All of OphilaDros's Comments + Replies

Eh? no. You didn't need to signal that.

Edited to clarify: I parsed the "meh" in your original comment as referring to what the general population (in India or China or maybe the world at large) will think about 'millions of deaths', and not your personal opinion on the matter. I figured we were discussing larger societal reaction, because that will impact how the economy does, and (in my mind) make a disaster 'major', separate from the sheer number of deaths.

At no point did I think you were 'for the virus'. Whatever that implies, I expect that to be something very few actual people will be?

So in India it doesn't feel like we're paying that price *yearly* because we're also getting more food, more access to better water, healthcare etc for that faster economic growth which reduces the number of deaths?

This one doesn't come with those benefits, I think we wouldn't be "meh" about even thousands of deaths due to a new disease. :)

-1[anonymous]
I'm totally against the coronavirus if that's what you're wondering about; didn't think I'd need to signal that.

This example looks like yet another instance of conflict theory imputing bad motives where they don't exist and generally leading you wrong.

A large part of this example relies on "Buchanan having racist political agenda and using public choice theory as a vehicle for achieving this agenda" being a true proposition. I can not assign a high degree of credibility to this proposition though, considering Buchanan is the same guy who wrote this:

"Given the state monopoly as it exists, I surely support the introduction of vouchers. And I do s... (read more)

8Benquo
1. Talk is cheap, especially when claiming not to hold opinions widely considered blameworthy. 2. Buchanan's academic career (and therefore ability to get our attention) can easily depend on racists' appetite for convenient arguments regardless of his personal preferences.

Just wanted to update that the two parties in Bangalore have been merged. Either of those links will point to the same location and time details, but just in case you're still editing the list.

6gattsuru
Crouch, Nott, or Jugson, though I'd guess the latter more heavily -- Jugson's constantly in the center of the blood-purist aligned factions during one of the battle games, and mentioned as Dumbledore's example of a powerful Death Eater with a seat on the Wizengamot, as well. Mr. White was selected for a particularly humiliating and harmful process, and coincidentally Quirrelmort had wanted to harm Lucius badly on the scale of framing him for attempted murder of his own son, and there's a pretty clear connection.

This meetup is updated to 9:00 PM IST on 14th March. Details updated at the meetup.com link.

Ok, sure. Changed the title in line with Vaniver's suggestion.

I had not understood what the "tribal talk" comment was referring to either and then decided to put only as much effort into understanding it as the commenter had in being understood. :)

I think since he draws an analogy to a problem it would be actually absurd to work on (no point working on overpopulation on Mars unless several other events happen first), he does seem to be suggesting that it's ridiculous worrying about things like UFAI now rather than "hundreds, maybe thousands of years from now".

Anyway, I only thought the post was interesting from a PR point of view. The AI problem has been getting good press lately with Musk/Gates et al suggesting that it is something worth worrying about. Ng hasn't said anything that will ... (read more)

The beeminder team sends "legitimacy check" emails if you've derailed on your goal which explicitly asks if it was a case of forgetting to enter the data. I've written in once or twice when I've derailed on account of not entering the data on time and have had quick responses from them, and haven't been punished. Were you unaware you could do this?

0taryneast
Kind of. I was aware you could appeal the decision, but I felt that would be an imposition on some poor moderator... and given I'm pretty sure this would occur on a regular basis, decided I didn't want to do that. What would work for me, would be for a short "grace period" in which we could update the decision ourselves. Like I said - fitocracy gives you a week or so to back-date your past workouts. Of course fitocracy doesn't run with a monetary punishment so it's not as bad for you to backdate... Basically - I conclude that beeminder's mechanic doesn't fit well enough to my likely usage patterns to be worth it.

There are forums like this where you can connect with other adult beginners (or learners at most levels, really) and even upload your recordings and ask for feedback.

There are also discussions around what pieces to learn next, how to set up a daily practise regimen etc. Does not replace a tutor, but is very useful nevertheless.

Do you enjoy movies? Does the background score seem distracting?

1James_Miller
Yes and I do dislike background scores.

Not all animals can be domesticated for meat production. Jared Diamond discusses the question in "Guns, Germs and Steel". He calls it the Anna Karenina principle, and some of the factors influencing this are:

  • Growth rate of the species
  • Breeding habits - do they tend to breed well in closed spaces
  • Nasty disposition
  • Social structure
3gwern
All of those just increase the cost; certainly they can make things infeasible for hunter-gatherers with per capita incomes of maybe $300 a year generously. But they are of little interest to people with per capitas closer to $30,000 and who are willing to pay for tiger meat.

Situational awareness is further lauded by elite military units, police trainers, criminals, intelligence analysts, and human factors researchers. In other words, people who have to make very important-- often life-or-death-- decisions based on limited information consider situational awareness a critical skill. This should tell us something-- if those individuals for whom correct decisions are most immediately relevant all stress the importance of situational awareness, it may be a more critical skill than we realize.

While agreeing with the general ide... (read more)

0Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Based on my experience, yes. I am an absentminded person currently trying to retrain myself to function as a critical care nurse–see my related post here. At work/in clinical, I am slowly developing the skill of being aware of everything as it happens, keeping an ongoing plan/list of priorities, separating out important changes in a patient's condition from noise, and knowing when I have to re-prioritize. Of course, focusing on modelling the world around me constantly (or at least the few cubic meters of my patient and relevant equipment) is exhausting and makes me worse at nearly everything else, from remembering theory to social skills. However, in a written exam (or at home posting on the Internet), I don't hesitate to block out distracting stimuli and focus on one thing. I can still churn out an essay in 2-3 hours, and I write novels for fun and can focus about as well as I used to be able to, although exhaustion is a confounding factor. (I'm sleep deprived a lot of the time, because of shift work, which wasn't the case when I was in high school). My comfort zone is still absentmindedness, being 'zoned out' and focused on my own thoughts, and I don't think this will ever change–but I already have a degree of situational awareness that I can switch on at will, which will probably increase over my next few years of work experience.

Val explained to me how he changed his diet in order to decouple the relationship between his energy levels and when he last ate.

Have you/has he written about this somewhere? If not, could you expand? This seems potentially very useful.

2toner
Paleo + intermittent fasting + read Kevin's posts on supplements.

There was this article from a couple of years ago: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/22/AR2010022203639.html

"Whether you are aware of your incessantly ticking biological clock or not, the absolute last thing that any woman of steadily advancing childbearing age wants to hear when she flips on the morning news shows is: Women lose 90 percent of their eggs by age 30.

Using a mathematical model and data from 325 women, the researchers found that the average woman is born with around 300,000 eggs and steadily loses them as she

... (read more)
0Sarokrae
Is losing eggs an issue if there isn't a quality decrease? I mean, I only need one at a time... Thanks for the info though :)

Upvoted. If you want a(n additional) "seed" in India, pls let me know. :)

One way to combat extreme poverty is by creating employment opportunities so that people can help themselves, rather than giving them free shoes, or corn, or wells, all of which are suboptimal for meeting their varied pressing needs. So our approach is to hire them to do human computation work.

How are you planning to reach out to the poorest of the poor in developing countries? Will you be tying up with some agencies back there? Because you will not be able to find them over the internet.

You will also need strong mechanisms in place for quality control... (read more)

5spoutdoors
Great points. I have personal connections in some poor rural areas of Kenya already (and already in that place, people are always asking, "How can I join?", both of me and of the current workers). My colleagues also have connections in a number of other developing countries where we could plant "seeds". How to grow the "crowd" from those seeds is an interesting problem, but not insurmountable, what with ever-increasing mobile phone/3G penetration and a mobile interface to our platform (lots of people in Kenya, for example, have a low end mobile phone or internet-capable "feature phone" while still living in mud huts), a franchise model using netbooks and small solar stations, etc. As for quality control, you're absolutely right. There are a lot of ways to approach that (none of which Mturk implements). There's some well-established precedent for methods that work, so we feel confident we can generate high quality outputs.
3Viliam_Bur
Could humans be also used for doing this? Something like: "If you find other people to join this system, you will get 10% of their reward." Surely, this has a lot of negative connotations. This is what many scams do, because it is an efficient way to reach many people. To remove some connotations, perhaps the reward could be limited in time, for example you get 10% of other person's reward only for 2 years. (To make it certain nobody is promissing you to "find 10 more people, and then you don't have to work again, ever".)
8RomanDavis
Yeah, the whole time I was thinking, "Hasn't the guy heard of Mechanical Turk?' I guess he could be using MTurk as a platform to do this on, although I don't know haw much Amazon eats of your profit.

Quality and quantity were the only sex-related problems that came to mind?

Hmm? You quoted the rest of my question which talked about other things. It really was a question. :)

In any case, I must admit that unwanted pregnancies and venereal diseases (if these diseases have mostly become treatable then they're really not as much of a problem are they?) did not really spring to mind. I was thinking of effects on marriage and the impact through that on society at large.

However, even your data speaks only about a specific class of people, and not for all o... (read more)

the sexual norms based on sacralized individual autonomy end up working very badly in practice, so that we end up with the present rather bizarre situation where we see an unprecedented amount of hand-wringing about all sorts of sex-related problems, and at the same time proud insistence that we have reached unprecedented heights of freedom, enlightenment, and moral superiority in sex-related matters.

The unprecedented amount of hand-wringing might not be indicative of an increase in the number or magnitude of sex-related problems if it turns out that pr... (read more)

-3jacoblyles
Out of wedlock birth rates have exploded with sexual freedom: -http://www.familyfacts.org/charts/205/four-in-10-children-are-born-to-unwed-mothers Marriage is way down: -http://www.familyfacts.org/charts/105/the-annual-marriage-rate-has-declined-significantly-in-the-past-generation
8Vaniver
Quality and quantity were the only sex-related problems that came to mind? Pregnancy, particularly pregnancy out of wedlock, and venereal disease are the traditional sex-related problems. Both of them are massively higher after sexual liberation. (Out of wedlock births are also exacerbated by welfare, which is part of a larger political discussion.) Births out of wedlock are somewhat difficult to hide from government record-keepers in developed countries like the US, though they may be possible to hide socially (which is what most people care about anyway). Out of wedlock births among African Americans are currently at ~70%; in 1940, a full generation before the civil rights era, it was 19%. Venereal disease is a bit harder to compare to last century (whereas we have out-of-wedlock rates going back quite a bit), and there are issues with diseases (like syphilis) becoming treatable and overall medical care (including reporting) increasing. But the impact of the Sixties on American gonorrhea rates is still clear. (It also seems likely that gay liberation contributed to the AIDS epidemic- but the primary comparison there is to Cuba, where those with AIDS were quarantined. Unsurprisingly, quarantine reduces transmission rates.)

Apparently in some parts of India, public toilets charge women (who can ill afford it) but not men.

Heh, was just about to post that I as an Indian woman who has done a fair bit of travelling around the country have NEVER ever seen this, but decided to google just in case. And found a New York Times article agreeing with the claim. Upper class privilege indeed. :)

In any case this doesn't look like an institutional policy, just petty corruption against those who are the least powerless to stop it. Which is sort of your point.

The number of instances that a typical American will need to be 'humble and obedient' - such as while getting pulled over by a cop, are possibly far fewer than the number of instances a woman in a traditional society such as the one described by Haidt is required to do so.

Possibly by an order of magnitude.

4Luke_A_Somers
AN order of magnitude? Several. I get pulled over every few years...

This helped me to prevent clutter from creeping back into my house after a dedicated decluttering effort: Never put an item on your list of things to buy the first time you feel a need for it. Wait until you feel its absence it 2 or 3 times, because chances are, something you've already got can substitute well enough for the functionality you are missing.

If you ever declutter, you'll find a surprising amount of products that end up in the corners of shelves which were used only once ever and then forgotten. Chances are you'll find 2 or 3 copies of the sam... (read more)

I think all of us commenting have different age ranges in our heads for 'older men' and 'younger women'. Anyhow the OP as far as I understand talks about very young women - 'girls who have recently exited puberty', and the discussion in the comments talking about 'power' and 'stature' seems to suggest men who are already fairly well established in their careers - at least the early thirties?

That's anywhere from a 15-20 year age gap. Not a whole lot more common than older woman-younger men pairings.

Possibly the the time spent in figuring out which ones are classy as opposed to 'wannabe' or 'cheesy' or 'trying too hard' or 'lower class'. Probably difficult to figure out for any given group to which you are signalling you belong, unless you actually do belong to that group.

Upvoted for saying what I was trying to say with far fewer words. :)

The best solution I’ve heard started by looking at who benefits from this norm [older women] and wondering whether they could have contributed to it.

While this is generally a good question to ask, at this point you would also need to think of a plausible mechanism by which older women could have contributed to the change. What new powers have older women (Would this be women over 30? those over 40?) gained compared to younger women, younger men and older men in this period that they could have used to change the norms so drastically? How would they have... (read more)

Attempted 2 online courses on Coursera. Grossly overestimated my own free time and conscientiousness, failed to make it even mid-way through both.

I'm not giving up though. Have signed up for one course this month - the introduction to Quantum Mechanics taught by Umesh Vazirani. Must do better and complete the course this time because if not, I just might start to self-identify as someone who plans, but does not execute!

5[anonymous]
I attempted Udacity's CS101 class. Got through several units of the program until the learning curve suddenly got very steep for me. Persisted through for another two units, but it wasn't getting better. I certainly got a lot out of the class, but I don't think it's yet within my ability to complete it. I was also attempting Udacity's ST101 and PH101 courses. The speed was too slow for me. If I wanted to learn the subjects, an actual book might be better. But I also realized that, for right now, it might be better focus on different subjects. (Such as programming and AI.) I'll be taking Stats I & II in the Spring, and Physics isn't required by my major. So I failed to complete three Udacity courses. But as a positive, it has let me take a page out of Cal Newport's playbook and simplify so I can focus on what's important.
1Kaj_Sotala
I registered for a couple of Coursera and Udacity courses, figuring I'd do them on the side while not working, but soon dropped out of them when I noticed that I didn't have the energy for both my job and the courses. (I never even got to the point of figuring out whether they were easy or hard - by the time I was done with my day's work, even looking at the course homepages in order to look at the lectures and read the exercises felt like too much effort.)

Also all those dramatic technological developments of 6000 years ago, which seem minor now due to the passage of time and further advances in knowledge and technology. As no doubt the discovery of the Higgs Boson or the Voyager leaving the boundary of the solar system would seem in 8012. AD. If anybody even remembers these events then.

Upvoted because 10% as an estimate seems too high.

I especially can't imagine why transhuman powers would have used the end of the calendar of a long-dead civilization (one of many comparable civilizations) to foreshadow the end of their game plan.

2NancyLebovitz
Also, even if the transhuman powers are choosing based on current end-of-the-world predictions, there's no reason why they would choose 2012 rather than any of the many past predictions.
2Mitchell_Porter
It's easy to invent scenarios. But the high probability estimate really derives from two things. First, the special date from the Mayan calendar is astronomically determined, to a degree that hasn't been recognized by mainstream scholarship about Mayan culture. The precession of the equinoxes takes 26000 years. Every 6000 years or so, you have a period in which a solstice sun or an equinox sun lines up close to the galactic center, as seen from Earth. We are in such a period right now; I think the point of closest approach was in 1998. Then, if you mark time by transits of Venus (Venus was important in Mayan culture, being identified with their version of the Aztecs' Quetzalcoatl), that picks out the years 2004 and 2012. It's the December solstice which is the "galactic solstice" at this time, and 21 December 2012 will be the first December solstice after the last transit of Venus during the current period of alignment. OK, so one might suppose that a medieval human civilization with highly developed naked-eye astronomy might see all that coming and attach a quasi-astrological significance to it. What's always bugged me is that this period in time, whose like comes around only every 6000 years, is historically so close to the dramatic technological developments of the present day. Carl Sagan wrote a novel (Contact) in which, when humans speak to the ultra-advanced aliens, they discover that the aliens also struggle with impossible messages from beyond, because there are glyphs and messages encoded in the digits of pi. If you were setting up a universe in such a way that you wanted creatures to go through a singularity, and yet know that the universe they had now mastered was just a second-tier reality, one way to do it would certainly be to have that singularity occur simultaneously with some rare, predetermined astronomical configuration. Nothing as dramatic as a singularity is happening yet in 2012, but it's not every day that a human probe first reaches inter

Hmm.. Not sure about the etiquette of posting the link in a public forum since it's not meant for redistribution, but will keep it for now.

You can get the 'author's version' of the paper 'for personal use, not redistribution' by going to this website, and providing your email ID:

http://web.ku.edu/~gillab/pubs.html

0OphilaDros
Hmm.. Not sure about the etiquette of posting the link in a public forum since it's not meant for redistribution, but will keep it for now.

Is your background Catholic? Asking because although I haven't delved in depth into 'justifications for belief' of various religions recently (I stopped shopping around for a religion 16-17 years ago), I don't remember Catholic justifications as being particularly stronger than that of the others I was reading up about (Islam/Buddhism/Hinduism).