Book's homepage: http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/
There seems to be threeish versions about:
The original (the one your link goes to), which McAfee believes may be preferred by the mathematically sophisticated or engineers. This is the one I'm personally using, currently.
A second version, meant to improve accessibility, which McAfee expects professors considering the text to prefer
Version 2.1, which appears to be a refinement of version 2. Includes solutions to exercises, cosmetic improvements, and "small edits for consistency of notation and for c
There are theoretical reason to expect long-term harm from it.
Such as?
I wouldn't be surprised if every single principle of effective learning has, by someone, somewhere, been co-opted into a dark art.
My favorite part of this post was the inclusion of the exercise left to the reader; working through it really helped me deeply understand what you were saying. I suggest that this type of thing become more common because generation effect.
The answer is 42.
(But, seriously, I think 15 is fine. I'd even be fine reducing it to 10 (username is currently #12)).
From a technical perspective. However, many of my friends respond to fb messages and not emails. Near as I can tell, they're young enough that, when establishing a "best way to contact me," they chose "website I'm going to be on anyway."
I think, now that they're graduating college, they're going to have to get themselves a professional email, but the best way to contact them socially is going to remain fb because, for most social stuff (or at least, social stuff my friends and I get up to), we don't really need any more features than fb has, which I find disappointing, being in the minority who could really use everything you listed.
Thank you for the reply. I somewhat disagree that this detracts from the purpose of the thread—I find signalling via grammar (a) nonobvious and (b) useful, making my comment very much in place in a thread about instrumental rationality (albeit less so in a questions thread)—but I do very much appreciate the feedback.
In that case, "it's" is a contraction equivalent to "it is". For a possessive, use "its".
Examples:
Practical advice from its members.
and
It's inspired by the stupid questions.
(What's the point of paying attention to this stuff if you're communicating clearly? Briefly, signalling. If I notice you've made a grammatical error, on average, I estimate you're less well educated or not invested in making the writing worth my while than in the opposite case, and am less likely to finish reading if I get bored or have to expend m...
Are there any nootropics that have decent evidence of nonnegligible effectiveness that aren't listed in Slate Star Codex's Nootropics Survey Results. Asking so I can use replies to this comment + survey as an exhaustive list of nootropics worth considering.
Are there any 2014 videos? I can find the 2013 keynotes here, but nothing since then.
If there were videos recorded and never posted for 2014, then the 2015 prospects look not so good.
Please do.
So, Folding at Home, but with money involved? Any idea if it can justify the increased electrical bills?
I agree with the point, though my immediate intuition is that a few months might work better than a few years; in StarCraft, there's almost no lag, but that hasn't stopped people from innovating, and any meta that persists more than a few months starts feeling stale.
Maybe have 3ish-month seasons like SC2*, and competitors disclose at the end of the season.
* There's three stages of a season: qualifiers, lower league, and upper league. Anyone can compete in the qualifiers, which consist of single-elimination brackets. The lower league is composed of 24 quali...
Korean academy in Guatemala
I notice that I am confused. What, exactly, is a Korean academy doing halfway around the world? Were you teaching people-who-speak-Korean English in a Spanish-speaking country?
And thus, another school that could have implemented effective SRS (probably) won't (I'm assuming, with you there to advocate for it, near-universal adoption is inevitable, but without an advocate, nobody will undergo the trivial inconvenience of doing something new, especially when they don't fully understand the cognitive psychology behind it). I'm reminded of Teaching Linear Algebra, where someone applies cognitive psychology to teaching, is hugely successful, and promptly never teaches again because a better opportunity came along.
That said, best of luck!
Obligatory link to The Best Textbook on Every Subject.
I'm told that Mas-Colell's book is the classic on microeconomics (provided you have the mathematical prerequisites), although this recommendation is second-hand since it's still on my to-read list.
Oops. I did, in fact, mean vocal music. Fixed and thank you.
Regarding the audio environment: you're combating the irrelevant speech effect. Shuffling and instrumental music are bad; people talking and vocal music are worse. A good bet is industrial-grade earmuffs + earbuds (possibly noise-isolating) playing white noise.
Regarding turning off the internet: experiment. I find it annoying and a hindrance, but I know that it's wildly helpful for other people.
Created throwaway, couldn't comment.
(So as to not propagate throwaways testing this, account is less_than_2, and the password is 123456)
Learn to dance
Where? How? I'm interested, but lack knowledge so very thoroughly that I don't know what to Google or how to judge the results of a best-guess Google search beyond "bellydancing is not for me... probably."
I take it the requisite level of mathematical maturity is fairly low? (For instance, I'm assuming Rosen doesn't leave gaps in his proofs for the reader to fill in.)
I ask because I've sometimes had trouble with low-maturity math books with novel content, and "accessible" can mean "little mathematical maturity required" or "high-school-level prerequisites".
This discussion has already happened at great length here.
To summarize my stance: there's risks, but considering that everyone I've read on discourse.soylent.me has had positive results across the board, from body composition to semen taste. I get noticeably improved mental clarity (along with getting so lean I'd be scared I was undereating if I didn't know precisely how many calories I was eating and clearer skin), which makes me willing to accept those risks. Also, because soylent might be safe and come with a load of benefits, there's data-generating va...
Lindeberg is a nutrition researcher (conducts studies, co-authors papers) coming from a medical background, which makes him just as much an expert as a nutrition researcher coming from a biochemistry background.
Why wouldn't nutrition scientists studying nutrition come to a similar conclusion about how young, murky, and complicated nutrition is and only make very conservative, very strongly supported recommendations?
We can measure how much a field has progressed by its predictive power, and nutrition is already making concrete predictions with high conf...
Read recent academic textbooks
Any recommendations?
The selective pressure on being able to digest lactose as an adult is stronger than the selective pressure to not develop heart disease from eating too much meat, since the former kills you before you can reproduce. Lindeberg claims that humans have sufficiently recent common ancestry that, in absence of the kill-you-before-you-reach-childbearing-age selective pressures, we're able to generalize from group-to-group fairly well. Non-Inuit probably do worse than Inuit on Inuit diets, and bool is_Inuit is a useful input in a program to produce an optimal soyl...
I've been watching for several years now (I adopted the diet myself in 2010), and all of the negative critiques tend to fall into (a) critiques from non-experts, (b) critiques from experts in unrelated fields, (c) health experts who agree that his recommendations have merit, but that they're impractical for the general public to follow.
I produce for you a book written by a relevant expert with ~2.5 times as many references as The China Study (2034 vs 758) who advocates eating an ancestral diet (lean unprocessed meat/fish, fruit, nuts, vegetables/root ve...
the Inuit derive something like 98% of their calories from animal sources and are virtually untouched by Western disease, and concludes that very high consumption of (unprocessed) animals is perfectly fine
Just how genetically isolated are the Inuit?
I am thinking of things like the evolution of adult lactose tolerance, and wondering if what's good for the Inuit might be different from what's good for the rest of us. I'd expect the ability to consume large amounts of meat without ill effects would be pretty powerfully selected for, in an environment where nearly all calories come from meat.
This is a wonderful data point. It moves our model from "if you're a man, don't wear makeup" to "if you're a man, don't wear makeup unless you're going to appear on camera, in which case, wear just enough to counteract visual artifacts." I expect this to be a nontrivially better model for a significant amount of men here.
Any data on whether women prefer men with light makeup?
I'm given to understand that the print and audio versions are being held off until readers of the eBook root out the last of the errata. Where should I submit any I find?
It occurs to me that, given the philosopher's stone is around, any superweapons Harry could create and conceal with it in slightly under an hour could exist in the clearing, provided that they're enough to let Harry survive another hour, access the time turner, and create said superweapons.
Also, since prophecies are self-fulfilling and Voldemort prefers a world that won't end to a world that will and Harry has already made the appropriate unbreakable vow to do everything to prevent the end of the world, Harry could argue that expected universe where Voldemort lets Harry live is far superior to the one where Harry dies.
I'm assuming quaffles are still worth 10?
What are some sensible-sounding alternatives to eliminating the snitch entirely?
The best I can think of is have two snitches—red snitch, blue snitch. Whenever a seeker catches their snitch, the opposing team can't score any more; the game ends when the second snitch is caught.
Prediction:
Harry gets the Snitch eliminated from Quidditch. Not just in Hogwarts, but in the big leagues as well - they don't want a Germany vs. Austria on their hands.
All of the celebrity Quidditch players of the world - Victor Krum, Ludo Bagman, Finbar Quigley - are distraught by these sudden and drastic changes to a traditional game they've loved for many years. At the ceremony marking the changes, some of them tear up.
The Daily Prophet headline is "BOY WHO LIVED TEARS UP THE STARS"
Eliezer gives all of us a long lecture about how the prior for...
I believe that the people who attribute criticism #2 to feminism believe that feminists conflate "story about abuse" with "story encouraging abuse." If feminists are indeed doing this (I'm unsure whether they are), then criticism #2 ought to be attributed to feminism; the general population seems to have no problem with stories that portray unacceptable-in-reality sex (for instance, "NonConsent/Reluctance" is a major story tag on Literotica.)
Ybjrfg tenqr vf "Gebyy"
Salem Witches' Institute or a dojo in Asia seem the obvious choices, so we can probably safely eliminate them (because when was the last time EY used the obvious solution in MOR?)
Do we actually disagree about anything?
We certainly agree that the Barracuda's are crap in NAS's. I believe that WD Red's are a major improvement and Hitachi Deskstars a further improvement, which is just reading the Backblaze data (which is eminently applicable to NAS environments), so I'm we're in complete agreement that, for NAS's, Barracuda << Red < 7K2000.
However, I also contend that, in a desktop PC, a lot of what makes the Reds and 7K2000 more reliable (e.g. superior vibration resistance) will count for very little, so they'll still fail le...
My above comment was poorly written. Sorry. Hem.
Consumer-grade HDD's, used properly, all have about same, low failure rate. If you treat your desktop like a NAS or server, they will drop like flies (as evidenced). If you treat your desktop like a desktop, then a lot of the price-raising enterprise-grade features (vibration resistance, 24/7 operation) count for zilch. They're still higher-end drives, and will last longer, but assuming you give your desktop a fraction of the maintenance you give your car (like, take 5 minutes to blow it out every other year)...
Consensus is that modern HDD's from reputable manufacturers have approximately equal low failure rates, especially after the first year. You should still back up important data (low != 0), but the differences failure rates in consumer space is small enough to not really sway purchasing decisions.
Their methodology probably doesn't extrapolate well because they're testing the drives in what amounts to a NAS and the WD reds (which did well) are NAS drives, and therefore designed to operate 24/7 with vibration and nongreat cooling, whereas the Seagate Barracud...
I spend time in hardware enthusiast communities and not so impressed with Backblaze. Even here, the Seagate failure rates seem suspiciously anomalous.
Also, SSDs, which are probably a better match for most people here (my rig has run a 256 GB SSD for the past 2.5 years and I'm yet to want for more storage). Especially for laptops; they use less power (= your battery lasts longer) and can stand up to shock (so your laptop doesn't break if you drop it).
Huh. From the time I spent in the paleosphere, the arguments I saw against wheat were the six Scott listed plus "carbs are evil!" (Literally the only input to the delta-weight function is grams_carbs.) Lindeberg either ignores or dismisses these arguments. I stopped spending time in the paleosphere a while back and I'm not overwhelmingly proud of the epistemic purity of the parts I did frequent, so maybe you just got to see the paleosphere make their non-wretched arguments.
See also discussion here, in particular, soylent green (unsuitable for OP because hypoglycemia), soylent orange (yay complex carbs!) and ketosoylent (most recently Yudkowsky's Mildly Surprising Super Ketonic Dietary Replacement Fluid: Your Alternative To Healthy Eating.)
To tl;dr a tl;dr
Seeds (read: grains) have the highest concentration of "don't eat me" toxins, because of the role they play in reproduction; phytic acid, for instance, inhibits absorption of several minerals.
Humans can live off vegetables and some fish (Kitavans) or almost entirely meat (Inuit) and be pretty healthy. However, even animals optimized for eating seeds, much less humans, cannot live off grains exclusively without developing pellegra and beriberi.
Cereals have exceptionally high energy density, which may lead to overfeeding.
It'
Let's talk about drugs!
Caffeine's an adenosine antagonist. Now, let's figure out what that means.
Neurons have proteins embedded in their membranes called receptors. Chemicals (e.g. neurotransmitters) can bind to these receptors, which causes stuff to happen. For instance, adenosine is a chemical, and it can bind to receptors in your brain cells, resulting in sleepy behavior.
(Here seems to be the place to mention that this is a vastly oversimplified explanation. Those interested in a technical explanation would do well to check out the appropriate textbook,...
You might want to say something like "quick" instead of "fast" because homonyms (I first thought you were going to talk about intermittent fasting, which didn't make sense because of the hypoglycemia).
Why are you skeptical of whey protein? I've only ever heard good stuff, and I've spent enough time reading about nutrition to construct not-unreasonable arguments against almost every food. (Vegetables? Plants don't want to be eaten (except for fruit), so they contain bad-to-eat chemicals that humans almost certainly can't metabolize! Frui...
Doug McGuff (author of Body By Science) reminds me of Staffan Lindeberg (author of Food and Western Disease).
McGuff updates away from "common wisdom" of exercise, usually in a direction that makes things better.
McGuff is an opponent of large amounts of moderate-intensity cardio, arguing that it has extremely poor return-on-investment (too much time, energy, effort) and causes too much injury. His recommendation to do minimal amounts of high-intensity exercise line up nicely with Romeo Steven's recommendations and recent research.
McGuff focuse
I have this heuristic which states, if a bunch of smart people get excited about something, you should check it out. There's no obligation to also get excited about it (a lot of smart people get excited over classical literature, which does less than nothing for me, but I'm sure this is a product of my draw in the lottery of fascinations and not sloth.)
At this point, "anything that you find interesting and doesn't get downvoted into oblivion because nobody else finds it interesting" seems a reasonable criteria for "appropriate for LW". ...
Also, the testing effect. There seems to be some sort of consensus among scientists who research in the relevant area that many, low-stakes quizzes is better than few high-stakes tests, because it reduces student anxiety, encourages a more spread out practice distribution, and leverages the testing effect more. (There exists proper empirical support which I'm too lazy to dig up, but will if asked to.)
Second the rec on Sadava. I strongly preferred it to Campbell, the other standard intro bio text, which I found insufficiently precise. I'd go to make an Anki card about some concept, only to find that Campbell's discussion lacked enough precision for me to state exactly what was going on. Sadly, I haven't read another biology book (having been quite satisfied with Sadava's), so I can't make a Luke-compliant recommendation.