All of cozy's Comments + Replies

cozy20

Okay, now that I have already made the mistake of accidentally clicking the subdued manila submit surrounded submit button, let's go read the original article this is referencing as the ban.

He also wrote this. Hugh Vickery, that is. He is secretary of the interior now. So this article was April 22nd, 1988. Then, there was another article about the Aloha Airlines flight that crashed. That was written on May 11th. And finally, there is the quoted article about the recent ban on May 27th. Now, I want to specifically focus on what I pretty much presumed. I fea... (read more)

cozy60

Warning: autobiography and emotions ahead, I have to disclaimer this due to the anxiety I will describe later, or else I will feel I'm wasting someone's time. Thank you for understanding.

From early on I learned to hate money and especially business transactions regarding debt or interest. It felt very, very wrong. I early on chose to take the mantle of "never give a loan if you will be perturbed or think less of someone should they not be able to repay it, and if you do need to take, then pay it forward tenfold. Most of all, never expect th... (read more)

cozy10
I think you usually can try to parry most of these by doubling down. "In his steps, I sure wish to find myself having the courage to breaking that racist, unfair, law". "I don't care what you call it, I wouldn't let children suffer from a disease just because the way you want to name my cure". 
The trick is to push back hard enough that you're not just defending from an accusation of something bad, you are re-establishing that your position is good. If he wants to pursue that line, you are now the one attacking his st
... (read more)
cozy10

I gotta say, much too late to the punch here and nine years wiser, the 'not sexist' parts of these posts really do not age well, though many might not have caught the trend yet. The problem isn't that women, or whomever, want to be considered the same entirely physically and biologically. It's always been that, as some stark assumption, no attempt is ever made to proffer equal time or attention. There is a great amount of time and research that could be made and would reveal a great deal of knowledge in our history and the anthropologic... (read more)

cozy10

I was writing something like this, like, a list of an order of subjects and reading materials to be basically competent at knowing how to further your understanding and be able to clarify specifics in a subject, any subject, merely from exposure and a wide breadth of surveys.


It's absolutely impossible without just broadly missing subtopics and context.

For instance, to comprehend the development of mathematics properly, you also need a highly detailed understanding of history.

To understand linguistics, you need the same.

To understand.. well, to be ho... (read more)

cozy30

I... wrote a big comment but I wasn't logged in

I'm very sad.

Anyway, I agree. I lived my whole life hating money due to 2007 and my family's collapse, and it being entirely because we were reliant on decadence.

All it did was limit my influence liquidity, so to speak. And my comfort. I can't even focus on writing an opinion piece or writing a meta-analysis without being concerned over food, sleep, tomorrow, or my family. It's hugely distracting.


A few months ago I decided to change that around. Now I've started to be profitabl... (read more)

cozy30
Here is the gist: we trust the data as much as we trust the source, regardless of how much the source trusts the data.

Rant incoming, apologies. This is, sadly, not correct from the get-go. In general, besides your example which more closely is attributed to some form of psychological bias, we tend to lend source importance based on the lack of trust from a source. However, that implies there is any source vetting whatsoever.


I am sure there are a number of individuals here who have worked intelligence, and I am lucky enough to have both worked intelligen... (read more)

4Shmi
I think we are talking about different phenomena here. My point is that, if an average person trusts a source, they tend to assume that the validity of the data are the same as the validity of the source (high!) even if the source themselves takes their own data with the grain of salt, and advises others to do so. You are not an average person by any means, so your approach is different, and much better.  My personal experience with anything published is that it is 50% lie and 50% exaggeration. And yet I still rely on the news to get a picture of something I have no first-hand access to. But that's the usual Gell-Mann amnesia. I am describing something different: forgetting to account of the source's own uncertainty even if it is spelled out (like in the case of potential life artifacts on Venus) or easily queried or checked (e.g. for a stock tip from a trusted source: "how much did you personally invest in it based on your data?").
cozy170

It sounds like you have hit a stale point in your journey. Your book list is not very stark. It generally trends into a certain sort of person, the sort of person you do not want to learn from. I would guess because you already agree with most of it, and so you'd rather just write it yourself.


That's reasonable, I understand, and I have written a good volume of work that will never see day because of this. However, I do have a solution if you will try it.

Take a specific belief you have. Ethical, political, scientific, you name it- something you t... (read more)

2lsusr
This feedback makes sense in the context of what I wrote. I'm going to provide broader context which didn't make it into the original post. My reading is cyclical. The books I read in any given year indeed tend to be quite narrow. Some years I read lots of science fiction. Another year was about spirituality. In previous years I've read Heart of Darkness, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 1984, Ancillary Justice, The Little Prince, The Wealth of Nations, Goodbye Darkness, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, Steal Like an Artist, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, Arabian Sands, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, The Fault in Our Stars, Guerilla Warfare and The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Technical books don't show up on this list either because I tend not to read them cover-to-cover. The same goes for other books I've tried out without finishing such as Pride and Prejudice, Mere Christianity, Hard Choices, Twilight, Quotations from Chairman Mao and the 1911 Boy Scout Handbook. My scientific research with commercial applications doesn't get posted to this blog either. I'm slowly working my way through Sunzi's The Art of War. This bodes well with your recommendation to read old writings and translate difficult concepts. We may be on the same page here. I've also cracked open a D&D book. Your comment is helpful in encouraging me to continue.
cozy90

How does this differ from PredictionBook besides being a much more pleasing interface and actually used for reasonable things (and also the nice embedding)?


Oh, I guess I just explained how.

Really nice site I like it.

cozy00

Apologies for replying to this so much later.


And in a market where a price is either too low or too high, 'reversed stupidity' is intelligence...

This is exactly why I did not get into btc so long ago, and I was in those circles, but not a good tech or economist and considered it a flavor of the month, then a flavor of the year for black markets. And THIS is how I have changed my entire worldview in the past month or so- I gave up, rationality doesn't work when my life is going in wild swings, rational decisions end up being conservative and... (read more)

cozy10

Yes.


test

thank you very much.

cozy30

Military strategy is probably more careful than science in how many contingencies it expects, yet how few are truly accurate. Legitimately, science is more careful to actually try and do things it thinks has merit, while wars are fought off of conjecture and often just error. I think you can find a great number of amazing examples of both careful planning and completely spurious decision making, often on purpose to discredit another leader, within war. von Falkenhayn's memoir of the Great War is a wonderful example. 

He also brings up an absolutely exc... (read more)

4habryka
It appears you only used soft line breaks for every paragraph, making your comment de-facto one big paragraph. That will make blockquotes a lot harder. As in most text-editors, you get paragraph breaks by pressing enter, and soft line-breaks by pressing shift-enter. Sadly, some places on the internet (like IM apps) have conditioned me to often use shift-enter in places where it doesn't make sense, because enter also submits the message, so my guess is you were caught by those habits and were using shift-enter in the above?
cozy10

Although many will not see this, I want to compliment you expressly on these posts. You surely had a very eminent expectation and understanding of the community at the time and what could be expected. I think there is a general lack of the central issue that lead many to move to btc: distrust in the governments in general. I would love if you would perhaps do a retrospective on your memories and predilections of what you thought you knew, whether you did know it, what you weren't aware of but suspected, and things you were wrong on.

I wouldn't blame you for... (read more)

cozy30

So, uhm, want to revisit this idea, Mitch?

cozy10

1/5 of the way there. Have you made the 10^4kg paperclips? Or are we still hedging for the raw material sourcing?

cozy10

Big oof here.

I felt the same way. Was curious about what sentiment was back then, because I very often see people making predictions using the early years as some kind of first cycle. I really do not think it is analogous.

2CronoDAS
I have since lost some faith in the Magic Online Event Ticket. I do not have any more faith in Bitcoin than I did eight years ago. Furthermore, I'm fairly confident that Bitcoin is of net negative value to the world - a huge amount of energy is devoted to computing otherwise useless hashes so hackers can collect ransoms and some people can try to take money from greater fools. (There are blockchain projects that might have actual value, but Bitcoin is not one of them.)
cozy10

My initial impression was something completely different. I feel as if I do not quite understand why it is done in this manner. The order makes complete sense to me, as intended, more easily using the dunning-Kruger curve. The labels of the children, and (admittedly) my little knowledge of these Simulacra levels which I will read more of to understand whether I am missing the point.

Level 1: Symbols accurately describe reality.

Level 2: Symbols inaccurately describe reality.

Level 3: Symbols claim to describe reality.

Level 4: Symbols no longer claim to descr... (read more)

cozy30

Quoting the original Electrical Engineer 1891 publication from 1891, pp 521-530

The only wonder to the writer is, that many of the clerks who toiled at the irritating slips of tally paper in the census of 1880 did not go blind and crazy.

I volunteered for the 2020 Census as an enumerator briefly this year, but had to resign for various reasons- chief among them, that it was going to drive me insane. We used iPhones and kept our social distancing and used masks- etc, all the typical protective measures. What people were always concerned about was privacy. Esp... (read more)

cozy00

Imagine you set up a program that will continually resolve 2 + 2 after your death. Perhaps it will survive much longer than entropy will allow us to survive. It has a very nice QPC timer.

It uses binary, of course. After all, you can accomplish binary with some simple LEDs, or just, dots. Little dots. So you accomplish your program, set it to run using the latest CMBR-ran entropic technology, and no one attends your funeral, because you are immortal, but immortality does not survive entropy. At least, within the same uncertainty as you failing to state 2 +... (read more)

cozy60

I predicted the graph would be similar; and I was indeed much too optimistic. In fact, I was so wrong it reminded me of this exact issue, where your predictive ability becomes more and more impossibly difficult every decade or so off you go. It may also be getting even more difficult given our progress as a large unit of populations, but the underlying humanistic predictions may still well be possible, since that variable never quite leaves us.

If anyone has read 'Where To?' by Robert Heinlein, he makes predictions in 1950 and then updated his pre... (read more)

cozy10

Quite often when given that problem I have heard non-answers. Even at the time of writing I do not believe it was unreasonable to give a non-answer; not just from a perceived moral perspective, but even from a utilitarian perspective, there are so many contextual elements removed that the actual problem isn't whether they will answer kill one and save the others or decline to act and save one only,


but rather the extent of the originality of the given answer. One can then sort of extrapolate the sort of thinking the individual asked may be pursuing, a... (read more)

cozy60

This is a beautiful post in a way because it signals the ascent out of that valley. Looking at any ‘uncanny valley’ is regarded as being uncomfortable with the prospect of the bottom, but comfortable with either extreme end of it. Discomfort is essential to growth. Pushing the limits of yourself; pushing your understanding of your flaws; facing those flaws with an understanding that you will not be the same person after than you were before. I have been reading LW for while and this is my first post here, because I empathize dearly, and I hop... (read more)