All of polymathwannabe's Comments + Replies

What I wanted to tell the teacher was, "If arguments + evidence are compelling enough, you have no choice but to believe. In general, belief is not a choice." But then she'd have thrown Sartre and radical freedom at me, which would have completely missed my point.

What do you like?

First, happy birthday. Keep shining.

Second: I'm 2 years older than you, but reading your blog feels like learning from a teacher who has advanced in the path of wisdom an unfathomable lot more than me. In my own circles I meet dull and thick PhDs all the time, so my perception of your wisdom cannot entirely be due to your having done three times the education I have.

Your writing is the most careful I know. You know when you're right, but you never come off as overconfident. Time after time, you go out of your way to try to prove yourself wrong. A... (read more)

Upon first viewing, my brain wanted to think that the empty space in the middle was the "solid thing" and that the area corresponding to the leaves was "empty."

Last night I had a similar experience while organizing my new apartment. I kept walking past this open door, and my brain kept misinterpreting the space within the frame as the "door" even though it was already open and what I was seeing was actually the wall beyond.

Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker. A crazy neurosurgeon dissects people's selfhood while the good guys discuss evolutionary psychology and why the whole concept of crime may be misguided. The author keeps a blog on the same ideas (https://rsbakker.wordpress.com).

"Revival" is the text I wrote.

I missed the reason why LW no longer has bragging threads, so allow me to brag here about my first published story in English at Antimatter Magazine.

Unfortunately I don't travel much (although there's a 50/50 chance I'll move to Boston later this year), but you can find me on Facebook as carturo222.

ARARRRARGGGGHHH why do I only see this now.

Do you have any plans to come visit again?

Steve Reich's Violin Phase.

Make LW nice again.

I happen to be working on that at the office. Here is a snapshot of the opinion landscape (all from PubMed):

Iwamoto J. Vitamin K₂ therapy for postmenopausal osteoporosis. Nutrients. 2014 May 16;6(5):1971-80.

DiNicolantonio JJ, Bhutani J, O'Keefe JH. The health benefits of vitamin K. Open Heart. 2015 Oct 6;2(1):e000300.

Huang ZB, Wan SL, Lu YJ, Ning L, Liu C, Fan SW. Does vitamin K2 play a role in the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis for postmenopausal women: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Osteoporos Int. 2015 Mar;26(3):1175-86.

Falco... (read more)

NRx emerged from some of the ideas that also coalesced into LW, but their aims couldn't be more different. A core item of the LW philosophy is altruism; NRx is systematized hatred.

Also, it being on Breitbart should be enough indication that its version of events is not to be trusted.

I'm halfway through Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. They're science-based creation myths, and they're breathtaking.

Elo has 145 negative votes for the past month. This is getting ridiculous. What's Eugine trying to prove?

No such community exists near me.

To illustrate the topic I wish to present, I'll quote a review for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which complains that

In Rowling’s novels, characters deliver a mix of clever repartee and thudding exposition. Here Thorne [...] defaults to the latter. The result is a play that fails to utilize the most elementary of playwright’s tools: subtext. Characters say exactly what they feel, explain exactly what is happening, and warn about what they’re going to do before they do it.

My everyday failure to handle indirect statements may relate to this (as well... (read more)

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is available now. I devoured the script in four hours and I will only say: it's powerful and beautiful.

Example: election campaign promises should be enforceable upon victory.

I'm happy to have found minimal music. It reflects perfectly the way my head sounds on the inside. Main examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAzhzEjkdcI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLckHHc25ww

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbBkdYCViLs

Added to my Amazon wish list. Do you know of any other books one should be aware of?

Those stories are not about something other than themselves and the rules/process/structure of storytelling. I felt they could match your request for something sufficiently meta.

Cabin in the Woods? Stranger than Fiction? Funny Games?

Some months ago someone mentioned a chat website that tracked arguments in syllogism form to help people organize their debates. Does anyone remember what it was called?

LW orthodoxy, in so far as there is such a thing, says to choose SPECKS over TORTURE

No, Eliezer and Hanson are anti-specks.

Is there a way we can discuss civilizational issues without becoming mind-killed?

A LWer created Omnilibrium for that.

On how whether grains vs. roots were eaten may have determined the success of ancient civilizations.

I think a fine line needs to be walked when addressing Gleb, if only because he evidently has media visibility skills that could be useful for the community if he were less misguided.

Personally, I tend to parse them as "Look how cynical and worldly-wise I am, how able I am to see through people's pretences to their ugly true motivations. Aren't I clever and edgy?".

That's exactly how Hanson sounds to me, and why I tend to read his blog less often now.

I always delete permanently. But every detail is still in my head.

This past week gave me an example of my bipolar disorder in action.

A TV company announced they were open to story proposals. After a few weeks without ideas, I managed to come up with a story that sounded interesting to me. I spent the better part of a weekend at home writing the beginning of a plot outline, and felt extremely excited.

Then the week started and normal life resumed, and after the commute back home I didn't feel like writing anything. A few days later I deleted the folder I had created. I no longer saw any potential in it.

Part of the reason I... (read more)

It's the remake.

Aurora Peachy is a huge Sailor Moon fangirl and watching her get so excited for every episode always melts my heart.

Don't apologize. I've been waiting for weeks for someone to complain, to make sure that it wasn't just me who felt this was an actual problem.

On the practicalities of catastrophe readiness.

There was a similar post a while ago about the concept of small identities.

There's this powerful one-page fanfic.

Big news for visibility: Sam Harris is preparing a book co-written with Eliezer (starting at minute 51 of podcast).

I sometimes call myself a progressivist. I don't think communism is immoral---I see totalitarianism as the thing which is immoral, and you can have totalitarianism with or without a market economy; e.g. Latin American dictatorships that murdered hundreds of protesters while remaining very business-friendly.

You think wars should be abolished. Good. Then why did you include pacifism in the immoral category?

You believe communism, libertarianism, anarchism, ethical egoism, pacifism and realist philosophy of war are all immoral. What are you?

At age 17 I had the common experience of dreaming of my recently deceased mother, but my brain didn't take long to realize that seeing her was not possible, and I realized it was a dream. For some years I kept that ability to quickly see the inconsistencies in the dream world, but as of now my asleep brain is back to normal gullibility. Because I have a strong preference for living in the real world, I very strongly (verbally, actually) forbade my mind from showing me my dead mother again, and it obeyed.

My roommate died from cancer 3 years ago. It never stops being a sad memory, except that the hard pang of the initial shock is gone after some time. I don't feel guilty for no longer feeling that pang, because I know I still wish it hadn't happened and it still marked my life in several ways, so I haven't stopped doing what I privately call "honoring my pain." The usual feel-good advice of forgetting it all and moving on sounds to me as dangerously close to no longer honoring my pain, by which I mean acknowledging that the sad event occurred, and... (read more)

Create a moral framework that incentivizes assholes to cooperate.

So, capitalism?

There's the burden of proof thing (it's the affirmer, not the denier, who has to present evidence) and the null hypothesis thing (in absence of evidence, the no-effect or no-relationship hypothesis stands).

Unfortunately recording was not possible, but the slideshow is here. You have to download it and view it on LibreOffice; it does not look good on Google Slides.

Apparently, there's a case for detonating more nukes around the world.

I understand aji as potential for future moves that is currently not too usable but may be after the board configuration has evolved.

It appears to be an active field of study.

Me too.