Brainstormy words in that corner of concept-space:
[switches framing]
Signal boosting means sending more signal so that you it arrives better on the other side. There's more ways of doing so though;
The maximum total energy from PUFA has been a discussion point with DIY Soylent makers as well. The final consensus was that it should definitely be below 10%, and possibly below 4%. The 4% figure comes from The perfect health diet, which uses this as a source:
Angela Liou Y, Innis SM. Dietary linoleic acid has no effect on arachidonic acid, but increases n-6 eicosadienoic acid, and lowers dihomo-gamma-linolenic and eicosapentaenoic acid in plasma of adult men. Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids 2009 Apr;80(4):201–6, http://pmid.us/1935...
My university has access to the paper. I've got it hosted on my server, but you're only allowed to download it if you have legal access through your university as well. If you have legal access, feel free to click this link:
My current effective altruism strategy is:
Pretty straightforward, but it means I don't need to have a job specifically related to effective altruism.
The question might be if you're more useful by making money and giving that away, or by working directly with the cause or meta-cause you support. I think for me it's the former.
Besides being very interesting in the topics covered, this post has shifted my inclination to try drugs (to the trying drugs side).
Up to now, I didn't feel like trying anything serious. I saw no clear benefit, and I was afraid that it would mess with my core reasoning. I depend on my "reasoning core" to operate in stressful, inebriated, or otherwise compromised situations. Messing with that seemed like a Bad Idea.
Thinking about it now, though, I recognize that my core reasoning is not an isolated crystal anyway, being influenced by emotions and s...
For the record: A number of programmers have applied and, as far as I know, will be discussing with Shannon and beeminder people to discuss actually programming the required parts.
I, meanwhile, am just hobbying a bit to see if OpenMeetings can be turned into something useful. But indeed, I'm often in the room when I do that :)
Login form: Gutted
Video resolution: Capped
Chat area height: Increased
Webcam selection: Eh. The devs changed it, it's a bit better, but not quite there yet. Maybe they'll work on it more after the weekend. Edit: It's fixed! :)
Chat notifications: Haven't looked into it yet. Edit: Have looked into it, but haven't figured it out yet.
I'll have it running most of the time. Feel free to look around!
For the programmers, patches are available here: ftp://lesswrong:openmeetings@forecast.student.utwente.nl
Since I fixed this, it seems OpenMeetings is stable. It has been running for at least 10 hours, with at some point 8 people in there, all streaming video. There have been a few notes in the chat which I'll address publically:
I'm not sure if it's a good idea to redirect people here if tinychat is still better until this gets done correctly
Agreed. The redirection today was only for stresstesting it. If it's not stable, putting further effort in it is useless. It turns out it's stable though, so I'll hack some more at it, and see what I can make of it.
...i
We tried out mqrius' server and encountered a few difficulties, but I have no idea what was causing them, so it could just be that OM is a bit shaky.
I poked around a bit more.
Basically, I got "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space", so I figured it was a lack of allocated memory and increased the allocated heap space (Xmx and Xms). However, I did some further googling, and apparently the PermGen space is separate from the heap space. If it goes out of memory, it might be caused by either a normal process, or by a memory leak. It might be ...
Maybe a common room where people can initially talk about what they intend to work on. (Eliezer says: This needs either strong group norms or built-in limits on talk time to avoid becoming a social chat timesink.)
I discussed this a bit with tsakinis, and I think that we can indeed create group norms that do the following:
This will mean that someone who...
For programmers who are curious about OpenMeeting, I've set up a mockup server on my PC. It's is not entirely stock install, I've changed a few configurations to make it more like what we want. No source code changing yet though.
You can have a look at it here:
http://forecast.student.utwente.nl:5080/openmeetings/
Go there, wait for a few seconds for it to load, make an account (no verification or anything required), and then you can join the public room. You'll get a popup for video settings: it shows a black screen initially, even though your cam does work...
Screensharing is indeed very effective in a 1-on-1 session, but I think the webcam view is quite valuable for different reasons: It provides the sense of actual people whom you're working with on the other side. Part of the reason why the study room works is because of the community feeling you get. When the community starts a pomodoro, you join.
Of course, google hangouts support switching between screensharing and webcam on the fly, so this isn't an argument against hangouts: I just wanted to mention the value of the webcams.
--
I'm trying to imagine screen...
If people can turn off sounds and notifications, we probably don't have to worry about bothering others by chatting outside of a break.
I would think so too, but at least 1 person has requested chats that chats be at a minimum, even if he turned off the sound and notifications.
Besides that, a lobby has the advantage that you can hang out without working. Here's the failure mode I'm anticipating and trying to avoid: Let's say this becomes big, and there's plenty of people in the study room. Some will just hang out, and not specifically be working at that time. This creates an environment in which it feels "okay" to just hang out and not work when you're there.
I valued the bit of chatting we did a lot. It creates a community feeling , and helps with actually getting me to work :)
But indeed, some people are distracted by the chatting. Having a "lobby" would work. Then the study room could be quiet most of the time, except when the joint hour-synced Pomodoro finishes. If you want to hang out but aren't working, you remove yourself from the study room.
These would be simple but effective guidelines, I think.
It was my understanding that Main is intended for polished final products, and that drafts, polls, and, well, discussions, belong to Discussion.
That's a reasonable distinction. But imagine this: A post which is a central place for organizing working together. Such a post is a very valuable final product in instrumental rationality, but it will inherently have continuous activity and discussion.
This post is not fully polished yet, but it's the best one we have of the sort, and having it as a main post right now increases the chances of this becoming the ...
I disagree. Instrumental rationality is at least as important as epistemic rationality, akrasia is both one of the largest blocks and one of the most common blocks in daily life, and the survey has shown that co-working is the best tool we have to combat akrasia. Assuming we can make this the nexus of co-working efforts, its place in Main is justified.
Alright, so there seems to be enthusiasm for this. The next step is figuring out the practical details.
How do we create a group study room? The first things that come to mind are a Skype group chat, Google hangouts, and the newly developed browser-to-browser video chat. The latter seems undersupported to me, although I haven't researched it specifically. Skype group chats require at least 1 person to have a premium account, and I'm not sure if you can make a permanent "room".
That leaves Google hangouts. Some searching shows that it used to be pos...
My sleep schedule tended to drift further into the night as well. I installed f.lux s little over a week ago, and just realized a day ago that I find myself going to bed around midnight consistently! The amount of sleep has also decreased, to about 7.5 hours. sleep quality seems similar. (I'm using ElectricSleep for tracking movement)
Capitalizing on this, I've ordered orange-tinted blue-blocking glasses, and have attempted to find something like f.lux for Android. There are custom ROMs that can do it, and there's apps like Lux that only change brightness....
It's an interesting idea, for sure.
For me, though, I really need the coordination part. A global study room where you can come and go wouldn't work as well for me: it lacks the precommitment I get from agreeing with an individual to work alongside eachother at a specific time and date. I can make the agreement in far mode, and then near mode sticks to it, only if I made the agreement with someone else than myself.
Another thing that popped into my mind when reading this is that you're trying to create a large joint effort, where everyone involved tends to p...
I think money might complicate things: You might want to get paid more for stuff you don't find that interesting. With trading just time, it feels different. You'd just give the other person X hours of your time, and you get X hours back. It doesn't matter to you what you do in the X hours you gave away. Perhaps getting money for it also makes it seem like work, instead of a fun, social thing. Then again, maybe it's a distinction that's only in my head, so if you can make it work, sure, go for it!
Buying food indeed seems less formal.
Also, paying money to your friends is probably bad, psychologically. There is a "social mode" with family and friends, and a "business mode" when dealing with money. They use different rules. For example the business mode is based on principle that everything can be replaced and traded; but the family and friends are supposed to be special. Trying to calculate whether the X hours I gave to my friend really have the same value as the X hours my friend gave to me seems like a certain way to ruin our friendship.
(I am not sure how much this is culture-depended.)
Here’s a slightly different idea I’ve been toying with: Trading time
The gist of it is this: You make a plan to get together with a friend, and agree to work for 3 hours on whatever project he wants.You also plan a later date and time at which he comes to you and you work together on anything you want. This could be a hobby project, a difficult study topic you can’t quite grasp, or something simple like painting a wall.
The idea is that nearly everything is easier if you do it with someone else, especially for people that tend to procrastinate. Some things a...
Ah, but that's not what it means to run until significance -- in my interpretation in any case. A significant result would mean that you run until you have either p < 0.005 that your hypothesis is correct, or p < 0.005 that it's incorrect. Doing the experiment in this way would actually validate it for "proof" in conventional Science.
Since he mentions "running until you're bored", his interpretation may be closer to yours though.
Upvoted for actually testing the theory :)
Obviously, if what you're actually doing is running a set number of trials in one case and running trials until you reach significance or give up in the second case, you will come up with different results.
I don't believe this is true. Every individual trial is individual Bayesian evidence, unrelated to the rest of the trials except in the fact that your priors are different. If you run until significance you will have updated to a certain probability, and if you run until you're bored you'll also have updated ...
On Lesswrong there's no real objection against reviving old posts, which I think is a good thing.
Your second point surprises me. As a rational vegan, the animal suffering is the direct reason I don't eat meat or eggs, via Alicorn's expected animal suffering hypothesis:
You will save an expected number of animals equal to the number of animals you don't eat that you would otherwise have eaten.
You seem to disagree about that, and after writing and deleting a full post, I think I understood where our differences came from, and wrote the new reply above.
...[
Am I responsible for my moral choices?
Yes.
Is John in front of the burning orphanage responsible for his moral choices?
Also yes.
But can I be angry at John-1 if he runs away?
I find that I can't. Not when my anti-Correspondence bias-heuristics kick in, when I envision his situation, when I realize he is the product of a specific set of understandable environmental factors and psychological factors, which are the product of a specific combination of nature and nurture. Yes, some babies dying is John-1's fault. But John-1 is the "fault" of his upbring...
As a Dutch person with a German girlfriend, I'm in both countries quite often. It's common knowledge in both countries that the Dutch are good at English, and it's common knowledge in Germany that the Germans are not very good at English. Apart from that, fully English courses, or just English lecture slides, are common in our exact sciences university. In Germany apparently not so much, although I don't have first hand experience.
Looking up actual numbers, this seems to be somewhat true. The English Language in Europe wikipedia page has a nice bar graph a...
So your argument, if I understand it correctly, is this:
Your conclusion is then that we shouldn't force farms into financial trouble, because then the second type turns into the first type due to needing to cut costs.
Here is my view of things:
Oh nice, I had never considered that! Thanks for this new conclusion that flows naturally from two of my beliefs: Brain size differences between species don't correlate strongly with intelligence differences*, and suffering is bad.
*It's mostly brain-to-body mass ratio that seems to correlate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio
Within 1 species, there seems to be correlation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#Intelligence
Possibly 1000 people swearing off pork would instead have the effect of driving that same farm to a ruthless cost-cutting program
Quite frankly, I don't think this argument makes sense. Meat factories are already ruthless cost-cutting programs, and hogs "complaints" are already not taken into account.
What you seem to be implying here is that if meat farming is bad, we should better give them money so they don't make it even worse.
I've got pretty bad akrasia. I want to do things, but then I do other things. Intuitively, I feel like I'm me, and I'm in control.
Rationally, not so much. Rationally speaking the answer to "Am I in control?" depends a lot on how broad you define "I". Is my rational mind in control? No way. Is my brain as a whole in control? Yeah, mostly.
Do excuses automatically pop up when I avoid work? Definitely. "I wanted to relax." "I got distracted." "I hate working." Having some rationality allows me to see through th...
Not quite the same scenario, but close: often when I'm considering donating to some charity, there's a reminder in the back of my head that if I were to truly support this charity I would donate a much larger amount. This isn't a happy thought, it generates conflict: there's another part of me that doesn't like spending large amounts of money. Thus, I often donate nothing at all.
I'm still working on this conflict.
Does that take into account, for example, Arbital seeming less promising to people / getting less engagement, because all the users have just sunk energy into trying to get by on a revived LW?
There's an intuition pump I could make that I haven't fully fleshed out yet, that goes something like, If both Arbital and Lesswrong get worked on, then whichever seems more promising or better to use will gain more traction and end out on top in a very natural way, without having to go through an explicit failure of the other one.
There's caveats/responses to that as well of course — it just doesn't seem 100% clear cut to me.