This seemed to me like a long way of saying that "many people believe that they can control others when they can't". I want to know what the OP thinks of this.
(And also the belief "you can't make yourself like anything", in the case of the person feeling guilty about unproductiveness.)
Things that still confuse me:
This is important to me because it's central to some rationality research I'm doing currently.
Registering that I think "[entropy] can be used to explain the arrow of time" is bunk (I've linked 4:50, but see particularly the animation at 5:49): entropy works to explain the arrow of time only if we assume a low-entropy initial state (eg the big bang) in the past
Edit: Oh hm maybe the description isn't "time moves forward" but "time moves away from the big bang"
I REALLY liked this. A few years ago I scoured the internet trying to find a good conceptual explanation of entropy, and I couldn't find any. This is by far the best that I've seen. I'm glad you made it!
yeah, it doesn't seem like the Rationalist spirit to be hindered by this though :/
ahh
huh, you have large estimates
anyways thanks for the aella link
I'm a bit hungry for ... the thing that bidets are a metaphor for, here? Like, I think there's an interesting object-level question about the adoption of (almost strictly) superior ways-of-being, but I'm more curious about something like "what does the non-adoption of bidets tell us about how we are probably thinking and behaving sub-optimally elsewhere?"
That's the post that I wanted to write, actually— but I wasn't sure how to do it without being too aggressive
Is that because you simulate that there might be backwash back into the spigot?
I've been to many Rat&EA group houses, offices, and other venues both official and unofficial around the Bay Area, and I can't recall ever seeing a bidet. And because I think bidets are superior technology, this is pretty confusing to me. Why might this be?
Well, bidet attachments can be retrofitted onto nearly any toilet for ~$35 (e.g. see amazon). They aren't difficult to install either, taking only a wrench and less than 20 minutes of time. (I've done it myself once or twice.) And because they can be installed as just an attachment onto an existing toilet, they don't take up any... (read 330 more words →)
"Omicorn" was a really funny mispelling
Maybe you already thought of this, but it might be a nice project for someone to take the unfinished drafts you've published, talk to you, and then clean them up for you. Apprentice/student kind of thing. (I'm not personally interested in this, though.)