LESSWRONG
LW

All of groupuscule's Comments + Replies

Meetup : BALTIMORE: Anyone wanna meet up?
groupuscule10

Wish I had seen this. I announced a Baltimore meetup a few months ago, but the only other attendees came from DC. Let's get our act together. :-)

Reply
Baltimore?
groupuscule00

Well, I'm interested in doing a meetup if y'all are. I'd be willing to host here in Baltimore. I guess express interest and availability here or in PM?

Reply
0falenas108
I already said this in a PM, but for the sake of showing public support I will say that I would go to a meetup.
Diplomacy as a Game Theory Laboratory
groupuscule90

If contracts using outside resources were legitimate it would also be okay for players to (consistently) offer cash rewards for cooperation. That would break the game pretty badly.

Reply
The Irrationality Game
groupuscule00

Same here. A "pretty sure" confidence level would probably have done it for me.

Reply
1Will_Newsome
Tolerance effects, cost, decreased cognitive function, impairment of motor skills, and social disapproval make this a potentially poor course of action. That said, there may be drugs which do not have such side effects. ADD-treating drugs seem to make a lot of neurotypical people more satisfied with their life despite many being very addictive.
Is cryonics necessary?: Writing yourself into the future
groupuscule30

Writing might be inferior to lifelogging as a way of preserving yourself, but it might actually be better than lifelogging as a way of having a specific type of impact on the future. Since neither form of reconstruction is going to provide the same type of experiential immortality as cryonics potentially would, why not attempt to reincarnate your ideal self?

(As far as general anthropological data goes, there's going to be plenty of footage of average schmucks doing random stuff.)

Reply
The Tragedy of the Social Epistemology Commons
groupuscule60

Just as all good families are quite similar and bad families are often uniquely different, there's basically one correct epistemology and a whole lot of incorrect ones.

That's a pretty risky analogy.

Reply
6orthonormal
It's the famous first line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina:
-1Psychohistorian
Originally, I used this mostly for literary effect, but now that I think about it, it seems quite appropriate. There are numerous largely superficial factors to families - size, composition, socioeconomic status, and so forth. It seems to me there are criteria that really, systematically matter, that have to do with how people respect one another, the degree to which people accept conflict, the extent to which no family member is, for want of a better term, belligerently insane. Similarly, one can have a fairly rational epistemology and end up with many superficially different beliefs - both in the sense of values and likelihood estimates. One does need some systematic components, like a general avoidance of reliance on evidence-less faith, and a lack of major beliefs based on wishful thinking (among many other things). Similarly, one belligerently insane belief can destroy the rationality of a whole system, just as a sufficiently difficult family member can. On the other hand, one can have crazy family members and still have a generally functional family, just as one may have some irrational beliefs without it necessarily destroying their entire epistemology. I certainly don't mean to imply good families are inherently the same in terms of, say, gender composition, extended vs. nuclear, etc., and I did not intent to suggest they were. As it is though, I think the analogy holds up well.
Cambridge Less Wrong meetup this Sunday, May 16
groupuscule70

I was the guy sitting across from you reading "Yoga Time Travel."

Reply
6jimrandomh
You should've spoken up and joined us. Although I must admit that the forum lurker/meetup eavesdropper connection is amusing. I hope you'll come to the next one as an active participant.
3thomblake
This comment reads as very humorous when one notes it's a reply to yourself. (I'm not sure if that was the intent.)
Cambridge Less Wrong meetup this Sunday, May 16
groupuscule110

As a lurker, I may go to that place and eavesdrop.

Reply
7groupuscule
I was the guy sitting across from you reading "Yoga Time Travel."
Human values differ as much as values can differ
groupuscule00

Jay-Z proves status wants to break free of its domain.

Reply
The Wannabe Rational
groupuscule30

A rationalist forum would be interesting not only for the discussions themselves, but also because it would materialize and test some of the more abstract stuff from this site.

Reading the new year/decade predictions conversations, it struck me that effective treatment of outside content should be Less Wrong's crowning jewel--the real proof that rationality makes good ideas.

Reply
The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition
groupuscule70

Your finger will not get burned; it will suffer the cumulative damage resulting from an unusually high quantity of unrelated high-speed molecule attacks.

Reply
4wedrifid
I would call that 'burned'. If I call 'standing outside getting hit by lots of UV light' sunburned then it seems fair to call getting hit by lots of high speed water molecules burned too.
6Baughn
You could imagine a particle gun that shoots water molecules with the exact same speed distribution as hot water (carefully aligned so they don't collide mid-beam), but all with the same direction - straight towards you. The result of sticking your hand in such a beam would be roughly the same as putting it in hot water, ignoring the asymmetric momentum transfer. However, it is easy to see that you can extract useful energy from the beam.
Open Thread: January 2010
groupuscule00

This strategy works for me. I made the password to my non-work login something that would remind me why I set up the system. (I know of people doing similar things to the phone numbers of people they don't want to call.)

Reply