If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Until LessWrong 2.0 comes out, this is how I've been staying in touch with the Rationalist Diaspora. It took about an hour to set up and I can now see almost everything in the one place.
I've been using an RSS reader (I use feedly) to collate RSS feeds from these lists,
Rationist Blogs,
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/List_of_Blogs
https://www.reddit.com/r/RationalistDiaspora/
Effective Altruist Blogs,
http://www.stafforini.com/blog/effective-altruism-blogs/
Rationalist Tumblers,
http://yxoque.tumblr.com/RationalistMasterlist
And using this twitter to RSS tool for these LessWrong Twitters,
http://lesswrong.com/lw/d92/less_wrong_on_twitter/
This system is unsatisfying in a number of ways the two most obvious to me being 1) I don't know of any way to integrate the Rationalists on Facebook into this system and 2) Upvotes from places that use them like LW or r/rational aren't displayed. Nevertheless it is still much simpler for me to be notified of new material. If anyone has suggestions on improvements or wants to share how they follow the Diaspora that'd be most welcome.
Not enough karma to post anywhere else so i guess i'll post this here. This is from a few days ago.
I'm currently a psychology undergrad and i was talking to a fellow student who had some odd symptoms.
I took out my notepad and jotted a few things down. "I don't necessarily lose consciousness, but when i'm going about my day, i suddenly find myself in a different place to what i had intended on going. Sort of like going into a sleep walking state during the day then snapping out of it a few moments later. For example if i'm walking somewhere like the kitchen, my brain seemingly shuts off and i find myself in the bathroom almost if i had teleported there. I'm not sure if it's some kind of sudden memory loss. It's like a split second loss of consciousness. like someone else is controlling me for a few seconds with me not realizing it. "
This happens to him apparently 2-3 time a day. He tells me he doesn't suffer from bad memory or amnesia. When i told him it's common to suddenly forget what you were doing for example I.E when talking to someone pouring liquid overflowing the glass. He told me he knew what that was and stated that it wasn't similar to what he was experie...
Possibly similar to absence seizures or complex partial seizures. This person should really be checking with a neurologist rather than a psychology undergrad.
On the recommendation of someone who may or may not wish to identify themselves publicly, I'm posting the contents of a private message I sent to them with regard to Gleb_Tsipursky, as they believe the ambiguity of what and why I was doing may be causing some people consternation/cause for alarm, and contributing to some overall negative feelings on Less Wrong, as my reasons for behaving the way I was weren't terribly transparent to some people.
"His pinging of my emotional immune system is, I'm pretty sure, a false alarm. I have no reason to disbelieve him when he professes to, effectively, be emulating a sociopath, particularly in light of how bad he is at it.
Most of the point of that lengthy 'attack' was in the exaggeration, as I wanted -Gleb- to know how he's taken, and he didn't react to my more subtle attempts to nudge his behavior; the purpose wasn't hostility for the sake of hostility, it was to try to get him to modify some of his behavior while giving him a redemptive path (not redeemed by me, but redeemed by his behavior; my role is that of the villain, providing an obstacle which requires him to overcome personal faults and which plays conveniently to his preexistin...
I don't like how people are talking about Gleb here where everybody involved knows that he reads it without much respect for that. I understand that it is necessary for this community to solve this out and in a way this community is good that using reflection and neutral point of view but still I'm not too happy how it is done. I'd wish somebody would say:
Hi Gleb, if you are reading this, I'm sorry that we didn't find a better way. We really want to solve this in a way that is OK for you and us.
As for the tension that Gleb brings (and actually some other newbies, including me too): I think this is a natural process for a community that is developing after some initial hype. People taking the seed elsewhere; the origin not having the same close-knit focus anymore. I'm OK with this and I think adjusting to it and making the best out of it is better than fighting (which has its own questionable trade-offs). So Gleb is just one example. I have seen this very process in the c2 forum almost exactly the same way (there I also arrived after the hype; c2 is defunct now; make of it what you want...).
I like Gleb's intention and I partly recognize myself. How do you expect somebody with ...
I suspect people feel he gives a negative impression of lesswrong. And he will not go away with downvotes. Trouble is that it's not just that we disagree with him; often he is behaving in ways that are, not even wrong. If he were doing something wrong, it would be simple to say, "that is something wrong; instead of doing wrong you should do right like X". By being uncannily off, we can't even help.
I recently decided to cut back my time on Facebook from several logins per day to once or twice a week. I used the following lifehack to tweak my own behavior:
I asked my girlfriend to come up with a random number X. Then, with her help, I changed my FB password to X+Y (string concat), where Y is a short pseudo-password I know. So now when I want to log into FB, I need to ask for her help. The trivial inconvenience prevents me from doing multiple daily "impulse" logins.
This past week gave me an example of my bipolar disorder in action.
A TV company announced they were open to story proposals. After a few weeks without ideas, I managed to come up with a story that sounded interesting to me. I spent the better part of a weekend at home writing the beginning of a plot outline, and felt extremely excited.
Then the week started and normal life resumed, and after the commute back home I didn't feel like writing anything. A few days later I deleted the folder I had created. I no longer saw any potential in it.
Part of the reason I...
After the survey I've become confused about what it means for HBD to be false. Should any difference between two separated populations be completely environmental? I believe it's an antiprediction to think it's not. I would bet that the "genetic potential" for any complex trait will be slightly different on average between different populations even if we are talking about two neighboring cities. Even if they started out as copies of each other just a few generations ago. I also believe that the differences are small and are mostly irrelevant to any real world problem. If it's HBD, how does a person argue that it's false? And how does someone argue that believing it makes someone a bad person?
So we should solve this question empirically
This question is solved empirically. If you look at the data it's really obvious. There is NO serious research which claims that all populations have essentially the same IQ.
Humanity split from our common origin about 10000 years ago.
You're off by an order of magnitude or so.
Some time ago there has been a post (or a comment?) arguing against the tendency of not answering the questions one poses directly. Say for example: "Can you recommend me a book about virtue ethics?" being answered mostly by "Here's why virtue ethics is wrong" (this is a fictional example, it was not in the original post).
The discussion hit me deeply because from that time on I've noticed doing the same behavior a lot, and I've tried to correct myself with mixed success.
I've come to realize that there's a symmetryc 'bias' (it's not real...
I've been preparing for coding interviews, and I realized that the skill had gotten "rusty" from disuse. A specific example is coding a binary search, which is a little nontrivial because you have to think carefully to avoid off-by-one errors.
When people talk about old skills they talk about them in two ways: some skills you can supposedly never forget, like riding a bike, Some others can get rusty, so you need to keep brushing them up over and over again.
Neither of these seems actually true. I think it's more like the exponential forgetting cur...
Related to Disguised Queries:
Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology by Nick Haslam
...Many of psychology's concepts have undergone semantic shifts in recent years. These conceptual changes follow a consistent trend. Concepts that refer to the negative aspects of human experience and behavior have expanded their meanings so that they now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before. This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to cap
I've been reading a lot of Robin Hanson lately and I'm curious at how other people parse his statements about status. Hanson often says something along the lines of: "X isn't about what you thought. X is about status."
I've been parsing this as: "You were incorrect in your prior understanding of what components make up X. Somewhere between 20% and 99% of X is actually made up of status. This has important consequences."
Does this match up to how you parse his statements?
edit
To clarify: I don't usually think anything is just about one thin...
Amazon famously found that 100ms faster page generation increased sales by 1%. It seems like this mechanism should also be able to used in the other direction. People who want to use facebook less often might benefit from increasing page-loading time on facebook by 1 second.
Is there any existing program that can do this? The program could also be configured in a way that allows automatically raising the lag if you spent more than 15 minutes at facebook.
Has anyone developed a quantitative theory of personal finance in the following sense?
Most money advice falls back on rules of thumb; I'm looking for an approach that's made-up numbers all the way down.
The main idea would be to express utility as a function of financial quantities; an obvious candidate would be utility per unit time equals the log of money spent per unit time, making sure to count things like imputed rent on owned property as spending. Once you have that, there's an exact answer to the optimal risk/reward tradeoff in investments, how much to save/borrow, etc.
Inspired by the recent post of Kaj Sotala, I ask myself: is any kind of meta-goal a convergent instrumental goal? If so, isn't any kind of meta-meta-goal convergent instrumental for the meta-goal?
Does this create a Zeno effect of AI motivation, trying to achieve more and more meta goals?
You can try soliciting people's relative weighting of items on the PERMA model to learn lots more about them.
as a new, yet undoctrinated researcher, I feel it is my duty to further investigate my leturers recent comments that suggest there are publishing biases against plainly reported the results of her tobacco research when they go against the mainstream opinion.
I tried to publish a jo
I've been thinking of how to build on the #LessWrongMoreNice idea while taking some criticisms into account, and thought about something that seems to only have upsides - namely, creating a Gratitude thread. It would make the overall tone of LW more positive, without impeding the honest criticism. There's a lot of research showing that expressing gratitude improves mental and physical health. Thoughts?
I appreciate your efforts, but I need to point out that I am strongly opposed to this sort of idea, and anything else that explicitly turns LW into group therapy.
Introducing niceness into discussions on LW is not the same as changing the topic of discussions away from where it belongs, which is epistemic and instrumental rationality.
The discussion of how to use expressing gratitude to improve mental health, and how effective it is for LW folk, definitely belongs to LW. However creating an object-level gratitude thread feels like a step in the wrong direction (or at least, it seems sensible to keep it as a sub-thread in the open thread).
#LessWrongMoreNice
The question was: "115. How would you describe your opinion of the idea of "human biodiversity", as you understand the term? No Wiki page available, but essentially it is the belief that there are important genetic differences between human populations and that therefore ideas generally considered racist, such as different races having different average intelligence or personality traits, are in fact scientifically justified".
No matter how we clusterize people into races, unless it's some kind of a good randomization procedure I think the probability of their average traits being exactly equal is really small. I'm much less sure it's scientifically justified to say so as I don't know much about the state of research there.
I maybe kind of missed the "important" word there. Still...
Scientific debates are never about whether two groups are "exactly equal". The notion that the question is about whether something is "exactly equal" ignores the core about what the debate is about.
Important is indeed an important word in the sentence.
When trying to understand writing, don't go for the strawman. Try to understand what could be mea... (read more)