I was sitting in the audience as they got into the part where Bottom acts like an ass and this is supposed to be funny. I was just waiting for them to get it over with, and then remembered that there was nothing after it in the play that I looked forward to anyway.
Your unease may be from the audience reaction, not the action on stage. The action on stage is black magic, in which the King of the Fairies can get away with it because he is powerful enough to escape the consequences of black magic dabbling. This is pretty damn terrifying and not funny at a...
Are there good reasons why when I do a google search on (Leary site:lesswrong.com) it comes up nearly empty? His ethos consisted of S.M.I**2.L.E, i.e. Space Migration + Intelligence Increase + Life Extension which seems like it should be right up your alley to me. His books are not well-organized; his live presentations and tapes had some wide appeal.
I found another physician online endorsing a mg or two daily lithium supplement:
(found the blog on the paleo sub-reddit). I was going to the herb and vitamin store this afternoon anyway to get some ginseng and I am going to see if they have those 1mg lithium pills and if they have them and they aren't 25$ a hundred or anything ridiculous I am thinking I am going to take the plunge and do at least one short experiment.
When I took Edward Tufte's graphics class one of the questions was about website design. He said the gold standard is the Google News website. Almost all signal and almost no noise. This design is not bad at all but it might work better as an "About" page than as the main page. The main page should be precisely what you were looking for when you entered whatever you put into the search engine when it referred you to the LessWrong main page.
David Pearce was still taking questions as of an hour ago. He gave me a much more thorough answer to my question than I have gotten in the two other AMA's I submitted questions to. Neil Strauss and the Atlantic writer whose name slips me at the moment both gave me terrible drive by answers with about two seconds of thought behind them.
Do you know anyone who might fall into this category, i.e. someone who was exposed to Less Wrong but failed to become an enthusiast, potentially due to atmosphere issues?
Yes. I know a couple of people with whom I share interest in Artificial Intelligence (this is my primary focus in loading Less Wrong web pages) who communicated to me that they did not like the site's atmosphere. Atmosphere is not exactly the word they used. One person thought the cryonics was a deal breaker. (If you read the piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about Robin Hanso...
This is all good information. One thing missing in the seat belt part. Everybody in the car needs to be buckled down and heavy cargo like your laptop should be stowed in the trunk. There is a great video they showed in my defensive driving class which was an Irish television public service advertisement with four people in a car and three of them were wearing their seat belts and they were in an accident and everybody got killed with the unbuckled passenger flopping around the inside of the passenger compartment like a billiard ball.
Anthropologist John Hawks (quoted in the Discover article) in this video (at the 9:23 mark) shows data on the shrinking human brain over 16000 years. On his display it looks to me like the scatter extrema for today are over twice as large as the decline in the linear regression line. The number of data points from 16000 years ago is not large.
From the article:
Some 30 animals have been domesticated, he notes, and in the process every one of them has lost brain volume—typically a 10 to 15 percent reduction compared with their wild progenitors.
A strong claim if true.
I found this book on google scholar and the parts of it I read supported this claim more than refuted it but were not so definitive and absolute.
The government security clearance manuals have documented what can be reduced to procedures and rules and whatnot. I know a guy who worked for the CIA a few years ago and he tells me the most trusted positions are the guys who do the security clearance evaluations. He said over half of them were Mormons. (Friend of a friend information is inherently untrustworthy.) One of the greatest spies in American history, James Angleton, was apparently paranoid to the brink of mental illness. It is generally a very difficult problem.
The gold standard of such institutions is The Royal Philosophical Society.
Perhaps some form of The __ Philosophical Society.
What goes in the blank I am drawing a blank on. The California or Silicon Valley P.S. would be fine. The opposite of Royal is Commoner so the Common P. S. might be OK. Or Common Sense P.S. Or Real or Reality P. S. I would not use Bayes as a bunch of physical scientists whose attention you might want to attract are nigh-dogmatic frequentists right now but could presumably be weaned from their dogma.
This is not likely to be implemented easily here. When I looked at the poll it was around 20 for and 20 against having a politics open thread.
What could be done easily is start a subreddit lesswrongpoliticsbeta and if there did happen to be a great discussion on some topic ongoing there then put a pointer to it in the discussion sections here.
This is a series of posts by a fellow who volunteered on a suicide hotline for a number of years which I found informative. It provides the straightest answers I have seen to the question: how do you talk a stranger off the ledge?
This is an aggregation of resources on another website which has discussed the issue in detail.
Yeah I remember that and it was certainly a megalomaniacal slip.
But I do not agree that arrogant is the correct term. I suspect "arrogant" may be a brief and inaccurate substitute for: "unappealing, but I cannot be bothered to come up with anything specific". In my dictionaries (I checked Merriam-Webster and American Heritage), arrogant is necessarily overbearing. If you are clicking on their website or reading their literature or attending their public function there isn't any easy way for them to overbear upon you.
When Terrel Owens d...
Fair question, but not an easy one to answer.
I signed up for the reading group along with the 2600 Redditors. It was previously posted about here. The book is an entry point to issues of Artificial Intelligence, consciousness, cognitive biases and other subjects which interest me. I enjoy the book every time I read from it, but I believe I am missing something which could be provided in a group reading or a group study. As I stated in the previous thread, I am challenged by the musical references. The last time I read music notation routinely was when I s...
It would be easier to discuss the merits (or lack) of the book if you specify something about the book you believe lacks merit. The opinion that the book is overly hyped is a common criticism, but is too vague to be refuted.
It was a bestseller. Of course many of those people who bought it are silly.
This is a question where fiction might give us more insight than fact. If you read realistic novels from the 19th century you will find right away that many of the characters are atheists or agnostics. The gold standard novel is War and Peace which contains only one overtly religious character (Maria Bolkonskaya) if I recall correctly. More than one of the characters is overtly atheist. Tolstoy could put this into fiction when his counterparts in the Physics department and the Philosophy department and the Political Science department would not dare to say it.
More references to Cannabis research.
Hard to come by because of the legal restrictions. The best sources I have seen:
Altered States of Consciousness edited by Charles Tart, 1969, Wiley.
Pharmako/Poeia by Dale Pendell, 1995, Mercury House.
They include pros and cons although it is obvious both guys are at least a little more pro than con. From Pendell's book: "Smoking it occasionally makes you wise; smoking it a lot turns you into a donkey." (p.199)
neural irregularities as pink noise, which is also called 1/f noise
A few minutes of fooling around with a color tool will show you that the spectrum of pink is flat (white) with a notch at the green and the 1/f spectrum is brown, nothing at all resembling pink. The misnomer of pink to label 1/f seems to come from a misconception that flat + a pole at red is pink (it's not--it's red) and 1/f (it's not--it's flat with a pole at red).
It is a pity this idea has gotten so much traction into the English language as it is so horribly wrong. It's like one of those things that Pauli would describe as "not even wrong."
I am reminded of an essay by the Anthropologist Edmund Leach, 'Once a Knight is Quite Enough' (p. 194ff in The Essential Edmund Leach Volume I 2000 Yale U. Press) where he details the parallels between his initiation into British knighthood by Q. Elizabeth II and a Borneo headhunter ceremony which he saw at the end of WWII. Headhunting was illegal at that time in Sarawak, but they got special permission as the two victims were Japanese soldiers. Anyway the idea was if you watched a silent movie of the two ceremonies and ignored the costumes, the two ritual...
Here is the link to the freakonomics post for those interested. I thought it was OK. You might also be interested in the works of Bill James. Bill James was doing freakonomics and cognitive bias analysis back in the early 1980's, selling his Bill James Baseball Abstract self-published to a list of subscribers gathered by word-of-mouth. He is the man most responsible for the state of modern Major League Baseball statistical analysis--the emphasis of On Base Percentage, the de-emphasis of pitchers' Won-Loss totals and a number of other changes and innovation...
Did a physician inform you about the sleeping-on-side hack?
I personally know of an instance where a person had gastric reflux, went to the doctor, was prescribed a proton pump inhibitor as the sole treatment (Nexum), didn't get any better, went poking around the internet with google, and got non-medicine lifestyle adjustments (elevated bed head, fasting for five hours before bedtime) to fix their reflux problem. Then, later they told the doctor, who said nothing but "oh yeah".
We had no google in 1988 although surely some futurist genius somewhere foresaw it.
Very nicely done.
For emphasis I cut and paste the following:
as an economist, I'm thinking about life on the margin. The extra decision: should we think more in terms of stories, or less in terms of stories? When we hear stories, should we be more suspicious? and what kind of stories should we be suspicious of?
This repetition of "at the margin" or "on the margin" and even calling his blog Marginal Revolution may be the biggest thing about Cowen's writing which really hooks me.
And now some narrative. In the beginning the story was a m...
challenge someone to put up or shut up.
That is exactly right. Challenging someone to put up or shut up is a confrontation and an escalation. That is how fistfights begin. The challenge is construed as being to their honor.
A well-written analysis of the dynamic is given by a lawyer, William Ian Miller, in Humiliation. Among the other interesting tales he tells is how a medieval Icelandic noble family feud began with a too extravagant gift.
Can you imagine Angela Merkel or Margaret Thatcher or even Sarah Palin doing that? Offering to bet a lot of money on the issue in the middle of a debate is hyper-masculine, aggressive, and low class. It is not all that different from asking the guy if he wants to step outside.
Prediction markets where the other side of the bet is a faceless horde are completely different. There is no humiliation inflicted.
Intriguingly, even though the sample size increased by more than 6 times, most of these results are within one to two percent of the numbers on the 2009 survey, so this supports taking them as a direct line to prevailing rationalist opinion rather than the contingent opinions of one random group.
This is not just intriguing. To me this is the single most significant finding in the survey.
Kahneman gave a talk at Google about how and why intuition works well for us on 10 November. I am about halfway through it and so far it is marvelous.
edit The same talk (very close) at Edge transcribed plus discussion after with Cosmides and Tooby and Pinker. Link to transcript.
The last time I looked at prediction book the allowed values were integers 0 - 100 which makes it impossible to really use it for this. Here the meaningful values are is it .00001 or is it .0000000001?
I liked this fellow's take.
I concur that the Ann/Bob/Carol question is more taxing than the Cognitive Reflection Test.
In fact I can prove for my own case sample size N = 1. I scored 3/3 on the CRT and I missed Ann/Bob/Carol as I did not look at Bob as being unambiguously either married or unmarried and shot myself in my own damn foot on the sucker.
This quotation from a failed Nature collaborative project from Nielsen's website leaped out to me:
"A small majority of those authors who did participate received comments, but typically very few, despite significant web traffic. Most comments were not technically substantive. Feedback suggests that there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments. "
Many of the folks here have pet projects where they imagine easy pickings out there and they wonder why nobody is much interested in pursuing them and free software and open so...
Quality content. Quality content. And quality content.
The features which I would most like to see:
Wiki containing all or at least most of the jargon.
Rationality quotations all in one file alphabetically ordered by author of the quote.
Book reviews and topical reading lists.
Pie in the sky: the Yudkowsky sequences edited, condensed, and put into an Aristotelian/Thomsian/Scholastic order. (Not that Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas eve... (read more)