Interesting concept. I read about something similar in the book Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing The New Domesticity - the author recounts that when working at a dead-end job with no challenge her impulse for creativity got shunted into "DIY" projects of questionable value like stenciling pictures of frogs onto her microwave, and that once she got into a job that stretched her abilities the desire for "DIY" evaporated.
Out on my parts of the internet, a major reason to reject LWisms is because they are perceived as coming from a "Silicon Valley tribe" that does not share values with the majority of people (i.e. similar to the attitude of the newsblog (?) Pando, which regularly skewers tech startups). The libertarians claiming to be "apolitical", and the neoreactionaries, do not help this perception at all. (Although discussing more of this is probably unwise because politics SPIDERS.)
I personally feel that doing abs help me feel less hungry because they kind of compress my stomach (but so does wearing higher-rise trousers and pulling their belt tighter)
This is also observed when wearing back-braces and corsets over the long term. In the corset-wearing/waist-training community particularly, some people have observed that without significant changes in behavior, corsets may decrease appetite; the actual effect is of course highly variable, but it's frequent enough to be conventional wisdom in that community, so.
Huh, you might be right about that. There's also the fact that the word "socialist" is extremely negative in the US (where I live), so it's something that I am leery about explicitly identifying with.
In this case I mean that they might work if implemented - and similar things have worked in the past on small scales - but there may be insurmountable problems in the scaling-up process, not all of them political. (Most of them are, though.)
Not on every single one, no. For example, I think that a basic income is both practical and achievable (relatively speaking) in a way that turning every single corporation into a worker-owned workshop is not. This is not seen as a "socialist" viewpoint in the places I frequent. In fact, it is seen as selling out by letting the capitalists pacify the working class by throwing them a few more table scraps. Issues like this are why I do not want 'socialist' in my identity.
I know many people who are properly Socialist, and for nearly all of them it is a massive part of their identity. I am trying to avoid sticking a political label to my identity. That just seems like it would only lead to bad things.
I like the term "libertarian socialist". It really confuses people.
I can't help you directly, but TVTropes' You Know That Show is really good at finding these kinds of things.
I'm honestly not sure what my political views are. When I vote I am left to far-left by default, but if I can find a candidate that is against corruption I will vote for them regardless of their other political views. However, I harbor substantial sympathy towards anarcho-communism/OWS/etc. even though I know it likely wouldn't work in practice. Keeping in contact with idealists is good for my mental health.
...Oromis asked, “Can you tell me, what is the most important mental tool a person can possess?”
[Eragon makes a few wrong guesses, like determination and wisdom.]
“A fair guess, but, again, no. The answer is logic. Or, to put it another way, the ability to reason analytically. Applied properly, it can overcome any lack of wisdom, which one only gains through age and experience.”
Eragon frowned. “Yes, but isn’t having a good heart more important than logic? Pure logic can lead you to conclusions that are ethically wrong, whereas if you are moral and righteous,
Low-hanging fruit: I increased my average intake of vegetables with minimal effort by acquiring microwaveable frozen vegetable bags, which have become my default "I want to eat something but don't want to spend effort preparing it" food. Each bag can be transferred directly from freezer to microwave and takes an average of five minutes therein, and then you cut open the bag and transfer to a serving dish (or, like me, just plop the open bag into a plastic tray and eat directly from it).
It's not perfect (for example, I cannot find green leafy vege...
Another method is, however, to create a reliable reputation/review system which, if they became widely sued, would guide students and patients to the best universities and hospitals
That seems like an odd method of drumming up publicity.
I think Worm is better starting at 3.1 and doing 1-2 as flashbacks.
It is a rule of thumb in writing that many novels (especially those written by relatively inexperienced writers) will feel tighter and better-paced if one lops off the first two or three chapters. I find it interesting that it also applies to Worm.
I would not recommend watching Persecuted in theaters. However, I would recommend later acquiring it, preferably in some fashion that does not pay the filmmakers (paying for it would just encourage more films of this type). It looks like it would be fun to invite some humanist/liberal friends over, make popcorn, and poke fun at it MST3K-style.
Note: film is about evangelical Christians persecuted by a Evil Liberal Establishment. If you are deconverted, please do not watch it alone. It will just make you angry.
The SCP Foundation is a wiki filled with short horror fiction (that has recently become more widely known because of several games produced based on its content). Most of the entries are written as fictional reports/MSDS data-sheet-like information handouts by a bureaucratic organization that is focused on, basically, shutting mind-blowing horrors away from the bulk of civilization for fear that people would implode if they realized the world did not run on math. The problem being that not everything they're shutting away is a mind-blowing horror.
The artic...
Through the quote threads and references elsewhere on the site, I find I enjoy LW's taste in (short-to-medium-length) poetry. Can I have recommendations for more?
Although I accept this argument in the abstract, I oppose anyone actually trying to propose a policy like this in the real world because, historically, men have overvalued their feelings/utilons as compared to women's feelings/utilons. It's a simple ingroup bias, but similar biases in "amount of happiness"-evaluation have historically resulted in the stable maintenance of large pockets of unhappiness in societies (see also: slavery).
Hm, this actually sounds like it could be useful...
A therapist specializing in exposure therapy will be more useful than a cult for this purpose.
"No Safe Defense, Not Even Science" is close enough for the purpose I was using it for. Thank you!
I have trouble anticipating what will make someone feel better.
In this kind of situation, I usually just ask, outright, "What can I do to help you?" Then I can file away the answer for the next time the same thing happens.
However, this assumes that, like me, you are in a strongly Ask culture. If the people you know are strongly Guess, you might get answers such as "Oh, it's all right, don't inconvenience yourself on my account", in which case the next best thing is probably to ask 1) people around them, or 2) the Internet.
You also n...
Scientology uses semantic stopsigns:
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/sekten/mind1.html
...Loaded Language is a term coined by Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who did extensive studies on the thought reform techniques used by the communists on Chinese prisoners. Of all the cults in existence today, Scientology has one of the most complex systems of loaded language. If an outsider were to hear two Scientologists conversing, they probably wouldn't be able to understand what was being said. Loaded language is words or catch phrases that short-circuits a person's
I am trying to find a post here and am unable to find it because I do not seem to have the right keywords.
It was about how the rational debate tradition, reason, universities, etc. arose in some sort of limited context, and how the vast majority of people are not trained in that tradition and tend to have emotional and irrational ways of arguing/discussing and that it seems to be the human norm. It was not specifically in a post about females, although some of the comments probably addressed gender distributions.
I read this post definitely at least six months and probably over a year ago. Can anyone help me?
Given OP's complaint, I assumed OP would be unusually sensitive to even small amounts of discouragement (as magnifying small negatives is a frequent habit of people with depression/anxiety problems). As such, when I saw a -1 in the comment thread where I was directly conversing with the OP, I voted them back up to zero. This is because I do not want to discourage someone reaching out for psychological help, even if they are probably asking for help from a community that might not be focused on providing appropriate help.
That doesn't mean that we should enc...
Sadly, a significant fraction of people working in public health are in the late stages of burnout, where they simply don't have any altruism left to spare and are only working in their jobs because of money/inertia/fear of unemployment/extrinsic rewards. People who are burnt out that profoundly will express suspicion of malingering as, I think, sort of a protective mechanism: "there cannot possibly have been this many people that need this much of my energy, so most of the people dropping by with sob stories are just trying to pull one over on me bec...
At least some social services agencies have a position called "case manager", which is a person who is specifically hired to help other people get through the bureaucracy and to services if they cannot get these services themselves (due to lack of resources whether physical or mental). It may be worth your time to inquire as to how you could be assigned one of those, and then you only need to approach one person and ask.
These are things I have done to deal with these kinds of feelings:
Programs like Medicaid (in states that are expanding it to all low-income and not just disabled low-income people, at least) and food stamps are funded with the number of people who are expected to use the service. When you use low-income services like this, the people running the service can then mark you down and then use "we got more people using the service this year than we did last year" to ask for more funding. This also works for community clinics that get some or most of
The problem with textbooks is that they are the "pink slime" of publishing. College textbooks are slightly better than grade school textbooks, in that they have slightly greater than zero market forces acting on them (not many, but some) and can assume an adult level of comprehension.
See also this paper about common misrepresentations of evolution in textbooks and science literature.
Mental process like waking up without an alarm clock at a specific time aren't easy. I know a bunch of people who have that skill but it's not like there a step by step manual that you can easily follow that gives you that ability.
I do not have "wake up at a specific time" ability, but I have trained myself to have "wake up within ~1.5 hours of the specific time" ability. I did this over a summer break in elementary school because I learned about how sleep worked and thought it would be cool. Note that you will need to have basically...
I'm honestly not embarrassed by this story because it's "smug and disrespectful", I'm embarrassed because the more I stare at it the more it looks like a LWy applause light (which I had not originally intended).
A few years ago, in my introductory psych class in college, the instructor was running through possible explanations for consciousness. He got to Roger Penrose's theory of quantum computations in the microtubules being where consciousness came from (replacing another black box with another black box, oh joy). I burst out laughing, loudly, because it was just so absurd that someone would seriously propose that, and that other scientists would even give such an explanation the time of day.
The instructor stopped midsentence, and looked at me. So did 200-odd other students.
I kept laughing.
In hindsight, I think the instructor expected more solemnity.
http://www.webdirections.org/resources/james-bridle-waving-at-the-machines/
...Nikon cameras in certain generations are basically racist. They don’t see certain Asian faces. They’ve got a certain software inside them that breaks what they’re supposed to be doing in this case. And in fact this reveals the limitations, but essentially, the different way of seeing. Of course the camera isn’t racist, but it’s been programmed in a certain way that is meant to emulate the way we see, just as this is meant to emulate the way we see. The camera does not have the sam
I went to an online high school. Without going to an online high school, I would not have graduated at all. Here are some intermediate steps and questions that suggest alternative options that may be more palatable to both you and your parents:
If you do not have a preexisting tendency for depression as a result of taking ideas seriously, you probably have nothing to worry about. If you are already a reductionist materialist, you also probably have nothing to worry about. Millions of college students have taken courses in existentialism. Almost all of them are perfectly fine. Even if they're probably pouring coffee right now.
In LW terms, it may be useful to brush up on your metaethics, as such problems are usually most troublesome about these kinds of ideas in my social circle. Joy in the Mere
I first read Metagame by Sam Landstrom around 2008. At the time, I was an effectively broke high school student who had decided that I liked AIVAS from the Pern series and wanted more of that, which got me pointed to science fiction, despite the school library making it impossible to tell science fiction from the literary kind by shelving them in the same place. Which meant that, by default, I ended up wandering the Internet looking for long science fiction. Metagame was, at the time, available on the author's website as full text, and I came out the other...
Is it acceptable to post a "someone else recommended this book, but I did not find it compelling because of these reasons" on the current thread instead of the thread on which the recommendation was originally made?
I think the reason people say they couldn't write a time travel plot is because they think about time travel for five seconds and don't come up with a plot right there.
It's rather easy to come up with plots that require backwards causality and time travel (and psychologically realistic characters, for that matter) if you devote only slightly more cognitive effort to it, such as making it into a hobby or pastime rather than a once-off throwaway thought. It looks Impressive, in the same way that memorizing an algorithm to solve a Rubik's Cube is Impressive.
I have heard that the decline in the compelling qualities of literary fiction is due to classes in writing taught by literature professors, who know how to identify things like themes but who have no idea how to write compelling writing. Does this seem like a plausible statement to you?
http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4435.html
...Just after the PRISM scandal broke, Tyler Cowen offered a wonderful, wonderful tweet:
I’d heard about this for years, from “nuts,” and always assumed it was true.
There is a model of social knowledge embedded in this tweet. It implies a set of things that one believes to be true, a set of things one can admit to believing without being a “nut”, and an inconsistency between the two. Why the divergence? Oughtn’t it be true that people of integrity should simply own up to what they believe? Can a “marketplace of id
Jitsi is also relevant to this question, and I will concur that network effects are very frustrating.
Cryptocat is an OTR implementation that happens to run as a browser plugin and has developers trying to work out how to have cryptographically secure group conversations. The cross-compatibility should be high.
I heard (though I'm not entirely sure how to cite or quantify, so salt as necessary) that the weather patterns that will be inspired by climate change will tend towards extremes: either drier deserts or more damaging monsoons/hurricanes/flooding rains, not "bringing more rain to places that don't get rained on much today".
Thank you for finding those; I searched for the title of the article but was unable to find previous posts about it.
I don't know if there's a consensus, but this sounds vaguely like the concept of "intentional communities".
On luminosity
With extensive observation of myself, I finally understood that familial dynamics were reinforcing maladaptive thoughts in myself that I was actively trying to remove. Thinking very carefully about what my situation would look like from someone else's perspective bolstered my suspicions that my situation was likely emotionally abusive. As such, I (with extensive assistance from my own social circles) have managed to remove myself from my childhood home.
While not necessarily useful in a carve-reality-at-the-joints sense (1), I have found the co...
This explanation is clear. Thank you.
What are the positive and negative effects of income inequality, not "redistributing" income, etc.?
Most of the answers I've received on this issue veer far through the line of color politics and come out the other side spray-painted with logos and other such blatant advertising that the viewpoint in question is the only reasonable one. I'd like to get a rather straighter answer.
There is a series of textbooks for grade/high school math called Art of Problem Solving that focus heavily on deriving one's own solution to the problem given evidence and maybe a hint or two. Not useful for those of us who are already out of school but could be used to train young'uns.
Skincare Addiction is a subreddit dedicated to finding, and sharing tips on how to use, evidence-based skin products. If you are unsatisfied with the condition of your skin, the sidebar links are a good place to start. (I personally found good results from using "double cleansing" [oil cleansing and then water-soluble face cleanser] and an AHA-based exfoliator. I also use a moisturizer afterwards, but that was something I did already. Your results will probaby vary.)