All of singularitard's Comments + Replies

5Alsadius
The Canadian dollar was falling well before the current oil price drops. WTI peaked around $108 in June 2014, but the CAD has been falling fairly steadily since Sept 2012, when it was over $1 USD. Yes, the most recent fall has been happening at the same time as oil prices have been falling, but it's been falling at about a cent a month, compared to about half a cent a month it was falling for the two years before that(when oil prices were basically flat). Russia is better known for gas, because gas is harder to ship, and more dependant on pipelines - oil can be shipped by tanker or rail more easily. As such, if Europe gets Russian oil cut off it can buy from the Saudis, but if Russian gas gets cut off, they have many fewer options, and a cold winter. That said, LNG tankers are getting more common(largely to take advantage of the cross-Atlantic arbitrage between the frack-happy Americans and the enviro Europeans), and will alleviate that problem somewhat.
-1ChristianKl
Gas prizes are pegged to oil prices.

I guess there'll be a fair bit of traffic coming from people looking it up?

Well xkcd just reminded me that I have an account here, so there's that. Not that I want to waste time on this crackpot deposit of revisionist history, stolen ideas, poor reasoning and general crank idiocy.

edit: and again I disappear into the night

I didn't answer your question because it was loaded and ridiculous. Quit feigning ignorance to bait for attention, you sad little boy

I suspect if you took a look at your life, there are a lot of things you don't understand.

-2Jonathan Paulson
I think a more likely explanation is that people just like to complain. Why would people do things that everyone thought were a waste of time? (At my office, we have meetings and email too, but I usually think they are good ways to communicate with people and not a waste of time) Also, you didn't answer my question. It sounds like your answer is that you are compelled to waste 20 hours of time every week?

Having something done to yourself VS doing something to other people, there's really no comparison here. The science is sound.

Not that people with grade school equivalent knowledge of politics are worth arguing with (I mean you by the way). Dunning-Kruger alarm bells ringing. Don't worry, you'll get laid one day

3Lumifer
Heh. It's interesting how you assume the real crux of the issue away. The real crux (IMHO, of course) is whether and when a fetus stops being a chunk of tissue and begins to be a human being. There are two endpoint views -- at birth and at conception -- and a variety of intermediate positions. Your post assumes that the fetus is a chunk of tissue so when you are doing something, it's to yourself, not to another person. But that assumption is precisely the root of the disagreement.

I don't think very many people who are "pro-choice" are actually pro-abortion. The crux of the issue is that people will be getting abortions whether they are legal or not, so there should be a safe option for those people (as opposed to backroom doctor, coat hanger, etc) which requires it to be legal and regulated

I should know better than to explain anything to homeschooled randroids

0Lumifer
That's not a particularly persuasive argument, to see why replace "getting abortions" with e.g. "stealing" (pro-life people would replace it with "murder").

Most of the freedom and prosperity in the world is due to the military dominance of the entire Anglosphere.

Mind explaining your reasoning? Or is it just jingoism?

edit: option 2 it is, then

2buybuydandavis
You would have gotten an answer if you had stopped at the first question.

I would probably be able to get the same amount of work done in a 30 or even 20 hour week, given the amount of time wasted on meetings/email/waiting for data in an average office. Boss wouldn't want to pay me the same for a 20hr work week though.

-3Jonathan Paulson
I don't understand. Are you saying you could get 2x as much work done in your 40 hour week, or that due to dependencies on other people you cannot possibly do more than 20 hours of productive work per week no matter how many hours you are in the office?
0Bruno_Coelho
Bet if companies cut in half the number of 'meetings', the productivity gain would be good enough to make a 40h/week for a lot of workers.

The entire community is extremely insular and is weighed down with it's own established ideas. Most of the writers speak with total conviction, absolutely convinced of their own conclusions, despite the entire point of the endeavor being the pursuit of ever increasing amounts of correctness, thus making them 'less wrong'.

It consists mostly of extremely narrow demographics, cutting it's objectivity off at the knees by creating a culture that is perfect for serving as echo chambers despite their criticism of one another. It has also engaged in censorship of ... (read more)

Vitamin D, since sunshine is in short supply all winter where I live

That's completely unrelated to my point? How is a habit the same thing as a tool at all? Besides, that's not even remotely a widely-held definition for religion. I never really understood why anybody upvotes your posts, every single one of them is nonsensical to the point of idiocy.

2ChristianKl
The idea that religion is primarily about belief is very popular among atheists. If you don't have a habit to regularly use a mental tool that tool is worthless. Having the skill to solves Bayes formula is worthless if you don't have the habit to use it for non-textbook problems.

An order of magnitude is a power of ten.

I'm not sure if you are trying to be sardonic, but I wanted to know where you get the idea that some charities are actually orders of magnitude more effective. It sounds completely fabricated to enforce your point.

I didn't say that, top level commenter did. I wish their evaluations of all charities were at least as detailed as that.

1Drayin
They would needs hundreds of staff if not more to do that.

This sounds familiar. Are you aware of other similar concepts previously communicated elsewhere? I feel certain I've read something along these lines before. By all means, claim it's original though.

0lukeprog
Not sure if this is what you're thinking of, but there's a research area called "adjustable autonomy" and a few other names, which superficially sounds similar but isn't actually getting at the problem described here, which comes about due to convergent instrumental values in sufficiently advanced agents.

Rationalism is a toolset with which to approach problems, not a belief system. If you had a functioning brain, you would know that.

0ChristianKl
For people like Nassim Taleb religion is also about following a bunch of habits such as praying and going to church every sunday and not centrally about belief.

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for the 10 minutes and multitude of brain cells I lost due to this post.

Based on the phrase "change which charities I donate to" I had assumed he or she was already donating to multiple charities, presumably including action in subsaharan africa.

Also can you explain the "magnitude" thing? I'm not sure I follow your definition of "effectiveness".

0DanielLC
The money being donated to charities that are not in Sub-Saharan Africa would be better donated to charities that are. Even if that were not the case, that would just mean that the money that is donated to charities that are in Sub-Saharan Africa would be better donated to charities that are not. The money from a single donor isn't enough to change which continent you should donate to. An order of magnitude is a power of ten. Here's an example of what I mean. The Seeing Eye trains dogs to help mitigate the effects of blindness for about $50,000 each. The Fred Hollows Foundation performs cataract surgeries to cure blindness for about 25$ each. It's not generally clear how to relate how much good two different charities are, but it is pretty obvious that a cataract surgery does more good than a guide dog, and for 2,000 times less. Thus, the Fred Hollows Foundation is more than three orders of magnitude more cost-effective than The Seeing Eye. Even if The Seeing Eye was tax-free and the Fred Hollows Foundation was taxed at 99.9%, it would be worth while to donate to The Seeing Eye.

They don't publish very long write-ups, it's more like a checklist of their particular criteria.

1ChristianKl
I do think the length of the analysis of GiveDirectly is fairly long (http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/give-directly). If you think that the recommendation of GiveDirectly is a mistake based on naive assumptions it makes sense to read the article.

You might be (probably are not) right, but it is definitely something that requires research instead of just taking their word for it.

Amnesty, UNICEF, Bill and Linda Gates Foundation, as far as mainstream charities go. I believe they all have specific Canadian divisions if you are worried about tax reasons.

Some others you might check out are Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Canada Without Poverty, Equiterre, Canadian Council For International Cooperation, Tides Canada, CoDevelopment. I had a longer list but misplaced it.

I also strongly suggest you research each charity on your own instead of depending on whether or not a ranking website tells you it is good.