I highly recommend Robert Alter's translation in "The Wisdom Books," if you're interested in reading it.
...What the Great Learning teaches is: to illustrate illustrious virtue; to renovate the people; and to rest in the highest excellence.
The point where to rest being known, the object of pursuit is then determined; and, that being determined, a calm unperturbedness may be attained to.
To that calmness there will succeed a tranquil repose. In that repose there may be careful deliberation, and that deliberation will be followed by the attainment of the desired end.
The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the world, first ordered well t
You are telling me I am wrong, but it is not helpful to me unless you explain why I am wrong.
I thought it made sense. As far as I could tell, the original parable has a miser with two desires: the desire for delicious booze and the desire to save money. The latter desire is by far the more important one to him, so he "fools" his desire for booze by promising himself a booze reward, and then reneging on himself each time. In my interpretation, this still results in an overall positive effect for self-discipline, because the happiness of saving ...
I don't think you are correct.
The miser knows each time he will not get the reward, and that he will save on food and drink. That is the real reward, and the rest is a kabuki play he puts on for less-important impulses, to temporarily allow him to restrain them in service of his larger goal. The end pleasure of savings will provide strong positive reinforcement.
This could probably be empirically tested, to see if it is true and would work as a technique. I can imagine a test where someone is promised candy, and anticipates it while acting to fulfill a t...
The miser knows each time he will not get the reward, and that he will save on food and drink. That is the real reward,
Also, don't forget his pleasure at successfully tricking himself. ;-)
This seems rather a separate issue, especially since you admit that your choice of "cyborg food" only happened to be vegan. You're an accidental vegan. Next week, you might discover that a powder made from lamb faces had more bio-available iron, and that'd be the end of that.
Unrelated: The Accidental Vegan also sounds like the most boring movie imaginable.
Tofu is a good choice, and can be used in many ways. One secret to tofu is to pay attention to the amount of water in the tofu, as that seriously changes the way it tastes, feels, and acts in dishes. For example, when you are making a stew with tofu, such as the spicy and delicious Korean soup kimchi jiggae, you probably want to choose silken tofu, which is soft and will interact well with the rich broth. But if you are making something like McFoo, a tofu sandwich where you marinate the tofu in select spices until it tastes like junk food, then you want...
I like to think about initial application of this sentence.
"How old is this bread? A week? You fool! Look at how sick he is! Get some two-week bread immediately, and feed it to him as fast as you can! NO TIME FOR CHEWING."
As a newcomer who has never been to a meetup - an outsider - I assure you that you are right. It seems surprisingly cultish. I say "surprisingly" because I would never have imagined that LWers would attempt to ape religion and chain awe at the numinous to a specific set of rituals. I suppose in retrospect there is ample precedent, because certainly the Twelve Virtues and the litanies are pseudo-religious (presumably to lend them gravity), but... yipes!
It will probably save time to look at recent research, which might be flawed but might also help answer some immediate questions. This might be a start; I'd quote and comment, but I broke my arm recently and typing is difficult.
This seems to me like the best way to do it. I am sure it has been proposed before that downvoting cost a point of karma; why was this alternative not taken? Technical considerations, perhaps?
This careful reconsideration of the subject, subsequent apology, and declaration of an intent to change your behavior are admirable - and a bit ironic, in this situation.
The socialization of children into gender roles of conciliation and confrontation begins very early, as can be seen in a study by Clearfield and Nelson. Accordingly, it is not surprising (and jibes with our common sense) to note that men and women tend to respond to challenges in different ways. I think it's probably too broad to say that men "always" resort to violence "immediately," which seems like a deliberately weak phrasing. Rather, I'd say that men and women find different solutions, because of their different perspectives.
I can't testify as to the actual value of the planting or whether or not this was necessarily the best plan. There are probably many more plans that would be better, including giving them a gold coin. Or perhaps the farmers in the magical world of dark elves who make armed sorties against impoverished serfs could have been better served by a political upheaval and the installation of democracy. Or maybe because the farmers plant only the magical dubbleboo bean, they would have been able to reap a harvest only if they planted before the next evening's fu...
The plan was to sow one field and then kill the dark elves, as far as I can tell. I agree that it would not have been a good idea to just plow their field, since obviously that was what had already not been working, but it also seems to me like a very perceptive insight to realize that even if the elves were killed, the already-emaciated farmers might still die without help on the farm. It's also an insight that appears, within the story, to have derived from the presence of an alternative viewpoint.
Why would plowing one field make a difference to their survival or death? Especially when plowing one field is taking up time to the detriment of going after the dark elves. Indeed, if they cared about the farmers, wouldn't a cash transfer make infinitely more sense? No, this looks like the usual signaling about caring: "but they care so much, they even went and plowed a field to help them out!" (As opposed to working on the real problem, or giving them a gold coin which is probably worth several fields of food given the medieval setting and also doesn't have the minor problem of it likely failing anyway since it's going to be plowed by complete amateurs with broken equipment at the wrong time...)
Some of these anecdotes really illustrate the loss suffered when a group is insufficiently diverse. This one in particular struck me as a demonstration of the high value of a range of perspectives:
...On this afternoon, our characters are venturing into the countryside and come across two emaciated farmers who tell us their fields are unplowed because dark elves from the forest keep attacking them. “They're going to starve if they don't get a crop in the ground,” I declare. “We've got to plow at least one field.” The boys go along with this plan. ...
“It's r
All too often, people focus on how gender discrimination is unfair to those who are excluded or minimized, but it's also a loss to the group and its goals as a whole.
I don't see how this story has anything to do with gender discrimination, unless it's trying to reinforce some stereotype of "Women can come up with peaceful solutions to problems, but men always resort to violence immediately."
Plow one of their fields, and you might feed some of them for some time (if they can get some more farming done in between attacks). Kill their dark elves, and they can feed themselves just fine.
I'd call that reasoning the epitome of shortsightedness; but the DM should've been more flexible and let you plow their field and later contrive a way for your party to learn that the crop failed anyway and everyone was killed or enslaved or starved to death.
This story struck me more as an indication of a really bad DM than anything gender related. If I were running a campaign where players stopped to try to actually help plow, I'd be really happy with them. Of course, in my own campaign world, I've also set up a complicated tea culture with some of the high noble families trying to out-do each other by finding expensive teas from exotic locales to show off. So I may not be very representative.
I will reply there. Thank you.
To the extent you can agree on a test for race, it will be useful for prediction. Obviously some tests (actual genetic heritage) will be more interesting that others "lol what's ur skin color".
I would suggest that most people do have a common test for race. It is something along the lines of, "To what extent does this person match a small set of specific physical characteristics?" For someone to be "black" in many places in modern America, it means that their skin tone is relatively dark, their lips are big, their nose is...
Finishing his degree is probably the best thing he can do, and so this is good advice. You get very little from having "some college," whereas a college degree (of any sort, regardless of whether he thinks it will be useful) is an indicator of social status and a proven ability to meet deadlines and requirements. I would suggest that directly contacting the school, emphasizing his disability, may make them amenable to working out some sort of distance learning to finish this final credit. The best way to achieve this would be to call them on t...
What do you mean by "race?" I notice a lot of discussion below on this topic already, but the term is unclear to me, and I don't see how anyone can usefully disagree or agree without this information. Some people use "race" to indicate loose groupings based around skin color, whereas others mean much more strictly a specific genetic group.
Incidentally, there is no canonical "race," just generally-agreed upon loose labels that vary from person to person. Because of this, it is generally not useful for predicting anything, an...
It seems to me that the most obvious way to demonstrate the brilliance and excellent outcomes of the applied math of optimization would be to generate large sums of money, rather than seeking endorsements.
The Singularity Institute could begin this at no cost (beyond opportunity cost of staff time) by employing the techniques of rationality in a fake market, for example, if stock opportunities were the chosen venue. After a few months of fake profits, SI could set them up with $1,000. If that kept growing, then a larger investment could be considered.
This...
Howdy. My name is Alexander. I've read a lot of LW, but only recently finally registered. I learned about LW from RationalWiki, where I am a mod. I have read most of the sequences, and many of them are insightful, although I am skeptical about the utility of such posts as the Twelve Virtues, which seeks to clothe a bit of good advice in the voluminous trappings of myth. HPMOR is also good. I don't anticipate engaging in much serious criticism of these things, however, because I have little experience in the sciences or mathematics, and often struggle...
That would be wonderful, world-changing, and unlikely. I hope but do not expect to see it happen.