All of TraderJoe's Comments + Replies

This is quite far down the page, even though I posted it a few hours ago. Is that an intended effect of the upvoting/downvoting system? (it may well be - I don't understand how the algorithm assigns comment rankings)

I have been reviewing FUE hair transplants, and I would like LWers' opinion. I'm actually surprised this isn't covered, as it seems relevant to many users.

As far as I can tell, the downsides are:

• Mild scarring on the back of the head
• Doesn’t prevent continued hair loss, so if you get e.g. a bald spot filled in, then you will in a few years have a spot of hair in an oasis
• Cost
• Mild pain/hassle in the initial weeks.
• Possibility of finding a dodgy surgeon

The scarring is basically covered if you have a few two days’ hair growth there and I am fine with tha... (read more)

Why would you need any g to contribute money?

Does anyone know how to get offended? I have never experienced the emotion and am interested to know what it feels like.

Can you add a NSFW disclaimer?

You mean like acupuncture?

Gender is much more biologically determined and less socially constructed than I had previously thought. http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/evolutionary-psychology-gender-construction/

"The graveyards are full of indispensable men"

• De Gaulle.

Thanks for the advance notice: I only check LW every few days and this will, uncaring universe willing, be my first meetup.

And many people who have tried to assassinate Kennedys...

I like this post. Can you think of any pre-20th century philosophers whose works you still hold to be valid/useful today? [or from that list, any pre-21st century...]

Is there any way we could get more notification for these? I could probably have made this, but didn't see this in time.

The most appropriate metric is the one which causes the smallest number of people to have to calculate their answer into another unit of measurement. If LW is mostly American, that may well be imperial.

On the other hand, if you are only half-a-rationalist, you can easily do worse with more knowledge. I recall a lovely experiment which showed that politically opinionated students with more knowledge of the issues reacted less to incongruent evidence, because they had more ammunition with which to counter-argue only incongruent evidence.

What exactly is the problem with this? The more knowledge I have, the smaller a weighting I place on any new piece of data.

[comment deleted]

[comment deleted]

Next year the survey should include an option to explain why your IQ is actually higher than was measured.

[comment deleted]

[comment deleted]

Surely this makes it very tough for a non-trolling user to figure out what was wrong with his post? Few people are going to explain it to him. You need to be familiar with LW jargon before you can expect to write a technical comment and not be downvoted for it, so this would very easily deter a lot of new users. "These guys all downvoted my post and nobody will explain it to me. Jerks. I'll stick to rationalwiki."

I took the survey before. It. Was. Cool!

Taken it. Suggestion [if it's possible to change] - we should add the option to unanswer an answered question. Right now you can change your answer from A to B, but not from A to non-A and non-B.

Sure, but how often do you see each of the following sentences in some kind of logic discussion: 2+2=3 2+2=4 2+2=5 2+2=6 2+2=7

I have seen the first and third from time to time, the second more frequently than any other, and virtually never see 2+2 = n for n > 5. Not all statements are shown with equal frequency. My guess is that the percentage of the time when "2+2 = x" is written in contexts where the statement is for a true/false logic proposition rather than an equation x = 4 is more common than all other values put together.

[comment deleted]

1. How much you think your opinion will turn out to coincide with mine - hard to define. If your respective answers are 10, 40, 90, how much did we agree? I'll guess that the sum of the three differences between my answers and yours is around sixty percentage points [out of 300 possible].

I often add "I believe" to sentences to clarify that I am not certain.

"Did you feed the dog?" "Yes"

and

"Did you feed the dog?" "I believe so"

have different meanings to me. I parse the first as "I am highly confident that I fed the dog" and the second as "I am unable to remember for sure whether I fed the dog, but I am >50% confident I did so."

[comment deleted]

This doesn't quite answer the question. I would be very happy if my place of work were closed and I could do fun things for two weeks. My objection to working isn't that work is unpleasant; it's that there's a high opportunity cost [all the fun people I could hang out with, the great books I could read, etc]. A better question is "imagine you are asked for your employer to take part in an experiment where you instead have your brain turned off. Your body ages by eight hours, but your brain experiences it as "you step into the office, then step out".

It retains the silliness but solves the opportunity cost problem.

What might convince me that Modafinil is a bad thing would be if a lot of people actively disliked the time they spent working. I personally assume most people roughly like or are neutral towards their jobs and mainly want to work shorter hours because it gives them more time for things outside of work, but I'm almost certainly generalizing from the example of me. If Yvain had made this argument I would understand more about where he was coming from and why.

Although I'm unsure of the etiquette of posting about personal blogs on other sites, I was also disappointed with the blog post in question. It was the first time that Yvain wrote something I disagreed with after reading his post in full and digesting in. I've often disagreed with him before reading it, but he usually persuades me.

This post seemed to rely on the principle that having more spare time is a positional good, with which I disagree strongly. Essentially, giving everyone another four hours of awake, productive time, is the same as extending your... (read more)