All of westward's Comments + Replies

My understanding is that most homeless people are 'local' to the area. That is, the majority were already residents of a city before becoming homeless and for a variety of common sense reasons would not want to leave. They know the physical and social geography of their area. They have family or other deep ties.  They know which shelters are open at which times, which areas to avoid, where to get dinner on a Thursday. Where it's relatively safe to sleep outside, etc.

Promising a person that if they move they'll be provided for means they lose whatever ... (read more)

3gilch
There's some UC San Francisco research to back up this view. California has the nation's biggest homeless population mainly due to unaffordable housing, not migration from elsewhere for a nicer climate.
5cousin_it
Yeah, I see. Thinking more about this, they'd be right to mistrust this kind of offer. It feels like the only real solution is the hard one: making sure there's enough low-income housing in cities.

The Better Business Bureau isn't actually a government authority or anything. It's Yelp before there was the internet. So report on their Yelp page, report at the BBB, sure. I've seen better traction (ie real public shaming and awareness generating) on local community sites like a Facebook group or NextDoor. 

Definitely name names.

1Sune
Trustpilot is another site you can leave a bad review. Not sure if it is popular in the US.

JumpCut for OS X

My paste hotkey for it is Shift-Cmd-V and you can hold one key after to arrow through old items.

Depending slightly on how you define success, there's not a good chance of being successful in the start up market. But it seems like you're coming up with solutions to a problem you haven't defined well.

What's your goal here? Why are you putting the effort into doing this market research? Into figuring out ways to assess viability of ideas? Is it just for fun? For the joy of exploring ideas? Or are you looking to create a job for yourself? To build a billion-dollar empire? How do you define success?

In short, why?

Slow orbit? More like 120 miles per second in reference to the galactic center.

Charlie Stross's Eschaton books have a pretty good take on time travelling, light cones, and causality.

If you want to ensure she won't regret the choice, go shopping together!

You will pay extra, as in you will pay more than the ring is worth. If you buy a diamond ring, turn around and try to sell it back, they'll give you something like 30% for it.

Also, listen to this: http://freakonomics.com/2015/04/16/diamonds-are-a-marriage-counselors-best-friend-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/

4Salemicus
This has always struck me as such a strange argument against buying a diamond ring, because it's true about every retail purchase. If you buy a chair, then turn around and try to sell it back to the store, you'd be lucky to get 30%, but no-one thinks that's an argument for sitting on the floor. You buy a chair because you want to sit on it, not as the start of a complicated chair-resale scheme. Similarly, you buy a diamond ring because you (or your beloved) want to wear it. Note: I am not blaming you in particular, because this is a popular argument, but talk about a selective demand for rigour!

Sending 25 resumes is one strategy, but there are others. I believe you should find a few companies you like, learn a lot about them, find someone who has a contact at them, and develop a relationship with that contact.

This website has a lot of elements I agree with in terms of trying to get a job: http://corcodilos.com/blog/7633/how-to-tease-a-job-interview-out-of-a-manager

I wish you the best of luck in whatever technique you try to be happier.

I think you could probably benefit from AA. At the very least you should consider quitting drinking all together.

Your posts are a little inconsistent (I don't get drunk vs I'm bored, let's get drunk! and I drink because I like the taste vs I drink crappy tasting cheap beer), but it sounds like you're pretty depressed and use alcohol to cope with that. I think you would benefit from quitting drinking entirely and I've found for myself that AA helps with that. The the only necessary requirement for AA membership is the desire to quit drinking.

A lot of the l... (read more)

3[anonymous]
A lot of people benefit from AA, the issue with the costs, such as having to admit stuff you don't like to admit, making you feel bad and powerless and so on. A ritual, a fellowship of losers rubs me entirely the bad way. Perhaps it works for people who feel like they are amazing and need their ego cut down, but I far more often feel like a worthles POS so a fellowship that rubs precisely that in does not sound attractive. I have more than enough self-esteem problems, if anything, I need the opposite, a winner's fellowship (Toastmasters or our local martial arts club). If I saw no other ways I would pay that cost, but since a 30 days stoppage worked well, I think I can try longer ones, eventually a full one, without many problems. In fact the 3 weeks rule (there is a "folk knowleddge" saying it takes 3 weeks to ingrain or delete a habit, such as it took us 3 weeks to not smoke inside our flat to get to the point where doing it would feel positively weird) worked, after 3 weeks I did not even think of it, and only the frustration of the illness brought it back. From this experience, I can easily imagine being completely abstinent as a general rule, when things are good, and turning to drink when something bad happens, say on the average 3-5 weeks a year. That would not be a particularly unhealthy way to live?

I think EY has a better chance of getting a Hugo in the Fan Writer category:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Fan_Writer

If a wizard wants the P Stone Treatment, they have to agree to two things: To sacrifice a little magic as part of the Vow of another and to take a Vow themselves.

"Let's see how you like everyone thinking you defeated the Dark Lord and you not remembering it." -Harry

I think it's quite poetic that Hermione is going to be made into a book.

That’s a beautiful way of phrasing it! :)

Plus, this makes chapter 8 even more amusing, in hindsight:

"Harry Potter! You're in Modern Magical History and The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts and Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century." It was actually the very first time in her whole life that she'd met someone from inside a book, and it was a rather odd feeling.

I feel bad for whoever voices QQ in the hpmor podcast. Chapter 108 is going to be a lot of exposition. Much of it should have been cut and/or moved to the narrator.

6Astazha
The creator, Eneasz Brodski, does the narration as well as the voices of Harry and Quirrell.

Even after re-reading the horcrux stuff a couple times, I'm still confused.

There are two types of horcuxes, v1 and v2. v1 only captures your mindstate as it was at the time of creation. v2 updates all horcruxes to the current mindstate. v1s were hidden in the canonical places (diadem, slytherian's locket, etc), v2 in the hard to reach ones (mariana trench, pioneer probe).

After 10/31/1981, Tom's mindstate bounced around the v2 horcruxes. In 1992, Quirrell found a v1 horcrux ("one of my earliest"). How does that work? How can a v1, which hasn't upd... (read more)

2LauralH
I thought it was that ALL of the horcruxes were updated to 2.0.
9fezziwig
Don't have it in front of me, but my sense was the timeline was more nuanced. First he made some Horcruxes. Then he invented the True Horcrux, and made some of those. Then he invented the True Horcrux Hiding Place, and made about a zillion of them. Quirrel found Horcrux v2 in Hiding Place v1.

Harry had a better choice: "Shoot the hostage"

Either fatally or a good wounding in the leg.

Harry'd already committed that his life was a worthy sacrifice to foil V's plans. Clearly V. felt Harry should be alive for some reason. Ergo, Harry's death would have hurt his plans. Stopped entirely? Maybe, maybe not.

A leg wound, preventing him from walking, requiring his own wand to heal or some machinations on V's part to find some non-magical interaction way to heal/move Harry would have also done nicely.

0Jost
To what end? He already has his wand back at that point, so this would merely be a slight inconvenience to V (but a great inconvenience to himself). Also, for what it’s worth, Harry still has the Healing Pack (which he bought in chapter 7) in his pouch, right? So there’s a way to heal him without any magical interaction between V and H; even if H doesn’t know the appropriate healing spells.
5Astazha
We have seen him to be afraid of this one. We've seen him express intent to stop that destiny at every point of intervention. Killing Harry is a really obvious and seemingly certain point of intervention. He certainly seems to think that Harry's death would solve the problem, and he's willing enough to have Harry kill himself, but not willing to kill Harry. Why?

200,000 years? Pfah. That's a poor measure of success.

Goblin sharks have been around for 600 times as long. I don't think we can say we're particularly successful as a species for at least a 30 million years.

With luck you and I as individuals will be around to see it, but to do so, we'll probably have deal with our biases.

Also, evolution happens across a species in an environment and within a species across a population. You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the slowest guy being chased by the bear.

You don't present a particularly compelling definition of this thing you're calling the internet. It could be equally applied to a close knit society.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

2Jan_Rzymkowski
It wasn't my intent to give a compelling definition. I meant to highlight, which features of the internet I find important and novel as a concept.

An acknowledgement that

a) Narcissism may not apply to children b) there's other ways to interpret the text than the one you presenting. c) you're not presenting text that runs contrary to your theory d) that there are other causes for a person and a parent not to respect their children than narcissism

Many human children start their lives being incredibly self-centered. One element of the process of maturation is tempering that. Harry starts off being pretty arrogant, but quickly, thanks to Quirrell, learns to lose. He genuinely cares about people, not so t... (read more)

4Algernoq
That's comprehensive. I agree, my argument is non-rigorous and hinges on a qualitative assessment of an entire story. Other people might not agree with my assessment because I'm relying on my (fallible, biased) pattern-matching capabilities to recall examples from the story; other people will tend to remember different examples more clearly. I also agree that it's not clear where the line is between "narcissist" and "not narcissist"; there appears to be a wide indeterminate area where the evidence is not clear. What you propose would answer the question much more rigorously. Evidence to get me to change my mind would include examples of the following: 1. Petunia listening to a worry/concern of Harry's and then acting to make Harry feel better 2. Harry expecting that he will probably fail at "world optimization" 3. Harry seeking out association with Ron or similarly-average students 4. Harry being told he is average at something important to him and feeling OK about that 5. Harry accepting rules he sees as unreasonable without trying to "get creative" to get around them 6. Harry being open about his goals with others, and avoiding people who he is afraid of being honest with 7. Harry helping others with no expectation of reward On re-reading this list, it looks like being less narcissistic would be bad for Harry as well as bad for most others in-Universe. I still think Harry is narcissistic and Petunia may be narcissistic, and that this skews the rate of narcissism among HPMOR readers. But, I'm not clear about what changes, if any, people should make based on this information. My standard advice of "get an advanced technical degree from a top school, then build something useful" is orthogonal to narcissism, and there's no reason-driven way to derive "should" judgments from scientific facts.

After reading through the article and your response to comments, I would wager that Harry and Petunia's narcissism is also permeable to flour.

3Algernoq
The text says Harry does not feel respected by his parents and provides numerous examples of Harry's arrogance, grandiosity, etc. What more do you want?

1) Remember that there many different techniques for learning language, and only some will work for you. For example, I haven't found 100% immersion useful. I like to ask questions in my native language about the target language. That helps me learn faster.

2) Recognize you're actually learning several skills: Speaking. Aural comprehension. Thinking in your target language. Writing. Reading. I find learning to read in the target language first to be the most helpful for my learning style.

4)This link may be helpful to start: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/b... (read more)

Yes. I'm "ASL IV" level. I'm conversationally expressive, less so receptive.

Do you have interest in collaborating on Anki decks? I'm thinking video clips with English glosses. I'd also love a ASL/English dictionary that was searchable by handshape, body location, movement, etc.

0Mati_Roy
If you're interested, I've done this document with all the best resources (IMO) that can be found about ASL. Concerning an ASL/English dictionary, I know these two: Handspeak and ASL Jinkle.

Not stories but...

Fermi estimates can be fun for kids (How many gumballs in this gumball machine is a classic) though for a three year old, it may be too advanced. How many action figures fit in this glass?

Three year olds can play "Guess the animal" which is 20 questions with some leeway on the yes/no part ("is it bigger or smaller than horse" is always our first question). Ingrain some binary search algorithms!

Depends on your definition of 'non-profit' and how that influences your thought of reasonably priced. I see that term refer to three very different entities: 1) Organizations who are basically large businesses that have a "not-for-profit" status accorded to them by the IRS (NY Presbyterian Hospital) 2) Organizations that are donor-based or membership-driven and very successful (United Way, Red Cross) 3) Organizations that are donation-based and run on a budget between "small business" and shoestring

I'm guessing you're asking about #3 an... (read more)

Don't have goals. Find something you like doing that also is exercise. Maybe it's a partnered sport like racquetball. Maybe it's juggling, walking in the woods. It can even just be something sedentary programming and you can make it exercise by doing it on a treadmill.

3Nornagest
Do have goals; don't try to meet them by willpower alone, unless they're very short-term. I'd instead think of your goals as giving you something to aim your habits at. Habits are easier to establish if you find them enjoyable in themselves, but habit alone is pretty powerful once you've taken the hit of establishing it.

Hmmm...I'm not sure this is good advice. Goals per se aren't usually great motivators. And I'd say sex is a better motivator than an abstract numerical achievement. And "Next summer" is not immediate.

After reading Scott Adams' article about goals versus systems, I decided to create a system for losing weight (I am 20 pounds heavier than I think is optimal for my health). The first part of the system is simply counting calories. No restrictions, just being aware. I plan on doing this for two weeks, then start changing my diet.

11 days ago, I started tracking my food using LoseIt and have found it extremely useful. The holidays have been intense (several days of eating 2x my daily "requirement").

The biggest thing I have found that meals of 250-6... (read more)

I know Mirabai Knight, of stenoknight. She's a great person and doing strong work in lower the cost of entry to becoming a stenographer.

0ThrustVectoring
The cost of entry is now almost entirely a time/focus/attention cost, rather than getting equipment and software and professional training. If I had or was a child, I'd recommend learning this - it's a valuable and useful skill, and the opportunity costs are lower for non-adults.

"Finally, a study that backs up everything I've always said about confirmation bias." -Kslane, Twitter

Link

It's important to recognize that not all children respond to the same incentives.

I have a parentally anti-authortarian master game theorist for a six year old whose "natural consequences" are often disastrous. It takes a lot of finesse to manipulate him. A combination of honest, fun engagement and honest, threatened punishments. That's not a necessary or desirable response to other children though.

2Gunnar_Zarncke
That sounds familiar. I have four of these but at least it is not that disastrous mostly. Threatened punishments don't really work. I can't use them. I'm not behind them and if I must it dosn't go well. My wife does sometimes and it works - but not for long. Finesse with incentives and patience work best. But these require resources that are not always avilable.

Comparing the "amount of brainpower" is silly. It's poorly defined ("focused attention on"? "time spent considering how to manipulate"?) and are we talking absolute or relative? I'm way smarter than a 4 year old. Most experiences are new to her and she has to consider them individually. I have a vast trove of heuristics at my disposal that she doesn't.

Sometimes, children don't notice their parents noticing. And that's great for kids. They're safe, but don't know they are, so feel powerful.

If the children notice this they may assume that you either condone, accept, bear or ignore it. None of these has positive effects

Why not? It depends on what your goals are.

I think it's pretty useful for kids to learn that the explicit rules aren't the true rules. And that authority does turn a blind eye sometimes.

1Gunnar_Zarncke
'None' was too strong. I agree that there are positive effects - but not if ignorance is used too much. I agree with that too. With four children authority necessarily has a blind eye often enough. The goal is to give the children a save home from where to conquer the world. A lot of possibilities to explore even with the risk of getting burned but not seriously harmed. A lot to learn but firstly things they are interested in and that are at their zone of proximal development. Some discipline and endurance. An extended family where they need to adapt to different rules and customs.
2David_Gerard
Mostly they don't notice. Parents develop eyes in the back of their arse and a hearing radius of about 100 metres. (Well, it feels like it.)

I'm not strong enough in math to figure out how the scoring actually works without spending some time with it, and I wouldn't "throw" questions anyway. But I do like seeing that, say, on my 60%s I'm actually right 70% of the time. So when I'm feeling "60%" I should actually go with 70% more often. I think I'm afraid of getting questions wrong because the score penalty appears so high relative to the score bonus (I know that's likely appropriate, even though I don't understand the actual log bits, etc of scoring ).

3Viliam_Bur
The scoring is done so that if you have 70% of your answers right, then you get the best average score by guessing 70%, not 60%. The increased penalty you get for getting 30% of those answers wrong is smaller than the increased gain for getting 70% of them right. But that's true only as long as you really get 70% of them right; so changing your answer e.g. to 80% while being only 70% correct would decrease the average score, because then the increased penalty for getting 30% of those answers wrong would be greater than the increased gain for getting the 70% right. Without understanding the log bits, you can easily verify this in a spreadsheet calculator. Make a formula saying how many points you get if you report probability R and if you really get P answers right. Playing with numbers, you will find out that for a given P, you get the highest average score for R = P.

Tutoring vs Classes

I want to learn American Sign Language. As a kid I grew up know some Deaf people and am attracted to the culture. It is also very relevant to my current job and my work will pay for me to learn (both my time and expenses).

I spent last semester taking classes at the local community college and while I learned the expected amount of ASL, I also learned I don't like going to classes. It feels like a good portion (>50%) is a waste of time. I'm conversing with other hearing students who don't know the language either; some things I already... (read more)

4Viliam_Bur
But that's a good thing, isn't it? I mean, that's what rational Harry Potter would do. Try finding a tutor that will let you make short videos of them doing the signs, and then you can put those videos into Anki. (At least I hope it is possible to put videos in Anki, never tried. Or maybe photos.) Could be more efficient than usual learning. Decide in advance how much is acceptable for you. Find out the minimum hourly wage in your area. Those are your limits. You can start by offering something in the middle of this interval.
1palladias
I paid $25/hr for an ASL tutor in Washington DC. I found it to be a lot worse than taking a community college class. My tutor was Deaf, but didn't have a lot of teaching experience. She wasn't very good at steering the convos into new vocabulary ("Tell me about what you did last week" involved a lot of repetition). And she was much better at helping me pick up vocab (which I was decent at on my own) than grammar/expression. I ended up stopping the lessons and looking for a better option.

Hey, thanks for mentioning this. I hadn't heard about it.

I've tried my hand at this app (50 questions or so), and it seems like the correct strategy, for me, is to go 50% for anything I have a little doubt on, and 99% for that I'm sure about. Maybe 5% of the questions fall into the 60%-90% range.

I'm still working to understand the tutorial and how to interpret my results.

5So8res
:-) It's not particularly hard to "perfect" your calibration in that game -- if you're over/under on a certain percentile, you can throw questions where you're confident into percentiles where you're "poorly calibrated" in order to spoof a good calibration curve. The trick to that game, if you actually want to asses your calibration, is to play for points rather than for a good curve. Being well-calibrated means that when you play for points, you have a good curve automatically. (I wish that they'd show you your curve less often, perhaps only when you leave the game. It's hard to resist cheating the curve. Then again, I'm not sure of a better way to provide the necessary feedback.)

Your education (whether it's formal by paying a college, informal by life learning) is an investment. Any investment should be evaluated by its expected return which is payoff/risk within a timeline limited by your cash on hand. A startup has a high payoff but high risk in 2- 5 years with low cash on hand. A career is medicine is medium payoff but lower risk in 10-20 years (education plus time to earn) with high cash on hand or ability to get loans. The payoff of owning a franchise business, or three, (like Subway) is high in 5 years with medium risk, but ... (read more)

How is contempt defined here? It's confusing me and I would rather say certain things are not worth my time. Is contempt when I think something isn't worth anyone's time? I'm not sure if I find anything contemptible under that definition.

I see a big difference between really disliking something on the whole and appreciating one part of that larger whole.

The Transformers movie, for example, was not worth the 2 hours and $10 I spent to see it. I did like how the DP got the light to bounce around the room, and the desert explosions were cool, but overall, i... (read more)

Does this technique require going back and reading entries?

I've kept journals in the past, but never felt comfortable actually reading what I'd written.

0Peter Wildeford
No, it does not.

I use a randomly generated password from LastPass. I have no idea what it is, so I can only access it from my laptop (with the Firefox LastPass Add-on). That combined with LeechBlock is pretty effective.

I could go to the LastPass site on another machine, I suppose. But I do store other, more important passwords on LastPass and don't want to expose those. And it takes only nominal inconvenience to prevent me from jumping into FB.

I agree with much of what you're saying. I make similar back of the envelope calculations.

One small point of clarity is that "money is worth less in the future" is not a general rule but a function of inflation which is affected strongly by national monetary policy. While it likely won't change in the USA in the near future, it COULD, so I think it's important to recognize that and be able to change behavior if necessary.

Lots of people attend an elite college because of signalling, not because it's an investment. Keep questioning the value of such an education!

0Lumifer
That is only partially true. The time value of money is a function not only of inflation, but of other things as well, notably the value of time (e.g. human lives are finite) and opportunity costs. In fact, one of the approaches to figuring out the proper discounting rate for future cash flows is to estimate your opportunity costs and use that.
2mwengler
I'm sorry I didn't explain that well enough. WHat I meant is money you are going to get in the future is not worth as much as money you are going to get now. Even if we work with inflationless dollars, this is true. It happens because the sooner you have a dollar, the more options you have as to what to do with it. So if I know I am going to get a 2013 dollar in 2023, that is worth something to me because there are things I will want to do in the future. But would I pay a dollar know to get a 2013 dollar in 2023? Definitely not, I would just keep my dollar. Would I pay 80 cents? 50 cents? I would certainly pay 25 cents, and might pay 50 cents. If I paid 50 cents, I would be estimating that the things I might do with 50 cents between 2013 and 2023 are about equal in value to me, right now, with the current value I would place on the things I might do with a $1 in 2023 or later. The implicit discount then for 10 years is 50% if I am willing to pay 50 cents now for a 2013 $1 in 2023. The discount rate, assuming exponential change in time as all interest rate calculations do, is about 7%. Note this is a discount in real terms, as it is a 2013 $1 value I will receive in 2023. In principle, if inflation had accumulated 400% by 2023, I would actually be receiving $5 2023 dollars for a 26%/year nominal return on my initial investment, even though I have only a 7%/year real return and 21%/year inflation.

What location is safe to leave the transfigured Hermione? Hogwarts is not a safe place.

1drethelin
Almost anywhere where someone won't be deliberately looking for a transfigured item or where they won't accidentally pick it up. You can't search the school in general for transfigured items, it would take too long. He could simply put transfigured corpsemione into any random book in the library or hand the item to someone to hold for him for a while or put her under someone's bed or anywhere as long as he can plausible retrieve her before his transfiguration wears off.

I read QuirrellMort as being honestly horrified by Harry's conclusions from Hermione's death. My take is that Quirrell engineered the troll to kill Hermione in order to get Harry to become an agent of death, not of life. He thinks Harry could possibly find a way to achieve his goals and wants to prevent both Harry from getting Hermione back and from inventing "universal healthcare". There is also the side benefit of driving a wedge between Harry and Albus / Minerva.

To claim it's not a good thing to eliminate the possibility of more future people is to claim there is a moral obligation to produce children.

This doesn't make sense to me. At the very least, one could claim neutrality as an alternative. And discuss quality of life, rather than quantity.

Have you considered becoming an actuary? You need math, but it's a high grossing job (up there with finance, IT, and engineering) with long term prospects.

Also, in 10 months, you could probably pick up a fair amount for programming for an IT job.

3Peter Wildeford
What would be the "next step" for pursuing an IT job if one is (1) generally "good at computers", (2) is capable of programming in PHP and JavaScript at an intermediate level, but (3) has taken only one actual class in computer science?
2Peter Wildeford
I hadn't; but I'll consider that now.
2Richard_Kennaway
The precise analysis of risk and uncertainty is also directly relevant to concerns in the LW/MIRI/GiveWell area. On the other hand, the quip is that actuaries are people who found accountancy too exciting.

Which fields are not that competitive yet would yield useful results? What are optimal fields for bright people to enter?

3ChristianKl
A good example would be the kind of work CFAR does to learn to teach people to be more rational. It's an important topic but there isn't that much competition for practical rationality training. GiveWell would be another example from this community. It's an important project for which there weren't real competitors when it got started. If you want to pick a topic for yourself, I find that spaced repetition learning is an area with a lot of potential where more work is needed. I don't think the Anki algorithms is optimal. If you are strong at math you could go and take the memosync data set and develop a better algorithm for estimating the timing of cards. When it comes to teaching people how to create good spaced repetition cards the resources that are out there are pretty limited. It's an area where you can do genuine work that helps the world without having to be an genius. From my perspective there are tons of interesting projects that could use more work but are outside of prestigious academic interest.
4Wei Dai
I suggest Singularity Strategies or Meta-Philosophy.
3CronoDAS
I don't know.
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