All of falenas108's Comments + Replies

Actually, yes.

EDIT: At least, adjusting the cost for how much a USD gets you in South Africa.

I would guess there's a group of people who are just more likely to buy newer, less tested things. These people bought into Zune, but they also got a facebook before nobody else did. AKA, early adaptors.

If lack of social skills were the only part of autism this might be onto something. But autism tends to be a cluster of symptoms, which aren't explainable by a lack of social interactions. For example, autistic people tend to have different sensory perception. I would not expect that symptom to appear from early isolation.

That's not necessarily the case. Low hanging fruit seems like a plausible alternative, as well as the success of meet-up groups or other real-life rationality things replacing online interactions.

I'm about to start being paid for a job, and I was looking at investment advice from LW. I found this thread from a while back and it seemed good, but it's also 4 years old. Can anyone confirm if the first bullet is still accurate? (get VTSMX or VFINX on vanguard, it doesn't matter too much which one.)

I'm about to graduate college and go into the real world, and I'm trying to get a job right now. If I'm not able to get one in the next few months, I will need some source of income. What are good reliable ways that I can convert time to money before I get a full-time job?

EDIT: I'm a physics/chemistry undergraduate with a decent GPA, and I have some skills in coding if that helps. I'm applying for jobs in software development and data analysis, and I've applied to 25 so far and have only heard back from 1. I'm going to keep applying and am fairly confident I'll get something, but in case everything fails I want to have a backup.

The biggest thing I did was a showcase item with the MONIAC cycle mentioned earlier. Me and one other person were representing the mercury cycle in nature. We had different plastic bottles representing different parts of nature/forms of mercury, like the atmosphere, methylated and unmethylated mercury, in crustaceans, plankton, fish, ect. The things died or get put in the seafloor, and got pumped back to the top by volcanoes and human activity. (We should have had more stay in the seafloor, but our pump was too powerful.) The flow successfully showed t... (read more)

In general I don't think there are foundational ideas on LW that shouldn't be questioned. Any idea is up for investigation provided the case is well argued.

But there are certain ideas that will be downvoted and dismissed because people feel like they aren't useful to be talking about, like if God exists. I think OP was asking if it was a topic that fell under this category.

You can probably think about it as the lines of a gravity field also going through the wormhole, and I believe the gravitational force would be 0 around the wormhole.

The actual answer involves thinking about gravity and spacetime as a geometry, which I don't think you want to answer your question.

Yeah, when I was reading this article I kept thinking that social cues are generally not as ambiguous as this article is making it seem.

Off the top of my head, I can't remember a time when me and another person interpreted multiple social cues from a variety of people in completely the opposite directions. Plenty of times when we focused on different traits, but not where one person interpreted someone as warm and open and someone else as cold and unwelcoming.

This may not make much sense to people outside University of Chicago, but every year we have a huge scavenger hunt, one of the biggest in the world, where we do things like make a keyboards that can perform logical operations, made a MONIAC cycles of natural systems, and has in the past included one team making a working nuclear reactor.

Me and one other person decided to form a team for this year, and we co-captained this team. We did way better than anyone expected, beating every team that wasn't an established house team that had over 100 people and lo... (read more)

I think there are two important points I got from the typical mind fallacy. The first is the usually one, that people have different preferences and different ways of thinking. The second is that people have different experiences, and I shouldn't use my experiences with a certain subject as a model for everyone's. Perhaps this could be called the typical experience fallacy?

For example, I grew up in a reform Jew, and my experience from that was "Unpleasant to be forced to say things I don't agree with, but tolerant of differences." It wasn't un... (read more)

It's at least plausible that Snape, as a potions expert who grew up with muggles, thought there might be some connection between potions and chemistry and learned the basics of chemistry.

Is this idea for current Western society, or for love overall?

ETHICAL INJUNCTION:

Any moral reasoning that results in "...and I will be miserable for the rest of my life" that is not extremely difficult to prevent and has few other tradeoffs is probably not correct, no matter how well-argued.

More generally, I think Harry should be doing more towards putting together a team.

Which is a lesson he should have learned when Hermione beat him and Draco in the first battle.

There was one part where they were talking about what would happen if Harry were not raised by scientists, and EY basically describes canon.

If I had to guess, Voldemort did something so Snape understands how Dumbledore manipulated him. Considering how pissed off Voldemort was that Dumbledore would do that, it seems likely that he would find a way to change that now that Dumbledore is gone.

My favorite calibration tools have been one where there was a numerical answer and you had to express a 50% confidence interval, or 90% confidence interval.

Like, a question would be how many stairs are there in the Statue of Liberty? And my 50% interval would be 400-1000, and my 90% interval would be 200-5000.

Looking up the answer it was 354, and I would mark my 50% as wrong and my 90% as right.

From chapter 38, when Harry buys the Quibbler:

"Gosh," Harry said half a minute later, "you get a seer smashed on six slugs of Scotch and she spills all sorts of secret stuff. I mean, who'd have thought that Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew were secretly the same person?"

EDIT: Then,

"And I'm secretly sixty-five years old."

Which is also true, because of Voldemort inside him. Which leaves....

"And I'm betrothed to Hermione Granger, and Bellatrix Black, and Luna Lovegood, and oh yes, Draco Malfoy too..."

"In that extremity, I went into the Department of Mysteries and I invoked a password which had never been spoken in the history of the Line of Merlin Unbroken, did a thing forbidden and yet not utterly forbidden."

So, this is the single change that makes this story an AU?

Hm, any particular reason, if Harry is already discussing other vulnerable info like having a transfigured Voldemort, he won't fess up to the part where Quirrel was Voldemort and that he won single-handedly?

Harry's upper hand relies on the idea that Dumbledore knew exactly what he was doing, and them that Dumbledore hired Voldemort to teach children for a year would undermine that.

Incidentally, my P(Dumbledore knew about Quirrelmort) just went way up this chapter.

That is when Dumbledore realizes Harry is a "good" Tom Riddle. We don't know when he realizes Harry is a horcrux.

EDIT: In fact, it's almost certain that Dumbledore realizes that Harry is a horcrux before that scene, or at least suspects it. It doesn't look like anything in that conversation in particular would make him realize that, and he clearly knows it by that point.

It was specifically said that every student and teacher individually signed the contract, so unless that's a lie this is probably not what will happen.

In some years, when I had become bored with ruling Britain and moved on to other things, I would arrange with the other Tom Riddle that he should appear to vanquish me, and he would rule over the Britain he had saved.

This is precisely the plan that Quirrel originally planned for Harry, have him pretend to defeat LV and set him up to rule the country.

"you are the first person ever to succeed in doing it deliberately?”

Having Quirrell kill someone wouldn't count as them cheering him up deliberately.

That definitely hints that part of the plan is to make use of Harrymort in some way, which makes the "why the hell did he bring Harry along" part make sense.

I'm not sure how serious this is, but if it were said aloud Harry would hear the difference between the two definitions of "tears," and wouldn't be worried about it if that were the case.

I have been pissed off for years at the existance of h-bar and h as separate constants, where almost everywhere h-bar should be the basic constant. IIRC, this is just because the first time either was derived, it happened to be h, so that got called the quantum mechanical constant.

I've had a permanent retainer in my bottom 4 teeth for about 5 years now. I recently started a habit of flossing, but it takes too much effort for me to use the official flosser for those. But, I recently started using the proxabrush every morning, which takes about 5 seconds per tooth and gets about 90% of the job done.

I've been doing it for 2 months almost every day now.

You can just say "non-binary people" or "agender people." In any case, binary and non-binary are the types you are talking about.

Incidentally, are there separate words for 'non gender identifying transgender' and 'trapped in the wrong body transgender'?

I think what you are going for is non-binary/agender trans people vs. binary trans people.

But, I'm not sure which distinction you're talking about. There are people who fit the classic "trapped in the wrong body," who have a clear idea of what body parts they would/wouldn't like (which could be anything from having a penis and breasts to no genitalia at all). There are other people who are completely fine with their phy... (read more)

Sure, that path seems possible as well.

I would say that since transgender people are much more depressed, presumably due to being trapped in the wrong body (which, as we both mentioned, doesn't apply to all trans people) then GID is a mental illness because it causes depression and suffering.

Although some of the depression could be caused by that, it seems pretty likely that a large portion of it could also because by being treated by society as a gender they aren't, as well as more targeted transphobia. GLB people also have much higher rates of depre... (read more)

I've been using this benzol peroxide wash.

I am also a massive fan of Lyx.

I'm only an undergrad physics major, but I'm in 2 classes where I have to submit moderately high level reports, and I'm working on a thesis. And I've only ever had to use one special format, which also happened to be the default format.

So far, I've found documentation to be eh, but I haven't had too many problems where that was an issue yet. The biggest problem is that my knowledge of LaTeX is sorely lacking because I've been using Lyx for everything!

Natural experiments: I've been trying a new acne wash for the past 6 months, and although I felt like it was working, I wasn't sure. Then, the other day when I was applying it to my back, my partner noticed there was an area I wasn't reaching. In fact, there was an entire line on my back where I wasn't stretching enough to get the wash on. This line coincided exactly with a line of acne, while the rest of my back was clear.

Now I know the wash works for me.

Related: http://xkcd.com/700/

This entirely depends on which path the causality takes.

Trans folks are much more depressed and tend to have much higher levels of mental illness than the general population.*

Obviously, experiences are different for different people. But most trans people experience extreme discomfort in the gender roles they are expected to perform and have some form of gender dysphoria. I would expect these things to be present regardless if they knew that the label "trans" exists. If this is the reason for the higher rates of mental illness, then encouragin... (read more)

On Friday, I sent 13 emails and received about 40. 10 of those 13 were responses to others. Many of these were planning meetings or events where faster responses meant more got done today. This was not particularly unusual for a weekday. A couple of these were ones where we proceeded to have a conversation. I am a college student, but I am the leader of a couple groups on campus and heavily involved in a few more.

In my case, where about 1/4th of the emails I get need a response, I would say my current method of having a small pop-up come when I get an email works pretty well.

The once a day method works for people who don't need to respond, or response time is less important. But that's not true for everyone.

Positive experience:

I've been poly for 3 years, had 10+ poly relationships, and while all but 4 have ended problems caused by polyamory has never been the cause. I'm currently in a triad for 9 months, been with one of the people in the triad for almost a year, and have been in another relationship for a bit over a year. Polyamory has literally never been anything more than a tiny issue in my current relationships, and only once was it ever anything close to a serious issue.

There was definitely something Eliezer said about bisexuality being strictly superior because then you would just be attracted to more people. I was 16 and straight when I read that, and I wanted to be bi since then. Then, about 3 years ago, I became* bi.

*It's weird, but there was a definite point where I started being attracted to more than one gender.

I agree, but at the time I posted this blacktrance had yet to make their post.

Huh? This is worded as a question about orientation rather than practice, so people who have an orientation have an orientation, no? Or is the issue something else?

People can be asexual but, say, homoromantic.

I'm pretty sure it's more than just that, a lot of feminist ideas are about helping typically underprivileged communities. I've seen a lot of stuff on feminist areas about helping the poor and the undocumented as an extension of that.

Sorry, I meant social justice types, as in those identifying with the social justice movement.

And sorry about the general lack of clarity, my mind's been feeling weird today. Basically, that the author is making it seem like people are making a big deal of out little issues, and I was trying to say that regardless of how severe you think these incidents are, there are probably worse ones that the author is ignoring.

My other response is that it's not that this type of thing is suppressing free speech, it's trading off between two groups feeling comfortable participating in a particular environment. Let's look at the incidents in this article where there was a censorship of free speech:

The professor refused to allow a student to capitalize words in their dissertation paper, citing the Chicago Manual of Style. The students preferred APA, but the professor would not let them use the style they prefer.

Similarly, a TA says they aren't allowed to comment on correcting gra... (read more)

TW rape threats, racism.

I have two responses, but I'm separating them because they are two entirely different issues. The first is that I think the article is misrepresenting the background of racism in UCLA in this article.

I'm a UChicago undergrad. In the past few years:

People put up a confederate flag in the window of the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs.

People dressed up as a 'cholo' getting beaten up by a police officer for Halloween.

A group called the UChicago Electronic Army took over the website of an entirely unrelated group and threatened... (read more)

I keep finding the statistic that "one pint of donated blood can save up to 3 lives!" But I can't find the average number of lives saved from donating blood. Does anyone know/is able to find?

Probably not that difficult, if someone really wanted to. I don't think there's a standard everyone uses.

I did not say that this difference made it the wrong policy, merely that it's something to keep in mind and that you shouldn't consider the cases of syphilis and AIDS to be entirely analogous.