Please, please, please, I beg you:
Learn to touch-type. Learn to type with ten fingers.
Computer programs and websites to do this abound. If you find one that's horrible to use, find another. But persist until you do.
I am appalled at how many people I know who use computers typing for hours a day, and never learned how to drive a keyboard. They insist they're just as fast as they would be touch-typing (they're not), and then complain of sore fingers from doing weird stuff to adapt to their inability to type properly.
Anyone reading this site uses computers enough they should know how to type. I would estimate (based on my geeky friends I've seen at a keyboard) less than 20% of you can touch-type properly.
Set up your desk, chair etc per the handy how-to-avoid-RSI diagrams that one can hardly get away from in any setting. Then LEARN HOW TO TYPE. And don't make an excuse for why you're a special snowflake who doesn't need to.
By the way, when I discovered IRC big time (1996), it took my speed from 60wpm to 90wpm. Complete sentences, they're your friend.
My daughter is three and a half. She is already more skilled with the computers at nursery than the staff are. (Can get from the CBeebies games to watching Octonauts on the iPlayer in the blink of an eye!) I'm going to make sure she learns to type properly as soon as possible after she learns to read, dexterity allowing.
I've always been amused by the "magic feather" nature of my typing.
I don't touch type. I ask my brain about this, and it reports without hesitation that I don't touch type. Honest. Never have.
That said, I am perfectly capable of typing at a respectable clip without looking at the keyboard, with my fingers hovering more-or-less above the home row. I get screwy when I go after unusual punctuation keys or numbers, but when it comes to letters and commas and so forth, it works fine.
For several years, this only worked when I didn't notice it was working... that is, when I became sufficiently absorbed in what I was doing that I just typed. This became clear to me when a coworker commented "Oh, hey, I didn't know you could touch-type" and suddenly I couldn't.
It has become less fragile since then... I am typing this right now without looking at the keyboard, for example.
But my brain remains fairly certain that I don't touchtype.
(shrug)
Upvoting this did not seem adequate.
I would also like to tentatively suggest an optimized keyboard layout such as Dvorak or Colemak, since the inconvenience is minimal if you're starting from scratch, and there seems to be anecdotal evidence that they improve comfort and lessen RSIs in the long run, but if fretting about what layout to use causes you to procrastinate for even one day on learning to type already then you should forget I said anything.
Getting people to learn to type will be, however :-D
HOW THE HELL DO 80% OF THE COMPUTER-MAINLINING GEEKS I KNOW NOT KNOW HOW TO TYPE. HOW DO THEY NOT KNOW HOW TO USE THEIR PRIMARY MODE OF HUMAN INTERACTION. Figuring that out will be a study in human cognitive biases, for sure.
Yeah, there's a reason i didn't mention Dvorak or whatever ;-) So as not to put another "thing to do first" in the way. I know in person nobody at all who actually uses Dvorak. I can't think of any Dvorak users amongst online friends I haven't seen typing. (Perhaps there are some and they've just never said anything.)
I use Dvorak. It's no faster and no more accurate, but it does tire out your fingers a whole lot less, and just typing one sentence in Dvorak will enable you to see why. I switched to Dvorak after a bout of RSI, and the RSI never came back.
Colemak user here. It didn't magically improve my typing speed as I hoped, top speed is 70 wpm and used to be the same with qwerty. I'm pretty sure it's more ergonomic to type with than qwerty, and I do have some wrist problems, so I'm going to stick with it.
I don't think non-mainstream layouts are something people should feel obliged to adopt unless they are having wrist problems. Beyond the ergonomics, it's mostly a weird thing to learn for fun.
Didn't like Dvorak because it makes you type 'ls' with your right pinky, and I type 'ls' a lot on unixlike command line shells.
They insist they're just as fast as they would be touch-typing (they're not)
I would estimate (based on my geeky friends I've seen at a keyboard) less than 20% of you can touch-type properly
This seems like dogmatic adherence to tradition. Is there actually evidence that the traditional method of touch typing, where each finger is assigned a keyboard column and returns to the "Home Row" after striking a key, is at all faster, more efficient, or ergonomically sound than just typing intuitively?
I ask because I type intuitively with ten fingers. I know where all the keys are, and I don't see the need to return each finger to the home row after every single keystroke, which seems inefficient. If I type a common sequence like "er" or "th," I do it with a single flick of the hand, not four separate ones.
Also, I cover a much larger portion of the keyboard with my right hand than my left, because it's stronger and more natural for me than assigning each finger the exact same amount of keyboard real estate.
I don't know if anyone can help me with this, but how do I tell the difference between flirting and friendliness? I grew up in pretty much total social isolation from peers, so neither really ever happened, and when they happen now I can't tell which is which. Also, how do you go from talking to someone at the beginning/end of class (or other activity) to actually being the kind of friends who see each other elsewhere and do activities together?
Edit: Thank you, this is good advice. Does anyone have any advice on how to tell with women? I'm bi, and more interested in women, and they are much harder to read than men on the subject, because women's behavior with female friends is often fairly flirty to begin with.
It's not always this clear-cut, but if a guy touches you at all while he's talking (brushes your hand, etc.), makes an unusual amount of eye contact, or makes a point of being alone with you, it's flirting. If he's talking or joking about sex, it's more likely to be flirting.
How do you become the kind of friends who see each other outside of class? That used to confuse me SO MUCH. The easiest way to transition from "person I've spoken to" to "actual friend" is to say "You want to get lunch together sometime?" It's also possible to ask "are you going to event X?" (I used to find this step nervewracking. But remember, most people are not offended by offers of companionship. Most people want to make new friends.)
Also, notice how people hang around after an event. Most people don't leave right away, briskly. They sort of mosey and talk. If you're like me, your instinct will be to think, "Well, I'm done with that, time to go do something else." But more social people spend a colossal amount of time just hanging around, and they exchange more closeness that way. You can't make friends with people who only see you in brief bursts.
There often is not any difference at all between flirting and friendliness. People vary very much in their ways. And yet we are supposed to easily tell the difference, with threat of imprisonment for failing.
The main effects I have seen and experienced, is that flirting typically involve more eye contact, and that a lot of people flirt while denying they do it, and refusing to to tell what they would do if they really flirted, and disparaging others for not knowing the difference.
My experience is also that ordinary people are much more direct and clear in the difference between flirting and friendship, while academic people muddle it.
yet we are supposed to easily tell the difference, with threat of imprisonment for failing.
It can be hard to tell the difference, and it can be easy to mess up when trying to flirt back, but it takes rather more than than simply not telling the difference between flirtation and friendliness for imprisonment. There has to be actual unwelcome steps taken that cross significant lines.
The way the mating dance typically goes is as a series of small escalations. One of the purposes this serves is to let parties make advances without as much risk of everyone seeing them turned down, and lose face. It also lets people make stronger evaluations and back out in the middle gracefully.
Flirtatious talk is not an open invitation for a grabby hands. It is an invitation for further flirtatious talk. It may be an invitation for an invasion of personal space and increasing proximity. This in turn can be invitation for casual, brief, touches on non-sexual body areas. The point of no return, where it's hard to gracefully back out and pretend nothing was happening, is usually the kiss. That's usually done as a slow invasion of space, by the initiator, who must watch for the other to either...
That's usually done as a slow invasion of space, by the initiator, who must watch for the other to either lean in and take position, or lean and turn away.
If you're reasonably confident in the other person's interest, simply announcing "I'm going to kiss you now," followed by a brief pause, works quite nicely, signals confidence, builds anticipation, and still gives them the opportunity to back out.
And really, you can talk and ask for clarification from people you're flirting with. Heck, asking "are you flirting with me" is itself a reasonable flirt-and-escalate move. Being explicit can kill the mood for some people, but if you're not actually sure where in this dance you are or which direction it's headed, it's generally safer than risking unwanted boundary crossing.
If you need verbal feedback, you're probably better off finding out fairly early whether the person you're flirting with is comfortable with questions or not.
and that a lot of people flirt while denying they do it
Or without even realising. Several years ago an acquaintance on whom I was developing a crush told me she was aware of this; this puzzled me since I thought I hadn't yet initiated anything like flirting, so I asked how she knew. Then she took my hand and replicated the way in which, a few days before, I had passed her some small object (probably a pen). I didn't realise I was doing it at the time, but in that casual gesture I was prolonging the physical contact a lot more than necessary, and once put on the receiving side it was bloody obvious what was going on.
http://www.wrongplanet.net/ is a community page for asperger/autism people that contains social descriptions on a level that might be helpful. I do not read too much of it, but maybe it is useful.
Well, that's the whole idea of flirting - that you can't really tell the difference. If it's clear and upfront, then it's not called flirting anymore, but rather an advance (friendly or more explicit).
You have a lot of uncertainty arising from a simple gesture/look/invitation, and (I believe) this is where all the fun really comes from: dealing with a lot of different scenarios that have very similar initial contexts but have a wide range of possible outcomes, and choosing the outcome you want with so little effort.
I also believe that your ability to tell the difference between one person's flirting and friendliness is strongly influenced by how well you know that person.
how do I tell the difference between flirting and friendliness?
Flirting is tinged with sexuality, either explicit or subtle. Maybe a touch on your arm, a wink, or innuendo. A lot of it is context-dependent, as well: for instance, the exact same words and behavior can be flirting when a guy says it to a girl, but not when a guy says it to a guy (the social default is that everyone is straight; this is different in a gay bar, for instance).
Also, how do you go from talking to someone at the beginning/end of class (or other activity) to actually being the kind of friends who see each other elsewhere and do activities together?
You have to actually be active and ask the person for their phone number, invite them to get coffee, go bowling, whatever. It doesn't always work out -- you may not meet up with 90% of them -- but the other 10% will become your friends.
An incidental note: lack of these sorts of skills can also create ugh fields around the subjects or surrounding subjects.
After having about 50 different housemates, I'm shocked by how few people have basic home-maintenance knowledge. Things like:
- Change the oil in your car every 4000 miles.
- Don't mix colored and white laundry and then set the temperature to "hot".
- Remove the lint from the dryer screen before each load.
- Don't put wool clothes in the dryer and set it on "hot".
- Change the air filter in your central heating every few months.
- Wash the stovetop after cooking with grease.
- Use dishwashing detergent in the dishwasher.
- Don't put knives or pots with metal/plastic or metal/wood interfaces in the dishwasher.
- Don't put tupperware in the dishwasher lower rack.
- Don't fill the dishwasher lower rack with pots so that no water reaches the upper rack.
- Open the fireplace vent before starting a fire.
- Wash the bathtub sometimes.
- Knives must eventually be sharpened.
- Turning the thermostat up extra-high does not make it get warm faster.
Don't put knives or pots with metal/plastic or metal/wood interfaces in the dishwasher.
Don't put tupperware in the dishwasher lower rack.
The others were obvious to me, but I don't understand these two. I've been disobeying them for a long time without any problems.
Tupperware runs the risk of melting close to the heating element. Metal and plastic/wood expand at different rates in dampness and warmth, so the interface can weaken if they're washed in the high heat of the dishwasher. That said, you can usually get away with both of these things.
Most tupperware should be "dishwasher safe", meaning it's been tested to high temperatures and won't melt even in the lower rack of the dishwasher.
I think there is vocabulary confusion happening here.
Real Tupperware -- the expensive stuff -- is nigh-indestructable. Some of it is made out of polycarbonate, the same material used for windshields in fighter jets and in presidential limos. At the thickness used in the Tupperware line, it is not quite bulletproof, but it is still very, very tough. You don't have to worry about it in the dishwasher.
Lower-end Rubbermaid plastic containers are much cheaper and not made out of the same material. (Rubbermaid does have a "premier" line that is supposedly comparable to true Tupperware.) These bins should not be placed in the lower rack of the dishwasher.
No.
Those are not called "knives", those are called "saws".
We (family) got some knives at marriage, and just sort of puttered along. Then I bought her some "good" knives, which arrived fairly sharp.
Oh. My. Sourdough bread in SLICES instead of ragged hunks.
Then we used them for a couple years, and I realized that since these were low-end "chef quality" knives (I'm not a chef. I don't much care about cooking, and I don't talk shop with real chefs, so that may not be an accurate statement, but the reviews I read indicated that these were as good as MUCH more expensive knives except in maybe the quality of the handle), that maybe we should get them sharpened, so I found a place in STL that had a knife sharpening service for local restaurants and went there.
They refused to even consider sharpening our steak knives. The guy called them "cheap junk". So we bought some of of the same brand as our other knives (basically the cheapest he had in stock). (Victorinox "Fibrox")
Oh. My. Steak is SO much easier to deal with now. Bread (on the rare occasions we have it ) cuts cleanly. Tomatoes and oranges can can be sliced as thin as you want. Limes for your gin/vodka? Clean cuts.
Knives are tools. Tools need maintenance or replacement.
They think that the furnace burns at a different temperature depending on how high the thermostat is.
Couldn't it just be an erroneous application of (an intuited version of) Newton's law of cooling, which says that heat transfer is linearly proportional to heat difference? They assume that the thermostat temperature is setting the temperature of the heating element, and then apply their intuited Newton's Law.
Seems pretty rational to me.
This is actually implementation dependent. Though the most common implementation of a thermostat is just an on-off switch for the heater, it is possible to have a heater with multiple settings and a thermostat that selects higher heat settings for greater temperature differentials.
Also, turning the thermostat up extra-high means that you don't have to go back and make the temperature higher if your initial selection wasn't warm enough.
Even with an ordinary thermostat, cranking it up can be effective in some realistic situations. If some corners of the house take longer to heat up than the location of the thermostat, they'll reach the desired temperature faster if you let the thermostat itself and the rest of the house get a few degrees warmer first. Or to put it differently, scoffing at people who crank up the thermostat is justified only under the assumption that it measures the temperature of the whole house accurately, which is a pretty shaky assumption when you think about it.
As the moral of the story, even when your physics is guaranteed to be more accurate than folk physics, that's still not a reason to scoff at the conclusions of folk physics. The latter, bad as it is, has after all evolved for robust grappling with real-world problems, whereas any scientific model's connection with reality is delicately brittle.
That's an important lesson, generalizable to much more than just physics.
Since about 50 years ago all but the lowest-end thermostats are designed to be "anticipators" — they shut off the heat before the requested temperature is reached, then gradually approach it with a lower duty cycle. More often than not, the installer doesn't bother to fine-tune this, in which case it can take a long time to reach equilibrium. Turning it a few degrees warmer than you actually want isn't a completely stupid idea.
(reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermostat)
Do you actually think a typical person has a coherent theory of how a heating system with a thermostat works?
It's a very human and intuitive way of thinking. People bundle together various things that seem like they should somehow be related, and assume that if something has a good or bad influence on one of these things, it must also influence other related things in the same direction. When you think about it, it's not a bad heuristic for dealing with a world too complex to understand with full accuracy.
I have had exactly one load of laundry go wrong ever due to colors running. (Purple.) I pretty much blatantly ignore washing directions, except for formalwear and business suits. If something cannot survive being thrown in with the regular wash, it's too much trouble to keep. (It helps that I thrift the vast majority of my wardrobe, so I'm rarely out more than $5 or so if something is ruined.)
I wish I knew how to politely and nicely end conversations, either with friends, strangers, whatever.
I know this one!
Shake their hand!
There is also the somewhat related problem of how to transition from pleasantries and chit-chat to the real point of the conversation when someone calls you on the phone. Sometimes people can stay in this mode for several minutes, and it's hard to convey the message "So, why are you calling me?" in language that is socially acceptable. My solution--which I believe I borrowed from Randy Pausch--is to say, in a friendly tone of voice, "What can I do for you?"
Thank them for their time, sincerely, making sure the beginning of the statement acknowledges the value of the current thread of thought ("that's absolutely fascinating...and thank you for sharing that with me") and make sure your tone of voice descends at the end of the sentence; if they respond with confusion at this abrupt ending (it may appear so to them) let them know why you must go now or soon.
If your reason is impolite ("you're a boring jackass") you may wish to omit what you specifically think of them (the reasons why you think they are a jackass may have less to do with them and more to do with you and how you see the world subjectively, it's something that needs to be checked out at some point) and simply indicate that you are in disagreement with them and that you lack the time and energy to properly present your position and that you may or may not get back to them later.
Works 5/6 of the time.
Yes. You can look at your watch, phone, or appointment book. You can adjust your posture and body language to turn slightly away, step back, and shift your weight to the foot farther away from the person, as if you were getting ready to walk away.
You can make comments that summarize the conversation or comment on it more generally: this kind of abstraction is a natural signal that the conversation is winding down. "This is a really good conversation," "It's really good to talk to you," "You've given me a lot to think about," and so forth.
You can also mention other things you have going on, such as "I'm working on homework for X class," "I've got a test coming up," "I've been doing a lot of work getting my house ready to sell," which gives the other person a natural close: "Well, I'll let you get back to your work. Good luck with X."
I don't know how polite or nice it is, but what I generally do is wait for it to be my turn in the conversation, visibly react to a timepiece of some sort, and claim an appointment or pressing task that requires my attention. "Oh, geez, is it that late already? I'm sorry, but I really do have to (get going, do X, finish what I'm doing)."
I've known some people who are oblivious to this and essentially reply "Sure, that's fine. Say, let's talk about this other thing!" I find them troublesome. The best solution I know is firmness -- "No, I'm sorry, but I really do have to work on something else now."
In one particularly extreme case, I actually had to say "I need you to go away now," but by that point I'd given up on polite.
Thanks. This reminds me of something I've found which works well in the short run. I admit I haven't checked for long term consequences.
It makes me crazy when people repeat themselves in short succession. If you listen, it's possible to discover that Waiting for Godot is more realistic than a lot of more interesting theater.
Hypothesis: People repeat themselves if they aren't sure they're being heard, or, oddly (and I've done this myself) if they're unsure of how what they're saying will be received.
Solution: Smile at the person and repeat back what they said. Your body language is "I was so interested I remembered what you were saying" not "I heard it already and I'm bored".
Observation: People stop repeating that particular thing. Yay!
However, they tend to seem a bit taken aback, though not hostile. I don't know to what extent they feel comforted and heard and possibly surprised because they weren't expecting that, and to what extent they've been embarrassed that their amount of repetition has been noted.
I'm mystified as to how to shave smoothly without cutting myself and without razor burn. I've never been able to accomplish all three of these in one shave. (This is facial shaving I'm speaking of, as I am male). Not shaving is not an option, as I quickly develop a distinctly unfashionable neck-beard whenever I neglect shaving.
Update, one year later: I can report that shaving during a warm shower with no shaving cream has increased the smoothness of my shaves, has drastically reduced shaving cuts and has eliminated razor burn almost entirely. Thanks, Less Wrong!
I had the same problem, but it went away immediately after one simple change: stop using shaving cream. Instead, just apply warm water before you shave (it helps to do it after a shower). Before I made the change, my face was always irritable the day of a shave, and exercising would make it flare up; now, nothing. (Having a good multi-blade razor still matters though.)
I was pointed to this idea by some article by Jeffrey Tucker on lewrockwell.com sometime in '06.
How to Buy Stocks
First Option:
- Acquire at least $3,000 in a checking account, and grab your account number and routing number. (It's written on the bottom of your checks.)
- Go to Vanguard.com and open an account.
- Buy into VTSMX, the total market index fund, or VFINX, the S&P 500 index fund. If you have trouble picking, flip a coin; they're very similar funds.
Second Option:
- Go to Sharebuilder.com and open an account. They shouldn't require a significant starting balance, but might.
- Sign up for automatic investing to take advantage of dollar cost averaging.
- Buy VFINX or VTSMX.
Third option:
- List out what you know about a company.
- List out what the market knows about that company.
- If your knowledge is better than the market's, then proceed. Otherwise (including if you don't know how much the market knows), go to option 1.
- Go to your bank and read about their brokerage accounts. If the fees aren't excessive (check Sharebuilder and other banks and stuff like etrade), open a brokerage account, or go to option 2 and open a Sharebuilder account.
- Transfer money to your brokerage account.
- Plan out your trades: under what conditions will you buy a stock? (not "the price now is o
2 deficits of my own come to mind. I didn't learn the alphabet until middle school or so; I covered up my ignorance by knowing pairs of letters and simply looking it up whenever I needed to sort something. (In middle school I realized how silly this was and studied diligently until I could finally remember the alphabet song. For years after that, whenever I needed to know something, I would mentally sing through the alphabet song until I had my answer.)
Until 2 years ago or so, I didn't know the 12 months of the calendar. I got around this by generating a bunch of month flashcards for Mnemosyne. (The cards should be obvious, but if anyone really doesn't know how that would work, I can post them.) I'm still a little shaky but I more or less know them now.
These 2 methods may not be generally applicable.
I had a Hebrew teacher who assigned the following exercise on the first day of class: Memorize the alphabet backwards. Once the pupils knew the alphabet backwards and forwards, we were able to look things up quickly in the dictionary.
I became much more familiar with the Latin alphabet after I performed the following exercise: Type out every two-letter string, in alphabetical order. This was laborious because I didn't know where the keys were on the keyboard; perhaps that contributed to its effectiveness.
I did this a few years back while bored at school, and it has actually been surprisingly useful.
I find the easiest and quickest way is to try to write the number in a way that makes it look like the letter; eg for H imagine drawing two lines above and below to make it look like an LCD 8. Using this I thoroughly memorized the letters' numbers in about 15 minutes. You'd need to periodically rememorize to keep the numbers fresh, though.
How does a heterosexual male begin a long-term romantic relationship with a heterosexual female? Be sure to cover such issues as pre-requisites and how to indicate what intentions and when.
[For balance, others can post the dual (which is not necessarily the same) question for the other categories of people.]
You have to put yourself in environments where you'll be able to interact with a lot of women. College is in a lot of ways set up perfectly for this: if you're not in college right now, consider joining a class or an activity group. Try to make it one where the gender balance will be in your favor. Book groups are one example--they're wildly tilted towards women (I suspect men just, you know, read books, and don't tend to see the value in sitting around sipping coffee and talking about reading books). But if you like girls who wear glasses, try finding a congenial book group. You'll probably be the only man.
Even better than book groups, though, are dance classes. Swing and rockabilly aren't super trendy anymore, but the scenes still exist in a quieter way, and these classes are great for single men: a) they're filled mostly with women; b) dance is an inherently flirtatious activity, and the physical leading/following dynamic is one that many women find very sexy; c) even if you don't find a date in that class, you'll have learned an attractive skill, and you'll be able to participate in events that will introduce you to more women; and d) physical exercise is good for building b
Lots of good advice here.
One change I'd make is that, imo, a movie makes a poor first date. Do something fun and active where talking is possible, instead.
This is excellent advice, and I up-voted it. However:
If she seems annoyed or condescending or whatever, try to shrug it off; just smile and say "okay, no problem" or something along those lines. Do the same thing if she says "I'd rather just be friends." (But for the love of Pete, do not spend a lot of effort trying to actually cultivate a friendship. Moooooove on.)
I may just be reading too much into things, and I acknowledge that this comment is written primarily as a response to the question "how to get into a relationship". Nevertheless, this bit bothers me a bit, as the "for the love of, don't try to actually cultivate a friendship" part seems to imply that there's no point in being friends with women if you're not going to have a relationship with them. That strikes me as a bit offensive.
Even if we're assuming that you're purpose is solely to get women, I don't think befriending lots of them is as useless as you seem to suggest. You say yourself that one's friends may introduce one to somebody one might be interested in. People tend to have more same-sex friends than opposite-sex friends, so being friends with lots of women will incr...
Befriending women is sometimes useful for becoming attractive to other women. (Allow me to skip the obligatory part where friendship is good in itself, of course it is, but I want to make a different point.) For example, you can ask them to help you shop for clothes, relying on their superior visual taste. Most of my "nice" clothes that I use for clubbing etc. were purchased this way, and girls seem to love this activity. Also they can bring you to events where you can meet other women; help you get into clubs; offer emotional support when you need it; and so on. If you make it very clear that you're not pursuing this specific girl sexually, being friends with her can make quite a substantial instrumental benefit.
That said, of course I don't mean the kind of "friendship" that girls offer when they reject you. That's just a peculiar noise they make with their mouths in such situations, it doesn't mean anything.
Sorry, that line wasn't clear. If you'd truly like to be friends with a particular woman, then by all means, be her friend! What I'm specifically counseling inexperienced men to avoid is the pitfall where they befriend a woman when they really want to be her boyfriend, and then spend a lot of time pining after her fruitlessly.
And I did mean it when I said, "It is true that established friendships can make a wonderful basis for romance..." My husband was my friend first, so I'm not knocking these kinds of relationships at all. However, it'll either happen or it won't; if there are strategies for making it happen, I don't know them; and I don't think hoping it will happen is a good strategy at all for men specifically looking for a relationship. My impression is that ending up in "the friend zone" with a woman you want to date is a fairly common failure mode for inexperienced men, so I advise SilasBarta to take some care to avoid it. I may have stressed that part too heavily.
There's a big difference between "If I approach someone for a date, and s/he rebuffs me, it's best not to spend a lot of effort cultivating a friendship with that person" and "It's never worth cultivating friendships."
Yes, making friends is worth doing. Agreed. And if it so happens that the person I'm making friends with is someone I'd previously wanted to date, great! I have numerous friends in this category, and some of them are very good friends indeed.
But even with that in mind, I mostly agree with siduri.
Mostly that's because I know very few people who can make that decision reliably immediately after being turned down. Taking a while to decide whether I'm genuinely interested in a friendship with this person seems called for.
I also meant the "spend a lot of effort" part to act as a qualifier, since for me true friendships tend to develop spontaneously and easily, in contrast to a situation where I'm actively courting the other person and they're kind of pulling back. In my own life, I've learned it's better to just let those second kinds of friendships die in the bud.
However, I recognize on reflection that for more introverted people, developing any friendship probably takes significant effort--so advice along the general lines of "if you have to push it, it's probably not meant to be" is actually probably bad advice for a lot of people. Instead, I think the question should be "would you be satisfied with friendship alone, if nothing further ever developed? Would the friendship be a source of happiness to you, or a source of frustration and pain?"
I just don't think guys should spend the time and energy being friends with women if friendship isn't truly what they're after. In a case like that it's much better for them to focus their attention on other women, who might reciprocate.
b) a lot of women have trouble saying "no" directly (we're socialized not to).
I cannot possibly stress enough how non-obvious this is to "geeky" males.
You have to ask women out on dates.
This is not strictly true from my experience. I've had three girlfriends thus far and in all three cases, we were basically just friends who eventually realized we wanted to date one another. Of course, all three were also housemates, so I may be an odd case.
I've tried the "ask women out on dates" approach from time to time, but keep coming back to the impression that I'm the sort of person who just slides into romantic relationships with friends, and that if I want more romantic relationships, I need to make my social circle -- not my circle of acquaintances, but my circle of folks I see on a daily basis -- more generally co-ed (kind of a problem since it's mostly folks I know from Singinst/Less Wrong these days).
Or become bisexual. If anyone posted a procedural comment on how to become bisexual, I would upvote it immediately =)
The way to become bisexual is to regularly extend your exposure to erotic stimuli just a little further than your comfort zone extends in that direction. I'll use drawn pictorial porn as an example erotic stimulus, but adapt to whatever you prefer: start with Bridget. Everyone is gay for Bridget. Once you're comfortable with Bridget, move on to futanari-on-female erotica, male-on-futanari, then futanari-on-male, paying attention to your comfort levels. You'll run across some bizarre things while searching for this stuff; if any of it interests you, just go with it.
By now, you should be fairly comfortable with the plumbing involved, so it's just the somatically male body you need to learn to find attractive. Find art featuring bishounen types, then pairing them with other male body types, and pay attention to what feels most comfortable.
It may take a while to go through this process, but I believe it's entirely achievable for most people who don't view heterosexuality as a terminal value.
The Bisexual Conspiracy commends your insidious efforts at propagating memes advantageous to us and has sent you several HBBs of assorted gender orientations by overnight delivery.
Two related thoughts come to mind.
One is that male anatomy is more familiar, and therefore presumably less intimidating, to straight men than female anatomy is to gay men.
Another is that in a heteronormative culture, men who aren't strictly monosexual are more likely to identify as straight than as gay. If what this technique actually does is make men who aren't monosexual more aware of their non-monosexuality, then I'd expect it to get more noticeable results on men who identify as straight. (I'd also expect there to be a wide range of effectiveness among straight-identified men.)
Despite subcultural normativity being strongly biased against bisexuality, really quite a lot of gay-identifying men have experimented with heterosexual behaviour, but are - ha! - closeted about it.
Instead of a strict straight/bi/gay split, I prefer to think of it as a spectrum where 0 is completely straight, 5 is completely bisexual and 10 is completely gay.
Hah! You're trying to squish two axes into one axis. Why not just have an "attraction to males" axis and an "attraction to females" axis? After all, it is possible for both to be zero or negative.
a straight cisgender male is most likely primarily attracted to persons with vulvas, whether they identify as men or women. He might secondarily prefer women, but that's a lesser "hurdle". [..] I don't think the attraction is "exclusive to men" as much as it is "exclusive to people with specific genitals."
Huh.
So George, a straight cisgender male, walks into a dance club and sees Janey dancing. He can tell she presents as female from the way she dresses, her hair, her body shape, etc. He talks to her for a while, and he can tell she identifies as female -- or at least claims to -- from the things she says.
But her pants are still on.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying George does not know at this point whether he's sexually attracted to Janey, because the "primary hurdle" hasn't been crossed yet?
If so, you and I have very different understandings of how sexual attraction works. It seems relatively clear to me that George makes that determination within the first few minutes of seeing her, based on a variety of properties, many of which are components of gender.
If not, then I'm not really sure what you're saying.
He can only be blackmailed with such photos if he would mind having them displayed to some third party.
I'm already quite publicly a polyamorous sex-positive atheist, I'm not running for political office any time soon
I think the reason for that is that so many gay men go through a phase, as part of their coming out, where they claim bisexuality for a while. This, combined with the fact that there seem to be relatively few numbers of truly bisexual men, means that a significant percentage of the pool of men presenting as bisexual are actually gay. So going out with a bisexual guy is really risky from the woman's point of view.
Is it purely a numbers game though? Most people have this thing nerdy academics call a 'mate value sociometer' and they use it to help decide how hot a female to pursue. Of course, this sociometer has to be calibrated, so you really want to be rejected often enough to know where you stand. My point is, it might be better to keep this sociometer in mind (especially since non-neurotypicals tend not to have this instinct), to at first target your proposals to be as informative as possible, and then later on target those girls your mate value can buy. (this is in fact what studies have found neurotypicals to be doing)
I'm not interested in a relationship in which I can't interact honestly with the woman, because I wouldn't find it to be fulfilling. I'd rather be single than have to tiptoe around my romantic partner's irrational beliefs. Changing that implies either ceasing to care about rationality, or dramatically lowering my expectations for a relationship. Neither of those sounds particularly appealing.
If anyone figured out the asexual variant of this, I'd love to know, too.
Alas, asexuality among humans is notorious for making it difficult to form long-term romantic relationships.
(Gender shouldn't matter that much.)
When it comes to following protocol it is matters more what it is than what it should be. The various permutations of gender and romantic preference do matter that much. (And looking at things as they are instead of how they 'should be' is probably step one.)
Not to be annoying (as I often have questions like this as well), but I've found that Google is remarkably helpful in answering those questions. In fact, I tried two of the example questions and the answers seemed very reasonable to me:
http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+deposit+a+check
http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+buy+stocks
I also use Google's suggestions (ie, by typing into Google Instant or Firefox search bar) to help phrase my question in the most common way, or to provide alternative related questions that might be more what I mean. For example, when typing "how to buy stocks" it suggested:
"how to buy stocks with out a broker"
"how to buy stocks online"
"how to buy stocks for beginners"
There are a number of web sites that present such implicit and procedural knowledge. such as: http://www.ehow.com/ http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page http://www.howcast.com/ http://www.howtodothings.com/
I might be useful to somehow select the most generally useful ones of these in one place.
I haven't come across any of them except eHow. eHow is awful. Useless. Bad. I have ended up there unwittingly from google searches a half dozen times or so. Not once has it answered what I wanted to know. The information on their site is optimised to be written as quickly as possible while getting the best google rank possible, with no thought as to quality of information.
I recently found myself thinking about this same topic. I have figured some of these out by trial and error, but feel that some formal training would have been useful (others I have not encountered):
How should you interact with a police officer - what are your obligations, your rights, and how should you conduct yourself?
If you want to move from one residence to another, what steps should you take? If you are credentialed in one state and want to move to another, what do you do?
If you get into a minor car accident, what should you do? What about a major one?
What's the best way to quit your job?
How do you vote in an election? A primary? What should you do if you want to run for office?
If you find that someone has died of non-suspicious and natural causes, what steps should you take? Whom should you call?
How should you interact with a police officer - what are your obligations, your rights, and how should you conduct yourself?
I'm a law student. I'll take this one. This applies to the US specifically, though being polite and deferent are probably universal.
In short: TL;DR answer: Be polite, calm, and friendly. If you are guilty of a crime, admit nothing, do not give permission to search anything that would be incriminating, say that you don't want to talk to the officer (unless answering extremely general questions), and, if you are detained, ask to speak with a lawyer. Be more compliant if you are innocent, but if you get the slightest hint that they think you're responsible, stop complying and ask for a lawyer if detained. For more mundane interaction (i.e. speeding tickets) be polite and deferent, and don't confess to anything unless they totally have you nailed. Arguing with cops will very rarely advance your case; save that for court if you care enough to challenge the ticket. More detail follows.
In minor cases (e.g. speeding tickets), you generally want to be polite, deferential, and honest, but probably don't volunteer too much information, except insofar as it's obvious....
Especially if you are guilty, you should ask if you are free to go, and if you are not, ask for an attorney. This is advisable even if you are innocent if the crime is significant.
I want to emphasise this. The prisons in the U.S. (and probably most countries) are full of people who believed that they were safe, despite being suspected, due to their innocence. Remember, innocence is no excuse if they find you guilty anyway. (This is even true after the fact; new evidence of innocence is not enough to get a new trial, as long as your rights were not violated in the old one, according to the Supreme Court.)
I'm just gonna add: Say "Sir" all the time. It really calms them down.
He asks you a question? ("have you been drinking?") Say "Yes sir" or "no sir"
"I stopped you because you were speeding" - "I'm very sorry, sir"
and so on. This has saved me countless times.
Dealing with serious clutter-- the kind of situation where the house has never been in good order and there isn't any obvious place to put most things.
Sometimes I take a crack at it, but there's so little progress and so many non-obvious decisions to be made.
The key point I have discovered in my own recent massive household declutter:
Distinguish "generally useful" or "potentially useful" from actually useful.
No, you'll never eBay it. No, you'll never wear that shirt or those boots. No, you'll never fix that laptop. No, you'll never get around to finding someone who really wants it. No, that weird cable won't actually ever be used for anything, because it hasn't been used in the past five years. No, you'll never get around to taking it to the charity shop. No, it may be a shame to throw out something so obviously useful, but it's a curse. No, you never did any of these things in the past so there's no reason to assume you will in the future. No. No. Stop making bullshit excuses. JUST NO.
Get a big roll of garbage bags. Delight in having so many full bags of discards that your bin overflows.
You have to be utterly uncompromising. Set the "when did I last use this?" to one year. Anything unused in longer than that better have a REALLY EXCELLENT justification.
If you swear you're going to eBay it, give yourself one week to do the listing. If it's not done, throw it out.
A very helpful method is to have someone els...
Sounds like the "outside view" approach to cleaning. It seems to me the “really excellent justification” heuristic could be generalized into expected value, with some danger of overfitting—something with infrequent but important use like a fire extinguisher might earn its place just as easily as a bic pen you use twenty times a day.
I think it's more generally the phenomenon Paul Graham talks about: stuff used to be valuable and people didn't have much of it; these days, it's actually not of value and most people have too much of it. That is: we're all rich now, and we don't know how to cope with the fact.
It's moving up to a better class of problem. Like how Britain has a major health problem in 2011 with poor people being too fat, whereas in 1950 food was rationed. It's a great problem to have. Though it's still a problem.
Yes, it really helps to get in an outside view - the friend to help and berate you - until you get the proper visceral loathing of stuff.
"you have to move it around whenever you move."
Usually I'm adverse to reducing clutter, due to the cost of going through, organizing it, and throwing away most of it. Every time I move I end up losing a huge chunk of my stuff because suddenly it's much cheaper to throw it out instead of moving it :)
Paul Graham's essay Stuff talks about the problem. He lists books as an exception. THEY ARE NOT AN EXCEPTION. Be as ruthless with your book pile.
Better yet, get a Kindle.
I am terrible at remembering names. This is bad in itself, but exacerbated by a few factors:
I regularly have lengthy conversations with random strangers, and will be able to easily summarize the conversation afterwords, but will have no recollection of their name.
I am fairly noticeable and memorable, so even people whose names I have no reason to know will know mine.
I am not particularly good with faces either.
This isn't a memory problem, I can quote back conversations or remember long strings of numbers. I often cope by confessing to my weakness in a self-deprecating manner, or by simply not using names in direct address (it's generally not necessary in English), but these don't actually help me learn names. If I remembered to ask their name early on, I sometimes pause mid-conversation to ask "Are you still x?" but that is somewhat awkward and I'm wrong half the time anyway. The only time I can reliably remember is if they share the name of an immediate family member.This is bad enough that I'll sometimes be five or six classes into the semester and have to check the syllabus to figure out the professor's name, or will have been in multiple classes with someone and shared several conversations and still not know their name.
When I started running study groups in college, the training included teaching how to learn student's names. The trick to remembering names is to say the name out loud, with focus on the name and the person at the same time. So, Joachim introduces himself, and you say "Joachim? Nice to meet you, Joachim!" Give the name and face enough time to sink into long term memory. If they don't introduce themselves, ask them their name, simply apologizing if it turns out you've met before.
Then, at the earliest good opportunity, reinforce the name. Using it during the conversation is good. Any time the topic goes in a new direction, or you or your interlocutor have a new idea, you say "So, Joachim, I have another way of looking at that..." or "Joachim, that is an excellent point." This is totally normal, but might not feel that way to a person who doesn't use names frequently.
Finally, it is minimally awkward to, at the end of a conversation, say to the person "Well, Joachim, it's been so good talking to you!" Or, if you've totally lost the name, say with a smile "I've enjoyed talking with you so much I've managed to forget your name!" And they ...
Thirding the request.
I have sometimes contemplated taking out my frustrations by following people around to learn their names, scrounging up any background material on them that I can get, and then pretending to be an old high school acquaintance of theirs, and watching them squirm as they try to remember me.
I'm not entirely certain people aren't already doing this to me.
1I do not have health insurance currently. I could obtain health insurance, but that's not my question.
How often is it appropriate to go to a doctor or general health person (in the US), if I think I'm mostly okay, and how much should I pay? How do I control how much I pay rather than setting up an appointment without mentioning price and allowing them to charge me? How do I find someone based on their skill/price rather than choosing randomly or following a recommendation from a friend?
No, nor that they print their own names. They just have to sign their names and date the signature. It's also a good idea to have each of them initial every (numbered) page of your will; this proves that no pages have been inserted or deleted.
When I first started asking how to write a will, a couple of years ago, the best advice I got was to write the will myself — because this is free — and then reread it in a few months. Repeat this process until I couldn't think of anything to add or change. Then visit a lawyer and have them translate it into legalese.
I believe there should be a subject in school (and text books to go with it) that goes through all the things that adult citizens should know. I believe this was part of what was called Civics but that is dead or changed to something else. The idea is somewhat dated but it included things like how to vote, how to read a train schedule, that different types of insurance actually were, simple first aid, how to find a book in a library and all sorts of things like that. Today it would be a slightly different list. Somewhere between 10 and 14 seems the ideal age to be interested and learn these sort of things.
I agree. I've also long held a different but complementary view: that all establishments should (hopefully, out of the goodness of their hearts) put up signs that basically say, "this is how it works here".
(For example, at a grocery store in the US, the sign would say something like, "This store sells the items you see inside that have a price label by them. To buy something, take it with you to one of the numbered short aisles [registers] toward the exit and place it on the belt. If you need many items, you may want to use one of the baskets or carts provided near this sign. The store employee at the register will tell you how much the item costs, and you can pay with ...")
While most of it would be obvious to everyone and something parents automatically teach, everyone might find some different part of it to be novel. And I suspect that this easily-correctible "double illusion of transparency", in which people don't think such signs would convey anything new, prevents a lot of beneficial activity from happening.
This is particularly helpful for anyone new to the area - immigrants, emigrants, tourists, etc.
As I live in Germany I have experience with such rule sets. People don't follow them and instead do whatever they consider to be the obvious thing to do.
Our public transport system has for example the rule that you should stand on the right side of an escalator if you choose to stand.
If you choose to walk the escalator you take the left side.
It's a smart rule and it would be in the public interest if everyone would abide by it. It would make life easier for those who choose who walk the escalator. Normal people however don't care and simple stand wherever they want to stand.
Introducing a formal rule set when people are used to following informal rules is hard.
Maybe not specifically that, but I recall a lot of new users (and regular users, and critics of users...) complaining that they don't know e.g. what kinds of comments are appropriate to post under articles, what the pre-requisites for understanding the material and generally stuff that we might just assume they know.
LW does have a good "about" section, though.
It needs a "how to use the site" section. When the envelope turns red, it means you have a reply or a message. The help link at the bottom of the comment box will tell you how to do formatting, but it's different formatting methods if you post an article.
There may be useful features on the site that haven't crossed my path. Finding them seems to be a semi-random process.
In case you are wondering why people have downvoted you, it's because you have bastardized the computing usage of 'portable' almost beyond recognition. Word documents are one of the classic examples of unportable file formats - formats locked into Microsoft software, which are portable neither over time nor computing platforms.
Although it might also just be because you are apparently wrong when you say you can't email a PDF to your Kindle like you can your Word documents.
(Even the XML MS format is pretty terrible, as groups like Groklaw analyzed back when MS first began pretending it was a real alternative to OOXML.)
I approve of explaining heavily-downvoted posts (FSVO 'heavily'). Thank you on behalf of LessWrong!
Just want to throw this one out:
Choosing the right size for a collared shirt (men) : Look at the seams that run from the collar down the neck and along the tops of your shoulders to the beginning of the arms. When you try the shirt on, that seam should reach exactly to the point where your shoulders curve downwards. In this case the shirt will accentuate the broadness of your shoulders.
the procedure here is how to consistently feel better after a few weeks (vs typical lazy cheap diets)
breakfast, buy:
- plain (unsweetened) yogurt
- honey
- fruit (bananas or whatever berries are on sale)
- granola (again, unsweetened)
dump together in bowl and eat. if you don't feel hungry in the morning just do a very small serving at first.
lunch: whatever, avoid sugar/white bread
dinner, buy :
- rice-a-roni red beans and rice when it is on sale (goes to 75 cents a box once every couple months at my local store)
- bell pepper (or spicier pepper to taste)
- olive oil
boil, then simmer 20 minutes
yes, this procedure can be improved upon. the advantage of this one is low activation cost as it is about as difficult as the regular bachelor diet of instant foods. if you're trying to eat healthier but can't find the motivation this is a decent compromise.
major thing to avoid besides the obvious: fruit juice and fruit flavored anything. you're subverting your body's desire for actual fruit. fruit juice is no better for you than soda.
I'm guessing this is mostly preaching to the choir here, but if this helps one person it was worth the 5 minutes.
When you have a spare hour, set your alarm to go off every five minutes and practice 'being asleep', hearing the alarm, jumping out of bed, turning it off, and running to the shower. After 20 repetitions, the idea is that the next morning, when you hear the alarm, you'll run to the shower without needing to get fully conscious first. I dunno, something to try at least.
Ok- folding a fitted sheet is really fucking hard! I don't think that deserves to be on that list, since it really makes no difference whatsoever in life whether or not you properly fold a fitted sheet, or just kinda bundle it up and stuff it away. Not being able to deposit a check, mail a letter, or read a bus schedule, on the other hand can get you in trouble when you actually need to. Here's to not caring about linen care!
Regarding investment, my suggestion (if you work in the US) is to open a basic (because it doesn't periodically charge you fees) E*TRADE account here. They will provide an interface for buying and selling shares of stocks and various other things (ETFs and such; I mention stocks and ETFs because those are the only things I've tried doing anything with). They will charge you $10 for every transaction you make, so unless you're going to be (or become) active/clever enough to make it worthwhile, it makes sense not to trade too frequently.
EDIT: These guys appear to charge less, though they also deal in fewer things (e.g. no bonds).
This is right. But to put it much more generally, and as an exercise in seriously trying to bridge information gaps:
To buy stocks you need what is called a Brokerage account. The way a brokerage account works is that you give money to the Broker to invest for you. (Generally, you will do this by transferring it from an existing bank account.) This money generally gets put into a highly liquid account in your name, such as a money market fund. You can get your money back by instructing your broker to send it back to you.
When you want to buy stocks or other financial investments, you direct your broker to use the money in your brokerage account to buy stocks or other financial investments in your name. Your broker will use the money that is in your account to do this. Your brokerage account now also contains the stock you bought.
When you want to sell stocks, you tell your broker to sell, and the proceeds get put back into your cash-like account.
Brokers make money by charging you a fee each time you buy or sell a stock or other financial investment through them.
There are full-service brokerages and discount brokerages. Full service brokers (such as Merrill Lynch) give you extra help ...
I feel like it is useful to mention that because of efficient markets (which implies assets are "fairly priced") and the benefits of diversification (lower risk), it's almost always better to buy a low fee mutual fund than any particular stocks or bonds. In particular, Index Funds merely keep a portfolio which tracks a broad market index. These often have very low operating costs, so they are a pretty good way to invest. You can buy these as ETFs, or you can buy them through something like Vanguard.
I think some more detail is called for here too, on mutual funds vs ETFs:
When you buy part of a mutual fund, you are giving your money to professional fund managers to invest for you. Mutual funds are often devoted to a single investment strategy (value, growth, index...) or a specific business sector (energy, health care, high technology), or even a specific kind of investment vehicle (stocks, bonds, commodities...).
You pay the fund managers a small percentage of your assets each year (the number you want to look for here is the "expense ratio"). Something on the order of 1%. Sometimes you also pay a fee when you put your money in or when you take it out; funds that do this are called "load" funds, funds that don't are called "no-load" funds.
When you buy into an ordinary mutual fund, it's a similar process to having a savings account: you send the fund money, they use it to buy financial investments. Mutual funds are generally sold and redeemed at par; each dollar you invest in the fund buys a dollar's worth of investments. When you cash out, each dollar of investments they sell is a dollar that goes back into your pocket.
ETFs are similar to stocks. ...
I have a kind of embarrassing one, but that's kind of the point of this discussion so here goes.
For some reason I've always had an aversion to social networking websites. I remember when all my peers used xanga, then livejournal, then myspace, and now facebook, and I always refused to use them whatsoever. I realize now though, that they represent a massive utility that I desperately need.
I am worried though, about starting new. Maybe I'm being overly paranoid, but it seems that having few friends on such a website signals low status, as does getting into the game this late.
So should I just create an account and add every single person I am even tangentially acquainted with? Is there a feature on facebook where you can hide who your friends are? Is it appropriate to ask someone you just met to friend you? What other cultural and social knowledge am I missing in this area?
I think people have very different standards as far as social networking goes. I would recommend deciding from the offset what you want to use Facebook for, and establish friending policies on that basis. If it's for keeping in touch with your nearest and dearest, keep it to a select few. If you want a conduit for talking to everyone you've ever met, add everyone you meet.
If I see someone who only has a handful of FB friends, I assume they're towards the more private end of the spectrum rather than thinking they're somehow socially retarded. Likewise if someone has 800+ FB friends, I don't think they regularly hang out with them all.
There is such a thing as a late adopter advantage. I don't think most people make these kinds of decisions when they first enter into that kind of environment, so you actually have the benefit of deciding off the bat how you want to use it, and how to optimise your usage for that aim.
Keep a regular sleep schedule.
This is something I completely failed to learn so far. Sure, I have some issues with procrastination or a lack of certain time-management skills, but even if I create a schedule for my whole week in advance and manage to follow it through for a couple of days at some point I completely mess it up because I sleep through half a day since I stayed up until 4AM the night before. Or I end up not getting enough sleep for several days in a row and getting sick (which happens far too often). Mostly, if I wake up at a certain time I don't get tired early enough to get a sufficient amount of sleep before I wake up at the same time on the next day (and unfortunately they don't make these time-turners yet).
It seems like every failed attempt to establish a working day routine can be mainly narrowed down to this single thing. I managed to get through High School and still get good grades even though I missed a lot of school days (due to being sick or too tired to go) because it was easy. Even at university it's still possible to pass the exams when you miss half of the lectures (although your results probably will suffer). However, I'm already afraid of my first real job.
How do you speak clearly?
I have a bad speaking voice -- my sibilants ("S" sounds) come out mushy. If I record my speaking voice and play it back, even when I'm concentrating on enunciation, I sound... terrible. It's a voice that sounds geeky at best, retarded at worst. A little too high-pitched and monotone, as well. People have been telling me they can't understand what I'm saying all my life.
It's quite likely that I'll give many public presentations throughout my life, so being better at speaking might be worthwhile. I've lost my fear of public speaking (knowing the material well takes care of that) -- I'm just talking about the mechanics of speech. I want to be audible, comprehensible, and not sound like a moron.
I found that frequently recording my voice and playing it back immediately afterward helps immensely. Up through the start of my junior year of highschool I did a very poor job with pronunciation in general and what I thought I sounded like, sounded nothing like what I did in fact sound like. I got a portable voice recorder midway through my junior year. I like poetry, so a few times a week I would spend a while (maybe a half hour) in the evenings reading poetry into the recorder and playing it back a stanza at a time. If I didn't like the way it sounded, I would repeat the stanza (or the particular line in that stanza that sounded wrong) until it started sounding right. Within a few months I very much liked the way my voice sounded, and instead of having people telling me I talked funny, I occasionally had people complimenting my enunciation. (As I side effect I also became able to read out loud which was something else I used to have a lot of trouble doing)
I think there may be some psychological element to finding one's own recorded voice unpleasant. When I hear my own recorded voice played back at me, I find it incredibly unpleasant, but my acquaintances assure me that it doesn't sound bad to them. Likewise, I've had people tell me that they can't stand the sound of their own recorded voices, when they sound perfectly fine to me.
If your acquaintances agree that your speech could use work, I agree with the recommendation of speech therapy, but it's possible that the problem is in your perception.
(Edited the last few paragraphs to be more useful.)
I actually teach this to college students, to some degree. This is in the context of moderately scripted competitive speech, though.
The first basic trick is to consciously try to speak at half-speed. Once you've done that, halve your speed again. This will at least be close to the right speed.
Another trick is to tell friends or family to rudely (or politely) interrupt you if you speak too fast. This technique can also be helpful for eliminating um, uh, like, y'know, and similar disfluencies. I will write "SLOW" on a piece of paper and hold it up while a student is speaking, for example.
I admit I am surprised that you find speaking slowly more difficult in terms of keeping track of what you are saying. In almost all cases I encounter, people actually speak much more coherently when they speak slower. Either use the extra time to think of what to say, or insert a few judicious pauses for the same effect.
I would say there is a non-negligible chance that your rapid speech comes off as very clear to you, but not to observers. I know that when I get really engaged in an idea, I will often talk rapid-fire in a way that I think ...
I'd be surprised if there are any of us who don't have some gap in knowledge that a majority of the rest of us found surprising. But really I can't think of any knowledge of this type I'm missing that I can't just look up (rather than ask here) if I realize that I don't have it. (Things of this type I can recall looking up in the past few years: ordering at a bar, dialing international phone numbers, reaching someone at a phone extension, getting a cashier's check from a bank, how to properly wear a suit jacket, how to read facial expressions and make small talk.)
I like wikihow, ehow, and similar sites--and I also find that guides intended for recent immigrants or people with autism are useful for "things everyone is supposed to know".
I think it's more that the word is dated. People still spend time together getting coffee to get to know each other. It's just not called a "date" because that sounds so 1950s.
The thing to do with telemarketers, I have learned, is not to immediately hang up.
No, it really is to hang up.
I prefer this to simply hanging up because doing the latter always makes me feel bad for several minutes afterward for having been rude to somebody who is, after all, trying to make a living.
Your emotions seem to be doing both you and the telemarketers a disservice - perhaps due to an instinctive misunderstanding of what kind of social transaction is taking place. The telemarketer is not socially vulnerable and nor are you in a position where perception will have future consequences. They also don't WANT to have an extended positive interaction that has no chance of success. Wasting five minutes on a mark that has no chance of giving a commission is strictly worse than an instant hang up. Your instincts are right that they are "after all, just trying to make a living" and you are just getting in their way.
I'm not saying it is necessarily worth retraining your emotional attachments in this case. You seem to attach pride to the act of wasting telemarketer time and guilt to the act of hanging up. This, combined with assertiveness practice you get and the cost of retraining yourself may mean that it is better to stay in the behavioral local minima.
Yeah, car batteries can do about a kiloamp into a dead short so we can treat them as ideal voltage sources for this 'application'. However, even with wet hands and solid contact, 12 volts is too low to get much current flowing.
Soaking my hands in saturated salt water got my hand to hand resistance down to 10-20kohm (0.5-1ma), which is still at least a factor of 250 above the 40 ohm resistance you'd need to draw 300ma, which is the lower figure wiki gives for DC caused fibrillation. Putting one hand on either terminal didn't get me so much as a tingle.
I know tingle levels are possible when soaking for longer (hours) and 9v will tingle your tongue (2-4milliamps), but it seems exceedingly hard to get to a dangerous level, considering that most models I've seen had the internal resistance of people at hundreds of ohms (350 is the number that sticks in mind). Also nerves are somewhat AC coupled, which brings the fibrillation limit up and makes people push away from the source instead of clinging on.
I guess it might be possible for someone with thin skinned thoroughly soaked hands making good contact and having a poorly shielded sensitive heart, but I'd call it a 'freak accident'.
Something else I've had to look up: how to convincingly dress like a grownup. (By which I mean less casual than t-shirts and jeans, work-appropriate, flattering, not looking like I just stepped out of a sci-fi movie or an art school.) There are some sites for female style advice I've found interesting and helpful (and edited to remove one I used to like that has gone off the rails).
I think I have lots of gaps to report, but I'm having lots of trouble trying to write a coherent comment about them... so I'm going to just report this trouble as a gap, for now.
Oh, and I also have lots of trouble even noticing these gaps. I have a habit of avoiding doing things that I haven't already established as "safe". Unfortunately, this often results in gaps continuing to be not detected or corrected.
Anyway, the first gap that comes to mind is... I don't dare to cook anything that involves handling raw meat, because I'm afraid that I lack the knowledge necessary to avoid giving myself food poisoning. Maybe if I tried, I would be able to do it with little or no problem, but I don't dare to try.
I don't dare to cook anything that involves handling raw meat, because I'm afraid that I lack the knowledge necessary to avoid giving myself food poisoning.
Short tip: If the raw meat smells or tastes bad, don't eat it.
Longer tip: the reason there are so many raw meat warnings are not because you will get sick from eating or handling raw meat. If you don't have a clogged nose, there is almost no way for you to get sick from raw meat, because you will smell or taste any problems before you swallow it.
What's NOT safe is mxing raw and cooked foods. The safety warnings are because the same bacteria that will make raw foods smell bad, will not produce the same smell warnings in the cooked food. This means that you can have highly-contaminated cooked food that gives off no warning whatsoever, and get terribly sick from it.
I have eaten raw meat -- including raw chicken and raw eggs -- for many years, and had fewer incidences of stomach upset with them than I have had with cooked foods. The worst reaction I ever had to a raw food was when I ate a bad egg raw, that was too cold for me to properly taste or smell. (I vomited it up a few minutes later, when some less-impaired part of my...
Generally, it is mainly chicken that one needs to be careful about, because it is sometimes contaminated with unhealthy bacteria, even when bought "fresh". A general procedure with all meat, and especially chicken, is to wash any surface that raw chicken comes in contact with when you are done preparing it and have started to cook it, then wash any utensils you used that touched the chicken, and wash you hands. To be extra cautious, you can do that for any raw meat. Raw meat should be refrigerated soon after purchase and now allowed to stand uncooked at room temperature for more than the time it takes to prepare it.
Washing bacteria down the drain is certainly the primary purpose for using soap, by far, but surfactants like soap also kill a few bacteria by lysis (disruption of the cell membrane, causing the cells to rapidly swell with water and burst). In practice, this is so minor it's not worth paying attention to: bacteria have a surrounding cell wall made of a sugar-protein polymer that resists surfactants (among other things), dramatically slowing down the process to the point that it's not practical to make use of it.
(Some bacteria are more vulnerable to surfactant lysis than others. Gram-negative bacteria have a much thinner cell wall, which is itself surrounded by a second, more exposed membrane. But gram-positive bacteria have a thick wall with nothing particularly vulnerable on the outside, and even with gram-negative bacteria the scope of the effect is minor.)
In practice, the big benefit of soap is (#1) washing away oils, especially skin oils, and (#2) dissolving the biofilms produced by the bacteria to anchor themselves to each other and to biological surfaces (like skin and wooden cutting boards). Killing the bacteria directly with soap is a distant third priority.
For handwash...
Yeah, scary. And scariest is that he said it with a dismissive tone of authority and my brain just accepted it. It took me a couple minutes to notice it and convince myself the “expert” was completely ridiculous (I was almost a complete beginner skier at the time).
By the way, it’s not like short skis are new: I checked afterwards and found that their ease of use has been known for decades. It seems trainers insist on long skis just because they can give more lessons, rental shop guys can charge more for the bigger “better” skis, and I suspect most everyone else doesn’t even try them because they’re think they look like child skis or something.
In addition to "Learn to touch-type. Learn to type with ten fingers.":
I am often amazed and astonished that people do not know how to operate the search engine of their choice properly and thus fail to find their desired information. It is your main internet-information retrival-tool, make yourself familiar with its advanced possibilitys, also know as operators. e.g. for google, see this chart: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html
I found most useful (for google) the following ones:
Quotationmarks around a phrase, e.g. &...
Certainty is irrelevant, even if you are certain you still have serious problems making any use of this knowledge; there is no convenient stock named RBTS you can just buy 500 shares of and let it appreciate.
Example: in retrospect, we know for certain that a great many people wanted computers, operating systems, social networks etc - but the history of computer / operating system / social networks are strewn with flaming rubble. Suppose you knew in 2000 that "in 2010, the founder of the most successful social network will be worth >$10b"; just...
Vladimir, I'm not sure about the orientation bit. Imagine constructing a sphere of fish around the lightning strike, so that the fish tile the sphere and are flat against the sphere (actually, hemisphere). Necessarily, all the electricity flows through the fish, because they completely tile the hemisphere. Now re-orient the fish without otherwise changing their location. Now, because the fish are thin, they no longer cover the sphere, and between them is a lot of seawater. So only a small fraction, now, of the electricity flows through the fish, and the re...
the fear definitely fully extends to never cooked chicken (cutting boards, knives)
Because bringing them into contact with cooked foods actually is dangerous. You won't have any way of knowing the cooked food is contaminated.
Here's the thing: if your food's not that fresh, cooking can make an unsafe food safe (from a bacterial point of view) at the cost of destroying some other nutrients. (e.g. creatine and vitamin C). However, that same piece of food you'd spit out due to taste or spit up via whatever the backup test mechanism is.
So it's not that I'm...
Enforcement in software players is lax for whatever reason, but makers of DVD players need to agree to honor the Prohibited User Operations flags in order to get a patent license to use the DVD video format. So the general point stands that if you're skipping previews, someone is either in breach of contract or breaking the law.
Any atheist here, and equally irrational? That's a bet I'd take.
It's one thing to disagree with a person on a number of points, and another thing to be unable to respect their epistemology. On difficult matters, where it's hard to locate an error, you can consider another person's reasoning sound to respectable standards without agreeing with their conclusions (we're only human after all,) and on matters of opinion, disagreement does not necessarily imply conflict of epistemology. Religion falls into neither category.
I used to be open to relationships with...
My deficiency is common manners. I think it's a lack of attention to the world outside of my own thoughts. I've been known to just wander away from a conversation that is clearly not over to the other participants. I notice a sneeze about 10 seconds too late to say "bless you!". I'm appropriately thankful, but assume that's clear without my actually saying or writing something to convey the feeling. Depending on the context, my preoccupation leads me to be perceived as everything from a lovable nerd to an arrogant jerk. It's something I'd like to change.
When I interact with people who behave the way you do (there a lot here at NASA), I generally do not hold it against them.
However, since you said you'd like to change, here are some suggestions that don't require a great deal of attention because they are responses to specific events (which you would need to practice noticing):
- Always say "Thank you" for everything. Assume that no one thinks you're thankful unless you say so. It's not necessarily true, but it is true sometimes, and it's virtually never true that saying "thank you" will annoy someone that has just done something for you.
- Learn people's names and use them when you see someone for the first time each day (assuming you're in an anglophone culture--romance cultures greet more often, I don't know about other cultures). For many people, saying "Hi, JoAnn!" instead of just "Hi" or "Mmf" helps make them feel valued and respected by you.
- It's OK to leave a conversation that others are continuing, if they're not actually speaking to you at the time you leave. Tell everyone "Bye" or "Talk to you later" or whatever is appropriate for your expectations of interacting in the future, and then step away. If you don't want to interrupt a lively discussion, you can just raise your hand in a quick wave, try to make eye contact with at least one person if you can and smile or nod, and step away.
Where can I get an IQ test? I am an adult and was never tested as a child. Searching google has only given me online tests. I want a professionally done test.
I considered myself intelligent, but some of the sequences/posts on this site are quite challenging for me. It has made me curious on exactly how intelligent I am. I don’t want to be too over or under confident when it comes to intelligence. I try to learn new things and that helps me find the limits of my intelligence, but I figure my IQ will also be interesting to know as well.
Thanks.
800+ comments now. I think you may have been right that lots of people have basic procedural gaps that need addressing, Alicorn... :)
I'm kind of weirded out by the fact that a three-paragraph post originally put in Discussion that took me ten minutes to write is now my most upvoted post of all time.
Yeah, that kind of advice is not going to fill any procedural knowledge gaps, sorry.
Previously I've tried "exercise" with fitness machines, aerobic and resistance both, an hour apiece on both, and it doesn't seem to do anything at all. I currently walk a couple of hours every other day. I have no idea whether this does anything (besides exhausting me so much I don't get any work done for the rest of the day, of course). I once read that 40% of the population is "immune to exercise" and I suspect I'm one of the 0.40.
If I have enough m...
I once read that 40% of the population is "immune to exercise" and I suspect I'm one of the 0.40.
I've been a competitive distance runner for a decade. In that time I've watched maybe 100 people join track or cross country teams, and every one who stays on the team more than a month has shown clear improvement, at least at first.
I've also known many recreational runners, and there's a big difference between a median runner on a cross country team and a median recreational runner of the same age and gender. In fact, of the fifty or so recreational runners I've talked to in some depth, and thousands I've seen at races, I have never met someone who trained themselves independently from the beginning and could beat me at 1500 meters. Meanwhile, I've known scores of people who could beat me at that distance, but they all ran on teams or had run on teams in the past.
In my experience, the slowest guys who joined the team and practiced every day would run a mile in about 5:30 after a year, with a median around 5:00, and 4:40 if they kept at it for a few years. For women it was about 7:00 at slowest, median 6:00 and around 5:30 for women who trained for some time. (Talen...
In that time I've watched maybe 100 people join track or cross country teams, and every one who stays on the team more than a month has shown clear improvement, at least at first.
Okay, but which way does the causality run?
I once read that 40% of the population is "immune to exercise"
If you mean, 40% of people don't lose weight by exercising, that's probably correct. The OP said "basic level of fitness", though, which does not necessarily mean weight loss.
I currently walk a couple of hours every other day. I have no idea whether this does anything (besides exhausting me so much I don't get any work done for the rest of the day, of course).
There is a fair amount of study (for citations see "Body By Science") that longer exercise does not result in greater health gains, and that it is rather the intensity of exercise that makes the difference.
In my own personal experience, long walks are pleasant, but I felt a greater increase in energy levels from using one of Sears's 10-minute PACE workouts (1 minute walking, 1 minute all-out running, repeat 5 times, then cool down). A few days of this and my general energy levels throughout the day went up. (I would guess the OP's suggestion of hill sprints is based on the same principle of alternating high intensity and low intensity activity for a short period.)
There are quite a few ways in which conventional or popular wisdom about exercise is wrong; the idea that more exercise is better is one of them. (The idea that exercise will help or cause you to lose weight is another.)
This is confusing. It seems like somehting a good rationalist should not have any problem with. And you're supposedly the greatest rationalist around. Are you sure you've actually applied your rationality skills and done stuff like sat down for 5 minutes (each) and thought about questions like "What exactly am I trying to accomplish with exercise, and is there any other way to accomplish it", "How can I find out what kinds of exercise will give results" , "can I replicate what a fitness trainer does myself, find the information online, or find someone willing to act as one for free?", etc.
There are probably a decent number of people with medical knowledge here, who knows these things. Heck, if a few things (like living on the wrong continent) were different I could've just given you my athlete sisters number.
Edit: Also, why is everyone talking about expensive equipment? I'm pretty sure you only need equipment for advanced training if you want to compete or because it's easier/more comfortable, general fitness and health I can see no reason to do anything other than running and stretching and push-ups and such. I'm also pretty sure you can use normal stuff lieing around even for the things you need props for. I'm no expert thou.
... goodness I can't believe I just typed this. -_- Feels like heresy telling Eliezer what to do, especially in an area I consider myself to know nothing about. I'm fully prepared for this to be down-voted to oblivion.
I once read that 40% of the population is "immune to exercise"
Where did you read that?
(I'd be pretty surprised if that turned out not to be untrue, overstated, or overgeneralized.)
I was skeptical as well, but Googling for "immune to exercise" produced this: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6735-some-people-are-immune-to-exercise.html. It seems like an area that could really use further research; if the universally-dispensed advice is ineffective for nearly half the population, that's a huge problem.
Yes, but that shows that Eliezer probably misremembered what the 40% referred to. In that study, "40%" refers not to how many didn't benefit, but rather to the maximal benefit on a particular measure of fitness received by any of the participants:
For example, the team found that training improved maximum oxygen consumption, a measure of a person’s ability to perform work, by 17% on average. But the most trainable volunteers gained over 40%, and the least trainable showed no improvement at all. Similar patterns were seen with cardiac output, blood pressure, heart rate and other markers of fitness.
Alternately, he might've been rounding the subsequent statistic:
Bouchard reported that the impact of training on insulin sensitivity – a marker of risk for diabetes and heart disease – also varied. It improved in 58% of the volunteers following exercise, but in 42% it showed no improvement or, in a few cases, may have got worse.
So, how many is many? What fraction of the subjects were resistant on the various metrics? Unfortunately, the NS article doesn't give exactly what we want to know, so we need to find the original scientific papers to figure it out ourselves, but the...
I recall originally reading something about a measure of exercise-linked gene expression and I'm pretty sure it wasn't that New Scientist article, but regardless, it's plausible that some mismemory occurred and this more detailed search screens off my memory either way. 20% of the population being immune to exercise seems to match real-world experience a bit better than 40% so far as my own eye can see - I eyeball-feel more like a 20% minority than a 40% minority, if that makes sense. I have revised my beliefs to match your statements. Thank you for tracking that down!
I once read that 40% of the population is "immune to exercise" and I suspect I'm one of the 0.40.
.4 of the population unlikely to have evolved? I can't take this too seriously I suppose.
Did you try working on strength first? A lot of cardio is claimed to not be very helpful.
Also, consider a coach or a fellow rationalist with some domain knowledge to work with, it's pretty important to optimize this area (esp. if it puts you out of commission for the rest of the day).
One hack that helped me work throughout the annoyance is reading kindle on a stationary bike. Lost 20 with that trick.
At this point, my Expectancy for positive results from single changes like "just use a trainer at the gym" has hit essentially zero - I've tried all sorts of stuff, nothing ever fucking works - so I'm not willing to spend the incremental money. If I have a lot of money to spend, I'll try throwing a higher level of money at all aspects of the problem - get a trainer on weights, try the latest fad of "short interval bursts" for aerobic exercise, get LASIK and a big TV and a separate room of the apartment to make exercising less unpleasant (no, dears, I don't get any endorphins whatsoever), buy a wide variety of grass-fed organic meats and take one last shot at the paleo diet again, and... actually I think that's most of what I'd do. That way I'd be able to scrape up enough hope to make it worth a shot. Trying one item from that list doesn't seem worth the bother.
I did try Shangri-La again when Seth Roberts contacted me personally and asked me to take another shot. It was just wearing tight, uncomfortable noseplugs while eating all my food and clearing out time at night to make sure I took oil 1 hour away from eating any other food or brushing my teeth, a trivi...
I replied to your other comment without being sure whether the "nothing works" part was about weight loss or the ability to gain strength and conditioning from exercise.
There is a current idea that exercise is beneficial no matter what you weigh. See for example http://haescommunity.org/ and this new article on exercise and depression: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lloyd-i-sederer-md/depression-treatment-_b_819798.html?ir=Living
I have a hard time not following the herd mentality and trying to measure my success with exercise by my size and shape. I can and generally do use another measure of success for exercise than what I weigh. You can measure increased strength either by seeing how much weight you can lift or how many push-ups or pull-ups you can do, or you can measure your increased cardiovascular fitness with your standing pulse rate, or how long you can walk or run without becoming exhausted. (I'm shooting for 45 push-ups in a row by age 45.)
Then it doesn't actually matter whether you're metabolically privileged. Or privileged with relation to losing weight anyway, some people would say your metabolism--and mine!--make total sense in a starvation environment. The ...
If I were in your situation, I would start to take a technical interest in the biomechanics of fat deposition in male bodies, differential retention of water in body tissues, the genetics of metabolism, the adipocyte cell cycle in visceral fat - as much causal and molecular detail as I could bring myself to assimilate. Just for a few hours, I would proceed as if I was going to tackle the problem by understanding what's happening from the molecular level up, genuinely identifying exactly where a change needs to occur, and fashioning an appropriate intervention.
The logic of this approach is that we are now in a time when such overkill analysis of all biological processes has become possible, and that you personally are smart and informed enough to be able to perform that analysis, "in principle". "In principle" means that if you devoted the next several years of your life to nothing but the intensive study of those topics, you would almost assuredly make useful progress. In reality you have other priorities which guarantee that you won't turn yourself into a research biologist. But just for a while proceed as if you were going to tackle this problem with the thor...
The following is not legal advice for your situation, despite the occasional use of the second person. Rather, it is general commentary about how wills work.
There are four good options: (1) do it yourself (2) hire a lawyer ($200 - $3,000) (3) use a legal forms service such as LegalZoom.com ($30 - $100) (4) buy a how-to book from a company like Nolo ($15 - $40)
If you do it yourself, you will need to think about what you own, decide who you would like to get that stuff when you die, and then write your instructions down on a piece of paper. You should then find two adults who are (a) not your relatives, and (b) not mentioned in the will to be your witnesses. Reassure the witnesses that you are sane, thinking clearly, and acting of your own free will. Then sign the will by writing your name in both print and cursive at the bottom. Add today's date. Then have each of your witnesses do the same. Have the witnesses write "witness" next to their signatures. Finally, make two photocopies of the will. Keep one in your desk for handy reference, give one to a friend or family member for publicity, and put the original in a safe deposit box at a bank for safekeeping.
If you decide to...
Well, the Efficient Market Hypothesis is wrong on a fundamental level -- its stated conditions for market efficiency often fail to prevail in the real world. Panics are one of those times, and being more rational than other people is not a free lunch, but in fact a Substantial Effort for Good Return Lunch.
(I've seen one paper actually proving, rather humorously, that EMH is completely true IFF P = NP.)
Are you claiming that there is literally no way of using this information to reliably extract money from the stock market? This surprises me.
I'll reuse my example: if you knew for certain that Facebook would be as huge as it was, what stocks, exactly, would you have invested in, pre-IPO, to capture gains from its growth? Remember, you don't know anything else, like that Google will go up from its IPO, you don't know anything about Apple being a huge success - all you know is that some social network will some day exist and will grow hugely. The best I c...
I think you're missing part of JGWeissman's argument, which is somewhat understandable as he hasn't explicitly spelled it out.
The fact that the Maillard reaction was, most likely, present in ancient cooking does not imply that the results of that reaction are harmless. It's evidence in that direction, but it's not conclusive. In particular, the fact that the compounds caused by the Maillard reaction build up over time and lead to a somewhat earlier death, rather than being a faster-acting kind of poison, make it hard for evolution to select against liking ...
This is another question that may lack a simple answer, and indeed there is a good chance that this is simply a wrong question in the first place.
Background: So going by LW and indeed much of the rest of the internet it seems that speaking to arbitrary strangers in public is in fact not in general considered creepy and unacceptable (which makes this a case where I would have done better with the typical mind heuristic, as opposed to what I guess is some sort of version of Postel's Law, as I am not myself in general creeped out when others approach me).
Now ...
My suggestion: take a crash course in etiquette by going to another city nearby, and then spend a few days walking around asking questions, or inviting people to do stuff with you, etc. Condition yourself to get used to the occasional weird look, learn what you can get away with, and possibly make friends with people you would otherwise never meet. If all else fails, drive out of the city and pretend the entire thing never happened. Or you will get some amusing stories to share with me when you get back. How can you lose?
I am only partly joking, my social skills are so mediocre I have seriously considered doing exactly this at some point. I might throw in some speed dating as well for good measure.
The Bizarre World of the Bisexual - it's all 100% true! [1]
[1] Statement of 100% truth may not be 100% true.
I've got another one that's about to be relevant to me. What should you do in order to be an effective manager?
I am an engineer and will soon be "in charge" of another engineer. I have had a couple bosses with various good and bad qualities, and obviously I want to emulate the good qualities and avoid the bad ones.
Is there a good procedure to begin being an effective supervisor of technical people? There is a vast of array of books and websites on management, but I think there's a very low rationality quotient.
I stutter, and I've done it for as long as I can remember. Anyone know how to beat it? I feel this has pretty significant (negative) effects on my life, because I'm often afraid of speaking up in a group, as stuttering is extremely embarrassing.
I would not be happy about my normal eating habits resulting in food poisoning 1 time in 50. I eat 3 meals per day, and would expect to get food poisoning nearly twice per month. Fortunately, my actual eating habits have a far better track record than that.
I live in the US. If I want to mail someone an item bigger than can be fit in a simple envelope, what is the procedure for determining the proper packaging, postage, etc? Will I have to actually bring the package to the post office to have them determine that? What is the protocol for doing so?
There are many who believe that the key to better hair is NOT using as much shampoo. Use as little as possible in order to not have greasy hair. This takes time to master. Some people need a full scrub every day. Some people need almost nothing. The homeostatis of your scalp is the key: using less shampoo should, over time, make your scalp produce less oil.
I'm down to a point where I go a day or two rinsing only, sometimes just a little bit of extra soap from when I washed my neck. When I wash my hair, I use very little shampoo...the bare minimum. T...
Personal hygiene. The internet has eluded me on what is the best method for washing your body. I've always put soap on a washcloth and used that to scrub myself. I used to get really dry skin and I don't know if this was from my method. It seems like there are lots of different techniques---sponges, washcloths, scrubbers, body wash, lotions. What do they do?
How do you keep hair looking nice? Sometimes I use a comb, but it still goes all over the place. I usually keep my hair short to avoid dealing with this.
Principles for growing long hair:
- It takes a long time. I've been growing mine for fourteen years, and it was at least seven before it was long enough to be at all remarkable. Growth rates vary, and mine isn't all that fast (4-5 inches a year), but it may be a long time. Don't get fed up and chop it all off.
- Stop doing damaging things. No more blow-drying or coloring or straightening or curling. Minimize the amount of product you put in. Never tease your hair.
- Get trims. A half inch trim every three months or so will take off the split ends and make your hair healthier.
- Conditioner is your friend. Use it liberally. As your hair gets longer, less of it will have any exposure to scalp oils. Be sure to condition all of your hair, not just the ends. I always brush my hair with the conditioner in it before I rinse. This makes sure the conditioner is evenly distributed and there are no tangles.
- Braid your hair before sleep to prevent tangles, and brush gently. Work knots out patiently, don't just tear through them.
- Don't wash your hair every day. Every other day is plenty for hygiene purposes, and more often is hard on your hair.
- Once your hair is too long to brush in a si
HughRistik:
Here are a bunch of haircuts that your barber probably can't help you with. All these guys are very popular, and most of them are sex symbols.
I don't think these photos make such a good case.
First and foremost, some of them are examples of extreme peacocking, or in case of that guy with dreadlocks, of extreme "I'm shabby but still high-status" countersignaling. This can indeed be spectacularly successful if done with utmost competence and in a suitable context, but it's apt to backfire with an even more spectacular failure if any of these conditions are less than perfect.
I'd say there's a more important general lesson here: just because high-status, sex-symbol men do something, it doesn't mean that it's wise for the average Joe to try imitating it. You must learn to walk before trying to run, which means that if you're not able to pull off a rock-solid and competent "conservative normal guy" image, you probably won't be able to pull off any of those more advanced peacocking/countersignaling strategies. (There are examples of men who can naturally do the latter but not the former, but it's very rare.)
This is why modern pop-culture is highly conf...
First, a "crazier and more subcultural" look is essentially a form of peacocking. Like all peacocking, it can be extremely effective, but it's difficult to pull off competently and tends to backfire badly if done in a less than stellar way.
I am indeed talking about peacocking. I agree with you about the risks of peacocking, and perhaps I didn't acknowledge them clearly enough.
So I definitely wouldn't recommend it to a typical guy, who almost certainly has much more advisable options than attempting peacocking.
Actually, I think peacocking of some sort is one of the options I would most advise to a typical guy attempting to improve social and romantic success. It can quickly help him get more attention and new sorts of reactions (e.g. compliments that increase his confidence).
...Even attempting a more conventional elaborate hairstyle can backfire. You know when a man tries dressing sharply but instead of looking sharp ends up projecting that bad "I'm trying too hard" look? (I don't have in mind being badly dressed by any clear standard, but rather giving off that vague impression that it's not his natural image, and it just doesn't fit him in some hard-to-d
Err towards generous tipping.
Actually, this is something I meant to ask about. Not how much to tip, which has well been covered elsewhere, but how one goes about the actual action of giving someone a tip. (I am generalizing beyond bars here).
Do not give a large bill and say "keep the change" even if this is makes a generous tip or makes precisely the tip you want to give. The standard connotations of this are all negative (including but not limited to that you are rich, can't be bothered to think about change, can't be bothered to think about what is the right size tip, and don't really care much about the person you are tipping). If you only have a single bill it is better to tip less and get some small amount of change back than to say "keep the change."
Wow, this is very much counter to everything I've heard and thought! When I think of someone saying "keep the change," I think of someone who is rich and generous and carefree. It doesn't have any of the negative connotations you suggest. And from the point of view of someone who's worked in service and lived on tips, I would definitely prefer a larger tip accompanied by the words "keep the change" than a smaller tip.
I've always assumed that this is something inborn instead of learned -- hopefully, that assumption (which come to think of it I've never really questioned) is wrong -- but I have a very hard time orienting myself. When I'm walking up the stairwell in my apartment, I have no idea whether I am walking towards the road, away from the road, or perpendicular to it. I can sit down with a pencil and paper and draw it and figure it out by looking at it from a 'birds eye' perspective. But when I'm standing in a room with opaque walls and trying to imagine what room is on the other side, I just get really confused.
I think that this sounds like too much work to learn manually, so I am embracing transhumanism and making a compass belt.
I do not know if this is a practical, general or transferable solution, but it worked for me: throughout my childhood I couldn't orient myself, and I finally taught myself at the age of 24.
Start from a place where you can see quite some distance in all (or most) directions. Outside is best. If you can see, but are not within, a downtown core, you're in a good spot. Ditto mountains, or other tall landmarks.
Now ignore those landmarks. They're untrustworthy. If you can see them, they're close enough that sometimes they'll be north and sometimes west and sometimes right on top of you. They can be a good marker for your position, but not for your orientation. You need an orientation marker.
So instead, look in the other direction, the most featureless cardinal direction you can find. Then imagine a huge, fictional geographic element just over the horizon, and tell yourself it's in that direction: living in Edmonton at the time, I used the mantra, "The desert is west."
This is a fictional desert. (Or sea, or taiga, or forest.) It is always west. (Or east, or southeast, or north.) For this process to work, you can't actually pick a real landscape, or it becomes possi...
I'm not aware of a gap in my procedural knowledge, but many skills are still fuzzy and basic. The internet serves extreme beginners and specialized experts well, but I've found reference books to be the best resource for the middle ground. Some that have helped me domestically:
- New Best Recipe from Cook's Illustrated: Basic cookbook that explain the testing and intuition behind a recipe.
- America's Test Kitchen cookbooks: Also from Cook's Illustrated, these books tend to explain why a recipe is what it is and give tips on technique or what cuts of meat wor
I've spent some time in bars, so I think I can handle this one.
1) Observe the bar, some have an area or two "designated" for walkup, others expect you to shoulder your way inbetween people. There is usually an area bounded by two big silver or brass handles. This is so the bartender can get out in a hurry to help the bouncer, and in many bars it's where the waitresses go to get their orders filled. Do Not Go There, you are getting in the way of working folk, and are making other working folk wait longer for THEIR drinks.
2) If it's busy know what you want before you go up there. Save your experimentation and questioning for a slow period. When it doubt "Whiskey, Neat", or "Vodka, neat". If you're having a day "Whiskey, double".
3) If you'd like to run a tab proffer your credit card and ask. Some places don't do it, some don't take credit. Also have some cash Just In Case.
4) If you have a preference (for example I don't drink canadian whiskey straight, and I won't drink a whiskey and coke if they use pepsi. So I ask "do you have pepsi or coke" [1]) ask BEFORE ordering. If you really don't care you will (generally) be asked for a pre...
I just want to second your cookbook recommendations--Cook's Illustrated especially. Almost all their products are extremely high-quality, and they have a very Less Wrong-friendly stance on cooking, which is to test everything. Before they publish a cookie recipe they'll make like twenty different versions, and have their taste-testers do blind tastings, and they'll publish the one that tastes best.
Alton Brown's "Good Eats" TV show is also probably Less Wrong-friendly because it puts a heavy emphasis on the chemistry and science of cooking.
Alice Waters' "The Art of Simple Food" is another good cookbook for beginners, because it walks you through everything: shopping for ingredients, choosing your pots and pans, the different techniques (i.e. what it means to "mince" an onion versus "dicing" it), prepping for cooking, etc.
How do you fold a fitted sheet? The time I tried to follow Martha Stewart's instructions I took a wrong turn somewhere, and just ended up with a wadded-up ball of sheet as per usual. And I didn't care enough to unfold and try again. Do you know a different/easier technique?
This has been upvoted a lot. Does anyone think I should move it to Main?
Edit: Apparently so. Moved.
How do you convince yourself to have self-confidence in a given situation, even in the face of direct empirical evidence that such confidence would be misplaced in that situation?
This seems to be a thing that many successful people are very good at - shrugging and acting like they're good at whatever task is at hand, even when they're clearly not - and then getting people to "buy in" to them because of that confidence rather than because of any evidence of actual skilled performance.
How do you kickstart that process?
(EDIT: was this a bad question to ask?)
Most shirts are "classic fit" or something along those lines. Well fitting shirts for slim people are "fitted" or "slim fit" or some such. "modern" is usually in between. The same goes for tshirts and pants. http://www.primermagazine.com/2011/field-manual/how-to-wear-a-tucked-in-shirt-without-looking-like-an-old-man
You can also get a tailor to slim your shirts. This runs about 30 USD/shirt at a tailor shop but sometimes you can find people offering such services on craigslist for less.
I'll actually second Sniffnoy on that, but I concede I'm unusual.
First, I often don't want to interact with people, and I've noticed that people who ask that specific question are usually somewhere between bad and INCREDIBLY bad at reading social cues that indicate I'm not interested in interacting. Related to tat, I've found people who ask that specific question are often very likely to get upset when I refuse to engage them. Basically, it makes me feel objectified - you're forcing me to engage with you socially without my consent. (I am aware that "...
Perhaps I should amend that to "don't be obviously indiscriminate in a sleazy way". The bad thing isn't finding lots of people attractive, it's apparently caring nothing for them as a person (which is about having had no conversational interction with them before asking them out, some small amount of buildup is necessary, though as siduri says, if you're a decent chap, it's probably less than you think) or alternatively appearing desperate (which is about demeanor, I think). Things I've heard remarked upon have been bemusement at dinner invites f...
I have a dear friend who loves rationality, reads Methods rabidly, quotes 'That which can be destroyed...' at the top of her FB profile... and still identifies as Christian. She's young and has had the kind of sheltered upbringing that makes it possible to actually believe your religion without lots of doublethink.
I expect to have her deconverted within a year or two -- I'd have managed by now if we weren't half a state apart.
This has mostly frightened me off so far.
Don't let it. I actually disagree with the original advice for this reason: any benefit you get is likely to be outweighed by the additional anxiety from worrying what other people think.
My general take on this is the opposite: go ahead and ask many people if you're interested. Don't worry about what they think. Most of them won't care or mind anyway, as long as you're not rude or hostile about it. There's nothing wrong with asking out a lot of people.
In fact, this is a common internal obstacle to asking people o...
Define "spitting it up" --if you mean chewing on a piece of raw chicken for 60-120 seconds, and spitting it out if it doesn't taste right, that's just a little odd
That would be spitting out, not up. In any case, what I mean is that I'm eating it for a minute or two before I suddenly have the distinct feeling that something is wrong with what I'm eating, and gently cough it back up.
if you mean swallowing the chicken, then vomiting it back up, that crosses my personal line into "sick from it."
There's a huge difference between vomit...
Something I am baffled at is how to quote a post on this website so that a vertical line segment appears to the left of the quoted text. I have a guess, but I don't want to clunky failed HTML attempt show up.
This is otherwise known as "being in the closet" in some communities.
Fortunately it is a closet full of beautiful women who you find highly attractive. Such a better closet to be in than the one homosexuals have had to hide themselves in at times. :)
The alphabet song I learned (and Elizabeth is probably referring to) is to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star".
If each list item consists of multiple paragraphs, your source code should look like this:
1. First paragraph of first list item.
####Second paragraph of first list item.
####Third paragraph of first list item.
2. First paragraph of second list item.
####Second paragraph of second list item.
except replace the "#" characters with spaces.
Alternatively, you can defeat automatic numbered list formatting like this.
Great comment, by the way.
Yeah, being the other biological sex is complicated, but a roughly equivalent statement might be "If she could (convincingly) present herself as male and attempted to get dates with women, she expect to find it much harder than she does getting dates with men while presenting as female."
This I disagree that this is rude.
You are talking about what ought to be. I am describing what is - how people think and behave. What we can observe is that many people have a great deal of difficulty getting off the phone when a telemarketer calls. The reason, I think, is clear: they are reluctant to end the conversation unless the other person lets them go, because this is conversational etiquette. That's why it's difficult. You saying that it ought not be difficult isn't a description, it's an exhortation. You're talking in exhortatory/advisory mode ...
Several reasons. For one, it's challenging my response for no apparent reason. I answered precisely how I intended to! Which may not be the same as answering truthfully but it's the best you'll get out of me in such a case. It seems to me to contain an implicit challenge that things aren't actually good and I'm just saying that because it's conventional. Which may well be the case, but if things are indeed bad, I am not about to start talking about it to an arbitrary stranger, nor do I have appreciate having it or the obviousness of it thrown in my face like that. And if that things are good then it seems to be accusing me of telling falsehoods when I'm not, which is not exactly complimentary either.
Definitely exercise helps. Working out first thing in the morning is probably the best way to ensure you'll be a) energized to start your day, and b) tired enough to go to bed at night. However, that might be tough if you already are on a deadline to get to work.
I wouldn't recommend working out at night if you're already a night owl. If you're at all like me, you'll end up super-awake right when you should be going to bed.
Any suggestions on how to grow from short to medium length without it looking terrible in between?
When I'm overdue for a haircut, I find that wearing a tuque for a while makes it look significantly less bad. This might be highly individual-specific, though.
Yes, you should definitely throw out your books. For everyone else it was obvious hyperbole for literary effect, but for you I mean it literally. What on earth?
Yes, that is so bad. I'm not paying paper prices for bits that evaporate, and I'm not giving Amazon a hundred quid's encouragement to pull that sort of stunt. That's an even more direct incentive to piracy than trying to watch a commercial DVD. In return, I get a searchable format and no physical clutter!
Although purging my life of digital clutter is actually an attractive idea. Hence the notion of ...
In that case, I wonder if it might not be worth it to date in the wider pool, with the aim of finding a woman who is open to deconverting. Generally it's a bad idea to enter a relationship hoping to change the other person, but religion has long been a sort of special case: a lot of LTRs do involve one party or the other converting or at least modifying their religious views.
This strikes me as a very high risk strategy, and probably a low reward one as well. Deconversion tends to take a long time, and even gentle attempts could strain a new relationship...
This crosses over with the textbook thread.
May I recommend: Making Faces and Face Forward by Kevyn Aucoin. Anyone who thinks they might have cause to wear makeup and want to do it well will delight in these. I encountered them via my high-goth girlfriend of the time and later gave them as presents to my current girlfriend's teenage daughters.
It might be a little thing, but these are the books for the task.
Well, pork has trichinosis. (Notice the treatment section is silent about what to do if you are diagnosed more than 3 days after infection.)
And chicken is basically universally contaminated with salmonella or campylobacter.
On the other hand, it seems to be actual news when beef is infected with E. coli or salmonella, so I infer that beef is usually free of such problems. (Why beef doesn't have a unique or universal infection of its own, I have no idea. Maybe cows just have better immune systems than pigs or chickens.)
Peeling onions can be surprisingly confusing. For instance, just under the really papery skin there is sometimes a layer which is partially or entirely thin, greenish, and rubbery. It's not all that pleasant to eat unless it's de-texturized (a puréed soup as described above will do the trick), but unlike the papery bits it's technically food. Keeping it or removing it is a judgment call, but I could imagine finding it an intimidating decision to make if I didn't know. The bits of garlic cloves that attach them to the base of the bulb are in a similar category. (I cut them off.)
Err towards generous tipping
Of course, this depends on where you are. In UK pubs you order your drink - and generally food - at the bar. And you don't tip. Though apparently you can "offer to buy the barkman/maid a drink." Took me a while to get used to this. In fact, tipping in general in the UK is still a bit mysterious to me after living here for a year. The guides say tip your Taxi driver around 10%, but why do they so often seem surprised when I do? As for delivery people, some of them actually refuse a tip, because of rules etc. If all this means that these people get a reasonably good wage and don't need the tips, I'm happy to comply; but it still seems odd to me.
Jump-start a stalled car.
I "get around" this by not carrying around jumper cables, so nobody asks me, which is of course absurd.
To my knowledge, this is how it works, but I might be missing a detail or two (never had to do it completely on my own).
1) Start with the car with the dead battery first. Expose the terminals of the battery - usually there are plastic covers to prevent anything from touching the metal terminals. Connect the jumper cables to both of these terminals. Jumper cables have a red side and a black side. You don't have to match red with the positive or negative terminal, but you will have to remember how you matched them. I.e., remember whether red is positive or negative.
2) Now go to the car with the good battery and make sure it's started and running. Connect the jumper cables to the terminals of the battery of that car in the same way that you connected them to the first car. I.e., if the red side was connected to the positive terminal on the first car, do the same on the second car.
3) Wait. It takes a few minutes to recharge a dead battery.
4) Try to start the car with the dead battery. You can do this with the jumper cables still connected. If it doesn't work, return to 3)
5) If it starts, disconnect the jumper cables.
A couple of things: don't touch the metal ends of the cables or the ba...
more than 50% of people in my demographic are even worse than me at that skill, but this doesn't mean they'll never get a relationship, because they can compensate by e.g. being insanely rich.
I'm not arguing that feeling no anxiety to physical contact and having the self confidence to lead woman in general is sufficient to be good at partner dancing.
I'm rather arguing that being good at partner dancing usually leads to feeling no anxiety to physical contact and having the self confidence to lead woman.
...I mean, if Alice doesn't get horny when around Bo
My own attitude is that time spent talking to me is time they aren't spending making a sale, so getting off the phone is the nicest thing I can do for them under the highly constrained circumstances. So as soon as I recognize them as telemarketers, I politely say "Sorry, but I'm really not interested; have a good day" and hang up, without waiting for them to do anything in particular.
Very tricky question. I won't answer it in two ways:
As I indicated, in terms of navigation/organization scheme, LW is completely untraditional. It still feels to me like a dark museum of wonder, of unfathomable depth. I get to something new, and mind-blowing, every time I surf around. So it's a delightful labyrinth, that unfolds like a series of connected thoughts anyway you work it. It's an advanced navigation toolset, usable only by people who are able to conceptualize vast abstract constructs... which is the target audience... or is it?
I've been in
Why do you believe that?
My knowledge of the field combined with the usual meta-information that I must always use to evaluate such possibilities.
Nothing in the description here gives any of the indications that it is the herald of hidden deep wisdom from the upper echelons of the nutrition sciences that is hidden from the rest of us. It is also too many steps beyond what the more mainstream (or even 'mainstream contrarian') scientists present to be at all likely.
This isn't a nutritional scientist we are talking about here. It's a naturopathic quack. The same guy who wrote the laughable "Eat Right For Your Blood Type".
This software sounds interesting. Can you provide more information on it?
It's called SWAMI Xpress -- don't ask me what the letters stand for. (It's actually web-based; what you're buying is a passcode that's physically shipped to you.)
Edit to add: here's a sample diet report (PDF) from the software, in case you're wondering what its output looks like.
Can one use it alone at home or does it require fancier tests that one would involve doctors to handle?
ABO blood type and secreter status are the only tests that have to be sent off for lab work; the r...
A HN regular just started a website that looks like a great match for this thread: http://cluedb.com.
And a car battery does have sufficient current to injure or kill a human being quite easily. (Voltage penetrates insulators, current actually does damage.
Fortunately current and voltage are not independent features of a power source - and in the case of current not even something that can be meaningfully measured without specifying the load! A car battery does not "have sufficient current to injure or kill a human quite easily" because of the human part of the (I=V/R) equation.
Off-topic: I’m not sure from your wording: do you have something that notifies you of replies to your comments?
The envelope under your username turns red if you have a reply or pm
Cutting meat into small pieces is hardly a modern invention. Shish kebabs go way back.
Eggs were at most 5 days old,
Since coming out of the store, or the chicken? ;-)
As a comparison point, I usually store eggs at room temperature with a high probability of still being good 2 weeks after getting them from the farmer. (Don't know how old they are before that point, or how they're stored, though they usually seem pretty cold when I get them.)
I never eat them raw except at room temperature, and never without smelling them before adding them to something else (like a smoothie or other recipe).
They were eaten cold.
In my experience, you're...
I don't pay much attention to historical performance. If one segment of the market has been doing better than the market as a whole, that doesn't mean that it will keep it up. And looking at the data here, VTSMX seems to have actually done very slightly better than the S&P 500 since it was created in 1992.
I've invested in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index (VTSMX) since that comes closer to betting on the market as a whole. It's closer to the ideal of diversifying as much as possible, spreading your investment evenly across the whole market rathe...
In my view the ideology matters surprisingly little. Do not make the mistake of choosing your partner for having the right convictions.
Emphasis added to point out the non sequitur.
Also, my "atheist qualifier" is intended to prevent me from choosing a partner with the wrong convictions, not to encourage me to choose one simply for having the right convictions.
No, according to the New York Times, the Monster Study showed no effect of the intervention on stuttering. Telling children that they should worry about stuttering did cause them to act like stutterers (eg, refusing to talk), but it did not cause stuttering. Similarly, telling children not to worry about stuttering had no effect on their stuttering. It does not address whether it affected their nervousness.
People who claim that the "dollar is being debased", don't know the basic facts. Inflation has actually been significantly lower than typical, the last couple of years. See for example http://investingforaliving.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/cpi-us-vs-japan.png
Market based inflation expectations (TIPS spreads) also indicate lower than typical expected inflation.
If that's not something you care about in a relationship, by all means don't concern yourself with it. But if you feel like you have to decide not to care about your partner's convictions, then it's a significant issue, and one that's likely to surface in the future however you try to suppress it.
Is there a systematic way to tell the difference between mockery, sarcasm, facetiousness, and serious? I seem to get it wrong relatively often.
Partial answer: Sarcasm appears to be a group membership test mechanism. It involves saying something that is obviously untrue according to the speaker's group's beliefs as if it's true, with the expectation that members of that group will understand that the speaker can't possibly believe that, and nonmembers will show their non-membership by acting as if the speaker does. It overlaps with mockery where it's done for the express purpose of highlighting the fact that someone isn't a member of a group, which is usually considered humiliating in and of itself and can also lead to other, more blatant teasing. It's hard to reliably tell the difference between sarcasm and seriousness without a good working knowledge of the speaker's beliefs - and even then it can be tricky if they're not particularly coherent in those beliefs.
(This is all based on my own observations, but I think it's accurate enough to be useful to others; if anyone has a better model I'd be interested.)
I have pretty high confidence this is not true. I have tried using each for the other and neither works as well
You will get food poisoning less than 1 time in 50 you do this.
I've eaten raw chicken hundreds of times and never experienced food poisoning from it, so by your definition, my approach to eating it is "safe".
On the other hand, I've experienced food poisoning from cooked foods several times during the parts of my life where I was not eating raw meats.
Proportionally speaking, of course, I've eaten so much more cooked food in my life that this doesn't mean cooked food is less safe than raw. Certainly, it still qualifies as "safe" by yo...
what sort of spoon, if it matters?
Any solid object will do, as long as it tolerates the heat. The only reason for using a utensil at all is that your hand does not tolerate the heat (and if it could tolerate the heat, then it would be unsanitary).
When stirring, the important aspect of the spoon is that it's wide; a flat utensil would work just as well. (However, a spoon has the added benefit of allowing you to taste the soup, as you add salt, herbs, and spices. Use the spoon to pour a little into a small bowl, let it cool there, and then taste it, or...
The three sections that you describe don't always go in that order, and they may also be separated into different volumes.
Also, the white pages should include both residential and business listings, although sometimes these also are separated from each other. The businesses here are strictly by name, not by category like in the yellow pages (and the listings are either cheaper or free).
Pish posh. I have admittedly horrendous sanitary procedures, and though I handle and cook raw meat at least 4 times a week I've never once gotten sick.
Pork actually should have a little bit of rose inside; I only cook my chicken until this is just gone (or even faintly visible). I routinely eat steak rare as can be, and tuna essentially raw.
One crucial recommendation is to shave upwards from the bottom of your neck to the top. This takes a lot of getting used to and really gave me the willies at first, but it works much better and you miss a lot less hair.
Really? I have the exact opposite experience. I find that going against the grain, especially on the neck, gives me nicks and rashes.
After having experimented a lot, what works for me is wetshaving using any ol' shaving cream, multi-blade razor, going with the grain.
Since facial hair grows in different directions this means you have to ...
exact procedure for boiling
Dump vegetables into a pot. Pour in water or stock until it reaches the same level as the veggies (less if you plan to add cream, more if you're nervous about burning it, less if you want thick goopy soup and more if you want thin soup). Put it on a stove burner, turn it up to High, stir at least once to prevent stuff from sticking to the bottom, and check on the smooshability of the vegetables every 5-10 minutes. Add more water if the vegetables are still unsmooshable and the water level has gotten significantly lower.
...wh
If you know the alphabet song, the melody naturally (at least to me) separates the alphabet into a few groups: ABCDEFG HIJKLMNOP QRS TUV WX YZ. This may be easier than memorizing divisions.
I recommend the book "Now You're Cooking" -- it's a cookbook explicitly written for people not familiar with cooking techniques.
Judging from the comments, cooking seems to be a big area where Less Wrongers feel tentative. I'm really surprised, as I'd think that paying attention to recipes and following the directions carefully would be an activity that analytical types would master quickly.
I like cooking and I do it a lot. I'd be happy to give advice if you can explain what the specific barrier to entry is? Is it understanding the terminology, choosing the equipment, finding reliable recipes...something else?
Poultry and pork are not safe to eat raw, even store bought in Western countries, same for minced meat. They need to be properly cooked, which means white all the way through. You can cook it hot and it'll be dry or at a lower temperature and still tender and juicy though.
Generally if it has hooves or swims and was properly handled or washed beforehand this is pretty accurate.
I don't know how to find research grants that might help fund graduate or even undergraduate education. Not quite "mail an envelope" or even "buy a stock" basic, but still annoying! One of these days I'll call up a bunch of admissions advisors and ask.
Several of my procedural gaps concern cooking, but they don't bother me because I plan to spend as few minutes of my life as possible preparing food. Not how I want to spend my precious time!
I don't know of a good content aggregator. I guess I would like to see a personalized web site which shows me all the posts/articles from all the good blogs and publishers I know about.
RSS readers are a good start, but not every site has a proper feed (with full, formatted article text and images) and usually the UI isn't what I want (e.g. it might be ugly compared to viewing the site in a browser; also I'd like to be able to see a combined feed of everything rather than manually selecting a particular blog). In the past, I needed caching fo...
LW makes frequent reference to coming to above average decisions with some kind of market.
And this market can be used to find right answers, the right calibrations between group values, something like this?
Where can I find information on this, or how does it work?
My addition to the Third Option would be: if you know something's a good company, wait until a cyclical (but fundamentally extraneous to the company's business prospects) market downturn and buy it while everything is crashing.
I think this is basically wrong, because opportunities are time-sensitive. If a company is undervalued now, it's not obvious it will remain undervalued until the next cyclical downturn, and you pass up on the benefits of any market correction in the valuation of the undervalued company.
I do agree that it makes sense to invest coun...
Came across this discussion accidentally,
And that's why I think “repository” threads belong in Main. That would have been much less likely to happen if this thread had been in Discussion.
ISTM that the n-th percentile man is less attractive to women than the n-th percentile woman is to men (at least for n not very close to 100), and as a result has less ‘bargaining power’, if you will.
I think "getting dates" isn't the goal for most people. The question is whether you get into relationships with guys that fulfill your criteria of being good mates.
You're right, this is a different problem. Which is still unsolved for me.
If you are a pretty girl than many man are willing to chase you and wait some time till you are ready.
I have had a guy go to fairly epic lengths to do this. We had what I think most people would call an awesome relationship afterwards, and lived together for some time...but a year and a half later, when w...
If someone tells me: "I read about this free hug thing and then I tried it out", what does that tell me about the person? He's signalling that his adventurous and willing to do things that are a bit outside of the social norm that produce good feelings for other people.
I seem to have a vague recollection of someone in one of my social groups watching a video (or something) of some guy doing the free hugs thing, and commenting something to the effect that (loosely paraphrasing) he must be a loser pathetically looking for pretexts to convince gi...
If you manage to let go, move to the beat and visbily have fun while doing it you might be better than 50% of the people who do improvised dancing at a nightclub.
And if you manage to implement FizzBuzz in a couple minutes you might be better than 50% of the people who have a comp sci degree.
The standard threshold of non-crappiness is the 90th percentile, not the 50th... :-)
But the skills about interacting with women platonically aren't all of the skills about interacting with women romantically. The infamous so-called “friend-zone”, anyone?
The point is a good one. That said, as far as interacting with girls platonically goes dancing is rather far from the most emasculating influence.
I don't think it makes much sense to seperate skills into platonically/romantically.
If you look at some PUA who goes for a one-night stand "romantic" isn't the label I would use to describe the interaction. On the other hand it's a word that I could reasonable use to describe an intimite Bachata dance between two people who just meet.
The ability to be physically intimite with the opposing sex without getting tense is valuable.
In dance the man leads the woman. For a shy male that's a valuable skill to learn.
Dancing doesn't teach you everything. It doesn't teach you having good conversations. The things that it teaches you are still valuable.
Scrubbing and attention Scrubbing, the follow-up.
Short version: I have problems with scrubbing effectively because I miss spots and have to iterate cleaning several times. There's various advice about scrubbing, of which using hotter water and not using the curly metal scrubbie seem to be the most immediately valuable. What I think of as an attention problem may be less serious than I thought-- I need to proofread what I write, so the same may apply to cleaning.
Plausible advice I haven't tried yet-- approach cleaning in 30 minute chunks so that a feeling of accomplishment/completion is possible.
Could you give examples of comments (and appropriate contexts) in contexts other than your own home?
FYI, my wife's actual profile showed this; more precisely, IIRC it rated her as 44% Explorer, based on the traits given. It did not show what percentages the other 5 boxes broke down to, and I don't know whether those factors were also taken into account in the analysis. (I also don't know what precisely the percentage represents; i.e. is it a probability, a "percentage of your traits"...?)
Better, but still not good enough. If it is a mixture, what about the other 56%? Which 44% of the explorer traits? If it is a confidence level, the model do...
IOW, you're not providing any new useful information here.
I have stated my decision to defer to mainstream consensus in the face of, basically, very little that would leave me to doubt it.
For those who have an interest in the possible benefits of a blood type diet the wikipedia page is, as is often the case, a good place to get the basics. Particularly by following up on the references cited.
I personally am not going to investigate further, the mainstream position seems to be solid:
Nevertheless, the consensus among dieticians, physicians, and scientists is that the theory is unsupported by scientific evidence.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]
I'm going with that.
Is this a correct model, though?
I'm sure it isn't! But that's the fun of Fermi problems: reaching not-wildly-incorrect solutions by way of absurdly simplified & wrong models.
For example, I feel sure that if my 20 foot answer is too little, the lethal radius would still be less than 1 larger order of magnitude (200 feet), and if it's too much, that the lethal radius is still bigger than 1 smaller order (2 feet).
"Highly variable" is not particularly helpful but I suppose if it's true then there might not be much more to say.
Regarding variability:
Are you in a section of the library where talking is forbidden? Probably don't talk there unless you wish to flaunt rulebreaking.
Don't interrupt people when they are thoroughly engrossed in reading a book or look like they are fully focussed on getting their assignment finished by 5:30. Do talk to people if they look more relaxed or generally not busy.
"Obvious" kind of stuff, for a suitable value of...
Oh, pardon me. That was not particularly a serious recommendation. At least, not one that is likely to become relevant all that often. I was mostly being lighthearted so as to signal rapport with sixes as opposed to complete disagreement.
Well, look at the list: these people are eating (among other things) "...rodents, a large variety of birds, many types of insects, caterpillars, various fish, larvae, freshwater crabs, snakes, toads, frogs..." In other words, small animals.
The bottom line is that the Maillard reaction is not a modern superstimulus. It's not in the same class of things as a candy bar. It's a reaction that occurs naturally when meat is seared, not something like a Snickers bar that can only be created through a tremendous amount of artificial processing using moder...
I would say that the fact that browning meat (and vegetables) can accelerate aging is among the things that people should systematically learn before they become adults.
How much accelerated aging do you get per unit of tasting really really good? Do I stop browning meat before or after I consider it worthwhile to start a calorie restriction diet?
THE WHOLE CAR EXERIOR is negatively charged.
It's a matter of voltage, not charge. The negative terminal of the battery has lower voltage than the positive terminal. The car's metal frame is in contact with the negative terminal, so it's at that same voltage, even though it's still neutrally charged.
I bought some for someone else a matter of days ago (she's living kind of hand to mouth at the moment, so I sprung the cost for her,) but I didn't notice until after I placed the order that I had selected the highest available dosage, 10 mg per pill. Would it be best for her to start with fractions of a pill per night? Her sleep issues are pretty serious.
Also, there's nothing necessarily wrong with a brown or gray surface on meat.
I understand that. However, it's also correlated somewhat with the age of the meat (i.e. quantity of oxygen exposure), which is why I will smell such a piece more carefully than one without such a sign of age.
I do agree that exposure to harmful substances isn't all-or-nothing bad (while of course I reject most homeopathic-believers' views that small amounts of harmful substances are magical).
It sounds like you might be in danger of overgeneralizing from homeopathy to the h...
Unfortunately it only seems to be a social convention among those who consider it to be a social convention. :P
You may have misunderstood me.
Dvorak is probably worth learning. I'm saying that (except if you spend most of your time typing non-English text, e.g. some programming language that has much more typing time than thinking time), it's probably not worth finding a more optimal layout than Dvorak.
In fact, if you have examples of the types of text you most often type, you can find a nonstandard layout using computer optimization, which is what I was thinking of.
My rough view is that for typical English text, the efficiencies are:
- qwerty: 85%
- dvorak: 97%
- (all o
But there are ways of dealing with social stigma's psychological effects that aren't removing the source of the stigma or changing society.
Could you expand on that?
As I mentioned above, having people social proof you, taking drugs, taking acting classes, meditating, and giving yourself therapy are all techniques worth experimenting with.
I could probably write a post about how I give myself therapy, but it might be difficult because essentially my self-therapy methods amount to phrases that get triggered in certain situations that remind me that feeling unhappy is not the rational thing to feel. (Example phrases: "I can deal with this level of emotional discomfort." "I give you my permission not to think about that." "As an exercise, try to feel [insert emotion here]." "Work with what you have." "Take a risk." "If I could choose to do X, I likely would.") It might be hard for me to extract all of my heuristics, because they get ingrained over time. (E.g. I find myself using "work with what you have" less because as a result of using it, I've made progress in ingraining the principle of not feeling demoralized by setbacks.)
Come to think of it, this approach (mostly implemented subconsciously) has been so effective that I'm thinking it might be a good idea to conscious...
Are enough people doing the research?
Absolutely. You can not beat that market. There is too much money involved and more than enough people interested.
As someone with terrible skin problems, I've found Dove products to be among the worst for skin condit[i]ons.
Yeah, mileage varies a lot with this, because everyone with sensitive skin is sensitive to different things. My skin loves Dove but it won't work for everyone. The key point is to look for body wash products that are labeled "for sensitive skin."
I've read that the way most stylists are taught to cut curly hair is flat-out wrong - apparently, the standard method is optimized for being able to straighten the hair, rather than having curls that look good.
No, I'm not sure how strong the selection effects are. In fact it's seems certain that some selection effects exist, and I don't know how to estimate them. But the signal is so strong that I didn't think selection effects could explain all of it. It might be an interesting question to investigate. Presumably there are studies done on making out-of-shape people exercise. Military recruiting and training could also provide a lot of data.
The pot itself can't get hotter than boiling either, as long as there's a bunch of water in it. (This, btw, is how rice cookers detect when the rice is done.)
One thing that I have trouble with in the U.S. is how much information the police can compel me to give when stopped on the street. Unless you're operating a motor vehicle (or have some other special circumstance), you don't have to carry ID, but in many States, you do have to show it if you're carrying it, and you usually have to give your name and address regardless. Since this varies from State to State, the national ACLU information is vague, so check with your local branch.
Those who are concerned may be interested to know that Ivory Liquid Hand Soap (and, in all the stores I've visited lately, no other) is a brand of liquid soap which contains no antibacterial ingredients.
Furthermore, it at least used to have a slogan like "so gentle you can even use it on your face" — and it does not have the warning “keep out of eyes” that, as far as I know, all antibacterial soaps have — and I do in fact use it as a face and body wash.
Raw chicken liver was over the line though.
I'll admit I've never tried any organ meats; I've heard that there are non-ancestral contaminants we don't have the sensory machinery to detect and which accumulate more in animals' organs than in their flesh.
I've never really thought about it before, but I'm pretty sure I "just know" as well, in most cases. I think there's a bit of ambiguity from P through U, (if you asked me whether Q or T came first, I'd have to think about it for a second), so that suggests that certain parts of the alphabet are easier for my brain to sequence than others.
All I can suggest past that is to make a point of using the designations more often. It didn't really click for me until quite recently, either, but the only thing that seems even remotely likely to have triggered that click is that a project I was working on involved discussing some pictures with a friend, and I found myself having to actually think about whether X was to the left or the right of Y a few times a week for a couple months.
I would bet yes. Part of the problem is not knowing the tolerance range of the parameters. Like when does the precise timing matter and when does it not.
If you're not sure whether it's done, you can cut it open and have a look.
You should probably specify how one would actually visually distinguish done from not done. Or maybe not, it sounds like PeerInfinity already understands the basics of cooking. I don't, however. :)
The question, then, becomes how common useful home ec courses actually are. E.g. I had one of those back in middle school, but it was close to useless. IIRC, it consisted of cooking and sewing; the former half did nothing to actually explain cooking and so was useless to anyone who didn't already understand cooking, while the latter half seemed to successfully teach the basics (at least, I think I understand the basics) but isn't something I've ever really had reason to apply. (I think we also discussed nutrition some, but that was redundant as it was already covered in other classes.)
Any suggestions using the yellow pages would be highly appreciated. I never really got the hang of it. In fact, I used to be proudly ignorant of it, announcing to friends and family that I simply could not read the damn thing. This had the negative effect of making me never want to call the pizza place when friends would get together, which made me feel guilty enough that I would offer to pay more than an equal share when splitting the bill. Now that google exists, I find that I really don't need the phone book, but any useful tips would be appreciated.
Your dishwasher is not broken. You need to insert dish salt and rinse aid, then it will do its job well.
If you want to ride the cycles, shouldn't you just market-time the broad index of your choice? Picking "undervalued" companies to ride the cycles implies that you have two skills (which, I think, are mostly orthogonal) -- the stock-picking skill and the market-timing skill.
you dance frequently.
Actually these days I usually only dance once or twice a week, and sometimes even less than that.
If you try to handle your relationship with a woman on an abstract level instead of handling it on a emotional level
That's not what I meant. I meant ‘trade’ as in, the partners jointly trying to fulfil each other's wishes, rather than each one only thinking about themself. That doesn't require suppressing emotions.
that significantly decreases your pool of potential mates.
So what? We're talking about long-term relationships, not...
In focusing on the difference in what the man can do versus what the woman can do to fix the situation.
Er... Why? You realize that the man and the woman can communicate with each other, and thence ‘trade’ (in a LWesque general abstract sense)? If it would take months for me to achieve something but minutes for her to achieve the same, it'd be most daft for us to do the former. (And it feels off to call what you mentioned in the other thread ‘something the woman can do’ -- it's not like the man isn't playing any role; it sounds as weird to me as calling ...
I don't know how to make that interpretation compatible with, for example, Blueberry's claim that a straight cis male would not be attracted to a pre-op MtF, given that many sexual characteristics typical of women are present in a a pre-op MtF. (And, indeed, my understanding of the real world is that straight cis males are not infrequently attracted to pre-op trangender MtF people.)
But I would certainly agree that the claim that the "primary hurdle" for sexual attraction is the set of all sexual characteristics, both primary and secondary, is a much more sensible claim than the one I understood Blueberry to be making.
Or maybe I have other things to do with 15 minutes than hugging a random stranger. Opportunity costs, anyone?
That's a completely different objection than saying that the activity is boring. If you change around your objections in that way it's likely that you are in the process of rationalizing some fear of intimicy.
Yes, but wouldn't that apply more to improvised dancing than to beginners' dancing classes?
What do you mean when you say "improvised dancing"? Do you already have the skills to spend a significant amount of time dancing closely with a women in nightclub settings?
IME, dancing with someone doesn't magically make me that much bolder in non-dancing situations than I already was (I can even remember at least one case when it actually made me more awkward), and I'd expect the effect to be even smaller if we were made to dance together in a class than if we did so on our own accord.
You only had a few lessons and that alone doesn't have much of an effect on your interaction with woman in general.
...That would mainly teach me resistance to boredom (and it would likely kind-of make me look silly, though that's not necess
IOW, my point was that dancing doesn't necessarily lead to sex and sex isn't necessarily preceded by dancing -- especially the kind of dancing taught in classes
That's not something I argued.
If you take the average nerd and put him into physically intimicy with a girl he tenses up. It takes time and effort for him to relax.
Romantic chemistry that created in a dance context doesn't lead with the same probability to sex than the same chemistry outside of a dance context.
It's still romantic chemistry and when your brain learns to become comfortable with it ...
Knowledge that domestic robots will be a bigger thing than other people expect doesn't translate into having comparative advantage at producing domestic robots.
"I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. "
I need to learn almost all of that...and several other things.
How would someone in El Salvador legally move to Canada in no more than 3-4 years? How much money would that take and how does one find a job?
I tried looking at the newspaper for one but nearly all of it ...
The word "homonymous" takes care of itself in my case, since it's a word I'm familiar with already. The "hermianopia" bit is a not-quite-portmanteau of "hermione" and "opium".
If you mean that seriously, you're simply wrong; if it's meant to be humorous, meh. I won't downvote per my usual practice for replies, but I could understand why the others did.
I had two mishaps a few years ago. Once A blue pant that darkened a whole load of white shirts, another time a red one. The color wore off after a few washes, but I don't recommend it. Even if most items are fine, just one is enough to ruin a whole load of clothes.
Light-colored? Probably a kind of green, then; oolongs are usually pretty dark-colored (but on the other hand, greens can get bitter if they sit for a while).
You can wear shirt stays while walking barefoot if you leave the bottom disengaged, because the elastic pulls them up into your pantlegs. Also, there are different types. Some clip to your socks like they do to your shirt; some loop around the bottom of your foot. The latter type would be possible to wear completely engaged while (aside from that) barefoot, if you really wanted to. They also have the advantage of not leaving deep, red, itchy, clasp-shaped impressions in your ankles.
How do I clean carpet floors? (I mean regular maintenance, but tips on removing particular kinds of stains also welcome.) I don't have a vacuum cleaner.
Simple habit is to start using Names in conversation way more often. It feels a bit unnatural at first, but can help.
Ok - well on a related note... I find that I only like the taste of water if I'm actually thirsty... if I'm just drinking as a kind of fidgeting (or when some diet-book had told me I should "drink 8 cups a day") I hate the taste too.
YMMV, of course, but worth considering.
As to the "8 cups a day" - my aunt's a dietician and she says that the 8-cups is inclusive of the water that you consume via other sources (eg in your food or your morning cuppa joe)... whereas most diet books assume it's 8-cups on top of all your other dietary sources.
Having lived in Lincoln and enjoyed the nicely watery tap water, I think they're just looking for something to grouse about. You often see groups of people start to dislike something because the rest of the group speaks ill of it, in a positive feedback loop.
Water is mostly tasteless, so people's perceptions of its taste are especially sensitive to weird psychological stuff.
Not necessarily. There are a fair number of Christians who strongly self-identify as Christian but don't go to church that regularly (in the US at least there are some very weird patterns. People claim in surveys to be going to church much more frequently than church attendance rates suggest.) This also won't rule out other common religious groups, such as semi-religious Jews.
This reminds me of a story I heard of a comedian who really put the screws to a telemarketer.
The comedian pretended to be a detective investigating a homicide when the telemarketer called, and started grilling him about his relationship with the deceased (i.e. the comedian). He even went so far as to find out what city and office building the guy worked at, and told him not to move because local police would soon be on their way to pick him up for questioning.
It was hilarious, but incredibly mean. I wouldn't be too surprised if the telemarketer found himself a new job as soon as possible after that.
In that particular case I could see "you're welcome" being received oddly, since the social expectation is to thank the other person. That said "You're welcome - and thank YOU for your $GIFT" seems to work decently if it's, say, exchanging Christmas gifts.
I've generally gotten positive reactions to using "you're welcome". It might help that I have a voice that comes across as genuinely friendly and happy, and when I'm not genuinely feeling that way I won't use the phrase. I don't think I've ever seen someone react as though it...
From the post that you replied to:
Then LEARN HOW TO TYPE. And don't make an excuse for why you're a special snowflake who doesn't need to.
It's not that much extra effort
Try cutting up the meat with a bone knife that you make and sharpen yourself, instead of your metal store-bought knife, and skewering it on a stick you find that is strong enough to skewer the meat, but small enough not tear apart the small pieces of meat, instead of browning in a metal pan or skewering on a metal skewer, and then tell our hunter-gatherer ancestors that it's not that much extra effort.
if I ate more meat at the time I would have discovered the (substantial) effect much sooner.
That is speculation. What w...
This is not high technology: all you need is a knife, a stick, a fire, and some meat. I'm pretty sure the technique is about as old as cooking. It just wasn't until Maillard that people understood what was happening.
Yes, I was saying that I often find actual women, even those in non-sexual situations, even those wearing clothes on, more arousing than women in porn, depicted without clothes, in explicitly sexual positions and acts.
I hope that clears things up.
I can easily see where this might be an artifact of a relatively narrow porn sample; I'm not especially a connoisseur of porn.
U-shaped response curve, so it starts losing effectiveness & nasty headaches are the consequences of a melatonin overdose that I know of.
I didn't mean "...to have sex with." I meant actual women. Who can sometimes be arousing even if I'm not having sex with them. As can men. Others' mileage may, of course, vary.
Some pharmacies have begun to sell it, however the dosage can sometimes be ridiculously small. I got mine online. Possibly from cognitivenutrition.com. Maybe bulknutrition. The price was trivial. I got 3 mg capsules although I may perhaps get 1mg capsules if I buy again.
If it's worth anything to you, I'm studying for ACE certification in my off time. I have all the study materials, and anything I can't answer off the top of my head I can look up in the same reference books a certified professional would have.
Edit: only saw the local context, and interpreted it as a personal request for advice. I wouldn't presume to tackle Eliezer's issues from this side of the internet. Nothing Fucking Works cases are rarely truly intractable, but I wouldn't want to deal with one with armchair diagnostics.
Conditioner makes it softer, and (for me at least) easier to work with. Plus it moisturizes your hair, and helps detangle it.
Conditioner is important if you have any parts of your hair bleached (e.g. prior to coloring), to add moisture back.
I like the grooming questions especially.
Besides by keeping clean, how do I go about smelling nice? Who should and shouldn't wear perfume and cologne? What kind? How do you use it?
It won't melt, but depending on the type of plastic it might become too soft and flexible to be useful for vegetable smooshing. From experience, some types of plastic spoons become too soft to even support their own weight when placed in boiling water.
Desrtopa makes the main points below; I'd like to add:
For what it's worth, as irrational as religion is, I'm willing to bet that any atheist here has equally irrational ideas that they stick with.
Even accepting that premise, the difference is that I'm willing to update my map. If a religious person had the same willingness, ey already would no longer be religious.
One of the things that amused me about that report when I read it was realizing that while I am often aroused by actual women, most mainstream straight porn does nothing for me.
I can only assume that many straight men find porn more arousing than actual women, since the whole point of porn is to be a superstimulus, so there seems to be a difference there.
I am curious how you manage the cash in your wallet. I usually withdraw a fixed sum whenever it is empty, and pay some items by card, some by money. But I usually do not remember how much I carry.
Some peers have a super tight wallet where they basically care next to no cash at all, while others always have a healthy sum on their hand. Is there a preferred way to do it?
In that case, I wonder if it might not be worth it to date in the wider pool, with the aim of finding a woman who is open to deconverting. Generally it's a bad idea to enter a relationship hoping to change the other person, but religion has long been a sort of special case: a lot of LTRs do involve one party or the other converting or at least modifying their religious views.
That sounds like an exhausting process without a way to judge openness to atheism quickly. It seems like converting from one religion to another would be less jarring than dropping ...
Well, for S, most relationships end "badly" (in a breakup, at least), so I guess I'll ballpark that at 90 percent.
For B, I estimate that 34 percent of men presenting as bi are actually gay (going from this study.) I'll assume that a relationship with the other 66 percent of bi guys would have the same 90 percent failure rate as the S group, but that a relationship with one of the 34 would have a 100 percent failure rate. So B overall is 93.4.
It's only a few percentage points higher, yes, but the fact that S is already high doesn't do much to cha...
I don't understand what you're talking about. I eat the rice-a-roni red beans and rice almost daily. it is a box with dry beans, rice, and a packet full of spices.
I try to grab the far corners from the inside and sort of WHOOSH the cover over the duvet. I get tangled up in it! And I can never quite find the opposite corners! And I can never quite pull off that magical get-it-to-turn-itself-inside-out WHOOSH and suddenly it's done! Perfectly!
If I knew what I was doing wrong I would know how to do it right ...
"The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy...
Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted outside philosophy & they die if these roots decay...
These roots are easily forgotten by philosophers who 'study' philosophy instead of being forced into philosophy by the pressure of nonphilosophical problems."
--Karl Popper, Conjectures & Refutations, (pages 95-97)
Maxing out on push-ups every couple of days is good fitness advice, but using them as a proxy for general fitness is problematic: it's very easy to exchange form for higher repetitions when doing push-ups, especially if you're not working with a trainer or gym buddy. There's a built-in incentive to do this if you're using them to measure your fitness, and it's easy to do it unconsciously. Falling into this trap gives you a false indication of progress, and also limits the quality of the exercise: you need a full range of motion to engage all the muscle g...
alternatively you can add half a bouillon cube to increase satiety. it doesn't "need" meat in the nutrition sense.
Gaining weight: for all the string beans out there, there is one secret to gaining weight. Ready for it? Eat. Eat a lot. Eat all the time. I hindered my progress for years by not eating enough, and made my best progress when I was drinking a half gallon of whole milk a day. Also, if I didn't make this clear, you have to eat.
Lifting: Heavy compound movements should be the cornerstone of any hypertrophy program. Squats, deadlifts, bench press, overhead press, pullups, rows. (Google "squat exrx" to see demonstration and description of exercise.) Wh...
Dealerships can be evil. They may try to get you to agree to pay X dollars/month for N months without telling you what the total actually is. Bring a calculator and for Merlin's sake Read Before Signing Anything.
And remember that you can always just walk out of there and buy a car off craigslist. That's what I ended up doing.
I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)