So raise your glass if you are wrong in all the right ways!
(Epistemic status: frivolous wordplay on the different meanings of "wrong.")
There were sixteen other students in the class. For all we know, theses about fun things could have been in the majority.
Yeah, maybe.
If you accept what I wrote in the GP, where do you see a contradiction in the four statements? And if you don't, could you try to articulate why?
No, no I don't think you had a contradiction either. I was just saying that you could do the same thing with "fun." And maybe other kids did, as you say.
I want to climb a mountain, not so I can get to the top, but because I want to hang out at base camp. That seems fun as shit. You sleep in a colorful tent, grow a beard, drink hot chocolate, walk around... ‘Hey, you going to the top?’ . . . ‘Soon.’
One of the replies there is,
@RachelHaywire diverse sci/astro ppl I follow, male+female believe far more women driven from phys sci by harassment than men by geekshaming.
Reminds me of Twain's comparison of the two Reigns of Terror.
Edit: Not to mention that we didn't lose Matt Taylor. He still has the same job as a scientist with the ESA.
An escalator can never break -- it can only become stairs. You should never see an "Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order" sign, just "Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience. We apologize for the fact that you can still get up there."
Some people seem terribly smug about being right about one thing. It makes me wonder if this is, in fact, the only thing they’ve ever gotten right in their whole lives.
For GiveWell in particular, if you do not believe they can do this, why do you think they can evaluate other charities' effectiveness?
Yeah, I think that's right. I'm the same as people who don't want to give to charities who have too much "overhead," leading to perverse incentives, as you say. GiveWell itself can be looked at as overhead for the charities it recommends, even though technically it's a different organization. As such they deserve to be supported too.
Will click "Unrestricted" in the future.
Right, but we don't think of a tennis ball falling in a vacuum as gaining thermal energy or rising in temperature. It is "only" gaining mechanical kinetic energy; a high school student would say that "this is not a thermal energy problem," even though the ball does have an average kinetic energy (kinetic energy, divided by 1 ball). But if temperature of something that we do think of as hot is just average kinetic energy, then there is a sense in which the entire universe is "not a thermal energy problem."
When you go to GiveWell's Donate page, one of the questions is,
How should we use your gift? We may use unrestricted gifts to support our operations or to make grants, at our discretion:
And you can choose the options:
Grants to recommended charities
Unrestricted donation
I notice I'm reluctant to pick "Unrestricted," fearing my donation might be "wasted" on GiveWell's operations, instead of going right to the charity. But that seems kind of strange. Choosing "Unrestricted" gives GiveWell strictly more options than choo...
An alternate phrasing (which I think makes it clearer) would be: "the distinction between mechanical and thermal energy is in the mind, and because we associate temperature with thermal but not mechanical energy, it follows that two observers of the same system can interpret it as having two different temperatures without inconsistency."
In other words, if you fall into the sun, your atoms will be strewn far and wide, yes, but your atoms will be equally strewn far and wide if you fall into an ice-cold mechanical woodchipper. The distinction between the types of energy used for the scattering process is what is subjective.
Whether this is intentional is not clear to me, probably not.
I think it was intentional -- other characters frequently remark on how dumb she is. My impression is that Swan's character was some kind of artistic/political statement by Robinson -- that the adventures of a screwed-up, clueless person are just as valid and meaningful as those of more traditional heroes, or something. I wasn't too impressed by this, but the book's worldbuilding was amazing and that made up for everything else.
When you get to a fork in the road, take it.
(I will keep doing this. I have no shame.)
I just finished Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, which I bought because of this review on Slate Star Codex. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting mix of history and fiction about the Soviet Union in the late 1950's and early 1960's, when it was actually plausible to hope that politicians and scientists could get central planning right and build an economy that provided a first-world standard of living to everyone. (Spoiler alert) it doesn't work out, and Red Plenty gives you a good look at how and why it failed.
I'm not usually a person given to inte...
Can I ask a silly question? My understanding of your situation is that you want to get your work done, but sometimes you don't have the willpower, so you use your M&M system for motivation. But then you are faced with the possibility of just eating a bunch of M&M's without doing anything. And there is no meta-M&M system to motivate you to keep from eating M&M's. So I don't see how this can actually help you. Empirically, it clearly does, but I have trouble understanding how. Why is it easier to keep from eating M&M's "on your own&q...
Hang on. I'm a "group" of sapients (a group of one, but a group). Everyone else is another group. Are you saying that I will never be convinced, or should never be convinced, by moral philosophy written by someone else?
And why call the assertions arbitrary? The humans in the story seem to share axioms like "pain is bad, cet par" with the Martians. Neither side is Clippy here.
Recruit the subset of rare humans who enjoy green tickling and employ them as tickling punchbags for green Martians to practice on.
The laws of Earth prohibit tickling for pay. Interestingly, the laws of Earth do not prohibit paying a Martian and a human actor to act as if the Martian is zapping the human's brain with a ray gun (which in real life is way worse than tickling, even by a green Martian, and which no humans or Martians actually enjoy doing) and then selling the video. It's weird. [ETA: I misunderstood the analogy. Doing experiments on the mot...
...In times like these I really have to wonder why it's never (or at least rarely, to my eye) stressed that self-awareness is probably the single most important component of a healthy life. We're constantly handed very specific definitions of good behavior, complex moral and legal codes, questionable social constructs, and so on. I don't remember ever really being told to take a step back--to step back as far as possible--and look constructively at myself. But increasingly I feel that the only dividing line between being "that guy" and being a net
An old Ikea commercial gives an amusing example of the difference between fuzzies and utilons:
...One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans don't make any sense, and I don't feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what's going on?"
"Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people
Well, here at LessWrong, we follow a thirty-something bearded Jewish guy who, along with a small group of disciples, has performed seemingly impossible deeds, preaches in parables, plans to rise from the dead and bring with him as many of us as he can, defeat evil, and create a paradise where we can all live happily forever.
So yeah, getting away from Catholic habits of thought may be tough. With work, you'll get there though...
(Edited to add context)
Context: The speakers work for a railroad. An important customer has just fired them in favor of a competitor, the Phoenix-Durango Railroad.
Jim Taggart [Company president, antagonist]: "What does he expect? That we drop all our other shippers, sacrifice the interests of the whole country and give him all our trains?"
Eddie Willers [Junior exec, sympathetic character]: "Why, no. He doesn't expect anything. He just deals with the Phoenix-Durango."
It gets at the idea talked about here sometimes th...
Yes, my mistake, it was indeed the pole piece. Not something that's supposed to be in close proximity like with an AFM. If I had broken an AFM tip it would've been less of a problem, because those are expected to wear out every so often.
It was a few years ago, but I remember that we were doing e-beam lithography, and that did make it necessary to move the stage around. I think the idea was that our circuit was pre-drawn using software, after which we could just put the diagram into the SEM computer and it would scan around and draw the pattern we wanted. B...
I once crashed the scanning tip of a scanning electron microscope into the sample when my attention wandered for a few seconds while I was adjusting the focus. The lab techs had made it very, very clear to me beforehand that I was never to let the tip and sample get less than a few centimeters (I forget the exact value, but it was specified) apart, because the scanning tip was very expensive and fragile. My moment of inattention ended up costing the lab $10,000, and me any possible friendships with the lab staff.
One lesson is, "Be careful!" but t...
Today is the thirty-fourth anniversary of the official certification that smallpox had been eradicated worldwide. From Wikipedia,
...The global eradication of smallpox was certified, based on intense verification activities in countries, by a commission of eminent scientists on 9 December 1979 and subsequently endorsed by the World Health Assembly on 8 May 1980. The first two sentences of the resolution read:
Having considered the development and results of the global program on smallpox eradication initiated by WHO in 1958 and intensified since 1967 … Decl
The virus currently only still exists as samples in two freezers in two labs (known to the scientific community). These days I think that that is overkill even for research purposes for this pathogen, what with the genome sequenced and the ability to synthesize arbitrary sequences artificially. If you absolutely must have part of it for research make that piece again from scratch. Consign the rest of the whole infectious replication-competent particles to the furnace where they belong.
EDIT: I found a paper in which smallpox DNA was extracted and viruses o...
This deserves some music:
...Old King Plague is dead,
the smallpox plague is dead,
no more children dying hard
no more cripples living scarred
with the marks of the devil's kiss,
we still may die of other things
but we will not die of this.Raise your glasses high
for all who will not die
to all the doctors, nurses too
to all the lab technician who
drove it into the ground
if the whole UN does nothing else
it cut this terror down.But scarce the headlines said,
the ancient plague was dead,
then they were filled with weapons new
toxic waste and herpes too,
and the AIDS sc
I expect them to be less mindkilled than they seem.
(Nods) that's really what I was trying to say, yeah.
Also it's worth an NB that the AAT only applies to epistemic agreement, right? It doesn't prevent groups from competing over resources: we agree that the pie is tasty, which is precisely why we're fighting over it. Of course if you're committed to fighting, then screwing with your enemy's, and partially-committed ally's, models of the world is a valid combat tactic.
Probably an obvious point: epistemically that's an error, but politically it's probably an indispensable tactic. Say you do an honest and perfectly reliable utilitarian analysis, and find that chimpanzees really should not be used in research; the real substantial medical advances are not worth their suffering. But frustratingly the powers that be don't care about chimps as much as they should. Your only hope is to convince them that chimp-using research is nearly useless to humans, so that even their undersized compassion for chimps will convince them to ...
I agree in principle, but I have basically no confidence in my ability to figure out what to do to help people in the future. There are two obstacles: random error and bias. Random error, because predicting the future is hard. And bias, because any policy I decide I like could be justified as being good for the future people, and that assertion couldn't be refuted easily. The promise of helping even an enormous number of people in the future amounts to Pascal's Wager, where donating to this or that charity or working on this or that research is like choosi...
This isn't a paradox, the bomb will go off no matter what, assuming Omega is a perfect predictor.
Amusingly, this wouldn't seem like a paradox if something good was guaranteed to happen if Omega guessed right. Like if the problem was that you're locked in a box, and you can only avoid getting a million dollars if you do the opposite of what Omega predicts. Answer: "cool, I get a million dollars!" and you stop thinking. In the problem as stated, you're casting about for an answer that doesn't seem possible, and that feels like thinking about paradoxes, so you think the problem is a paradox. It isn't. You're just trapped in a box with a bomb.
I've had that conversation with a few people over the years, and I conclude that it does for some people and not others. The ones for whom it doesn't generally seem to think of it as a piece of misdirection, in which Dennett answers in great detail a different question than the one that was being asked. (It's not entirely clear to me what question they think he answers instead.)
That said, it's a pretty fun read. If the subject interests you, I'd recommend sitting down and writing out as clearly as you can what it is you find mysterious about subjective experience, and then reading the book and seeing if it answers, or at least addresses, that question.
...Stepan Arkadyevitch subscribed to a liberal paper, and read it. It was not extreme in those views, but advocated those principles the majority held. And though he was not really interested in science or art or politics, he strongly adhered to such views on all those subjects as the majority, including his paper, advocated, and he changed them only when the majority changed them; or more correctly, he did not change them, but they themselves imperceptibly changed in him.
Stepan Arkadyevitch never chose principles or opinions, but these principles and opinio
Stepan is a smart chap. He has realized (perhaps unconsciously)
and so has outsourced them to a liberal paper.
One might compare it to hiring a fashion consultant... except it's cheap to boot!
You left off the most important point. If you think a topic is important and that someone smarter than you is already working on it, it would seem like your best move is to try and help.
Maybe they already have good lab assistants, and the best way for you to help is to work at the coffee shop that gives them their afternoon caffeine jolt, or the nuclear plant that powers their lab, or the daycare where their kids go -- in other words, have a normal job in the non-research economy. Those kinds of jobs are absolutely necessary to support more blue-sky stuff, so many people will have to do them. Why assume you are so much smarter than that entire group?