactly why "learning how to lose" is a skill.
I do in fact feel attacked by the suggestion that huge swaths of things valuable to me are worthless and ought to be done away with!
Unless you enjoy being outraged at a low threshold by something outside your control, this is a trait that you should be dissatisfied with and attempt to modify, not something to be stated as immovable fact. I, note however, that acting like that trait is an immovable fact makes for more favorable status dynamics and a better emotion-bargaining position...
Unless you enjoy being outraged at a low threshold by something outside your control, this is a trait that you should be dissatisfied with and attempt to modify
Does not follow. I prefer to feel in ways that reflect the world around me. As long as I also think this sort of thing is an attack, feeling that way is in accord with that preference whether it makes me happier or not. As long as I don't care to occupy a pushover role where I make myself okay with whatever happens to be going on so that people don't have to account for my values, drawing a li...
Most arguments against incest are arguments where the bottom line is already written since they are made by people who just don't want to admit they are plain grossed out by it.
The most common intelligent argument I've seen against incest is "power imbalance!" which in the case of your news story looks like a case of the noncentral fallacy.
Yes, it looks like you're right that there were significant investment opportunities even with BC technology, unlike what I assumed. We can quibble over whether these investment opportunities were "deep" or one-offs, but it seems reasonable that irrigating farms is something you can invest a lot in before hitting diminishing returns.
This is still a strange phenomenon: on one hand you have potential investments with high rates of return, even with risk adjustments - yet market interest rates were very high, showing few people were willing to make...
Per Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms, the ancients had noticeably less future time-orientation than modern people. Furthermore, there were relatively few ways to make profitable investments - it's not as though a farmer could take loans out to buy a tractor.
In that context, lending is more akin to drug dealing than responsible investing. It hooks in people with poor self-control who will spend it on consumption not investment. So the logical thing to do is to crack down on the practice. Yes there are some responsible users who lose out, but that's f...
Of course, the decline of science-as-an-institution isn't just marked by overt cheating. A safer and arguably more prevalent method is to game the publication system (ie by aligning your beliefs and professional contacts with powerful factions of reviewers), crank out many unrevealing publications, and make small contributions to hot fields rather than large ones in fields that are less likely to get you tenure.
Overall we'd see a lower signal-to-noise ratio in science, but this is hard to quantify. It's tough to call a discipline diseased until decades afterwards.
Is there a reason to believe we've got 3-10x better at detecting fraud in the past decade?
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
Not literally true, but I wouldn't be surprised that the expansion of access to electronic articles, and the expansion of people with access to see them, has resulted in a 3-10x greater read rate for the important articles.
Robbing things in general has consequences - but it's harder to detect the robbery of social trust than the robbery of a sofa.
Robbing the social commons has consequences.
Good! I'm pleased to see an example of LW going meta on itself in this vein.
As an extension, note that there's a well-established pattern by which people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder tend to attract (and be attracted to) people with Borderline Personality Disorder. An evocative line from The Last Psychiatrist:
... (read more)