All of dbaupp's Comments + Replies

If you wrap text in a pair of back ticks (`) then it gets displayed as "code" so left unmodified by the markdown parser.

(E.g. [this guy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(comics\)))

In the break, or as a 25 minute project ("reply to/categorise all new emails").

Another recently implemented feature (in the same batch as the positive+negative separation) is users can now have a profile page which is loaded from the wiki (it seems to just be via connecting accounts with the same name).

As an example, gwern and matt.

At the risk of being annoying by repeating myself on this point: Outside the US, UK and Tokyo (and more recently some parts of China), there is no such thing as "public schools with good gifted programs".

To add to the other countries people have mentioned, Australia has them too.

(Link to How Not To Sort By Average Rating.)

Something of interest: Jeffery's interval. Using the lower bound of a credible interval based on that distribution (which is the same as yours) will probably give better results than just using the mean: it handles small sample sizes more gracefully. (I think, but I'm certainly willing to be corrected.)

But I fear that it would cause irreparable damage if the world settles on this solution.

This is probably vastly exaggerating the possible consequences; it's just a method of sorting, and either the Wilson's int... (read more)

I don't have anything specific to offer, but (in theory) hard choices matter less. And if you literally can't decide between them, you can try flipping a coin to make the decision and as it is in the air, see which way you hope it will end up, and that should be your choice.

Kurzweil has joined Google as Director of Engineering. (Discussion on Hacker News.)

On his website.

(Speaking of which, the HPMoR link here should probably be updated to point at hpmor.com, since that now seems to be the canonical source.)

Option 1: Close the borders. It's unfortunate that the best sort might be kept out, while its guaranteed the rest will be kept out. The best can found / join other sites, and LW can establish immigration policies after a while.

This isn't so ridiculous in short bursts. I know that Hacker News disables registration if/when they get large media attention to avoid a swathe of new only-mildly-interested users. A similar thing could happen here. (It might be enough to have an admin switch that just puts a display: hidden into the CSS for the "register" button; trivial inconveniences and all.)

The Alice Springs unemployment rate was less than 3% at the time

This surprises me, since the NT has serious problems (e.g. the unemployment in the surrounding area is ~20%, with occasional townships at about ~8%).

Do you happen to have any insight into why Alice is such an outlier?

Just for reference, the minimum wage is only $15.96, so this fast food place is actually desperate for workers.

There is some interesting discussion at Hacker News about this article.

Only 80%?

In the USA, about 30% of adults have a bachelor's degree or higher, and about 44% of those have done a degree where I can slightly conceive that they might possibly meet Bayes' theorem (those in the science & engineering and science- & engineering-related categories (includes economics), p. 3), i.e. as a very loose bound 13% of US adults may have met Bayes' theorem.

Even bumping the 30% up to the 56% who have "some college" and using the 44% for a estimate of the true ratio of possible-Bayes'-knowledge, that's only just 25% of the... (read more)

R> hpmor <- lw[as.character(lw$Referrals) == "Referred by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality",]
R> hpmor <- lw[as.character(lw$Referrals) != "Referred by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality",]

Is this a typo? Or some text that was lost in the copy-paste?

• Silver: The Signal and the Noise
• Ehrman: The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament
• Cowen: Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World
• Hayes: Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy

(For the [text](url) link syntax to work, you need the full URL, i.e. including the http:// bit at the start: http://comptop.stanford.edu/preprints/heads.pdf)

I think you missed some duplicates in for_public.csv: Rows 26, 30, 761 and 847 are identical to their preceding one.

There's even an issue for it.

("Lord Martin Rees is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has been Astronomer Royal since 1995 and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge since 2004. He was President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010". For anyone like me who didn't know.)

They're trying to seed the subreddit. If there's no content, no one will be interested, and if there's no one subscribed there'll be no content... this technique is a common way to kick start the community.

(It might be worth posting fewer links though, otherwise any discussion that does happen will get lost quickly.)

There are a few other "crackpot indices" around. John Baez has a famous one, and Scott Aaronson has one in that vein (mostly specific to mathematics papers though).

I agree with wedrifid, and would prefer that this doesn't happen.

One problem is comments are "non-local", as long as they are above the bad-comment threshold, they appear in the recent comments. Allowing people to have stupid discussions freely will pollute the recent comments section (and this was actually one of the reasons for the recent implementation of the karma threshold).

If LW supported marking some threads as "comments don't appear in recent comments", then it wouldn't be such a problem, although there is also the risk that the low-quality will start overflowing into the rest of LW (maybe?).

What's Stanton's scale? Google only turned up references to measuring scales.

Their website suggests just a $5 monthly fee.

I'm unlikely to be betting against gambling addicts,

Betting against US gambling addicts. There are gambling addicts all over the world.

And the anchoring effect of the random number changes.

That's not such a rigorous answer:

Imagine you have a random sample with n observations x_1, ..., x_n, independently and identically distributed according to some distribution with mean mu and variance s^2.

The sample mean is sum(x_i)/n (the expected value is mu as one would hope). Doing some manipulations we find that this has variance s^2/n, i.e. a large n means a small variance, so larger samples are more tightly clustered around mu.

I think using a random number gives samples with low- and high-anchoring, and statistical trickery allows them to distinguish, especially since the sample size will be relatively large. (One way would be: group the samples based on random number (e.g. 0-333, 333-666, 666-999), then do a standard ANOVA with those groups as the factors.)

What evidence is there that voluntary voting doesn't just add noise to the selection process?

That's a serious question: voluntary voting means that a higher percentage of the voters are in a blue-vs-green mindset (since they are more likely to vote than someone who has weak preferences), while compulsory voting gives a more accurate picture of the feelings of the entire population, even if that involves people who donkey-vote etc.

(That's not to say your point isn't valid, just that the sword cuts both ways.)

Given the (apparent) desire for Shanghaiese to keep it secret, wouldn't an at-home method of learning English (e.g. over Skype) be perfect?

For unusual characters, googling some sort of vague description and then copy-pasting from one of the first 5 results often works, e.g. 'e accent' or (as a purely contrived example) an eth (ð).

Or you can use a site like this which allows you to draw the character and then copy paste.

A third solution would be to ask everyone to round to the nearest 5, 10, 50 (etc.) when answering.

Why bother having Asian (East Asian) instead of just East Asian etc? (Especially since the ethnic groups you list aren't globally considered "Asian", e.g. I don't think pacific islanders describe themselves as part of Asia.)

Just a heads up, this sort of question is better suited to an open thread. :)

(Is this in the wrong place?)

Just for reference: this has been pointed out at least once before, and I believe there was a (temporary) fix implemented (but I can't find any reference to it at the moment).

But that was almost a year ago now, so it's good to bring it up again.

LW isn't the only group of people who talk about being "rational" and avoiding biases. It would be a little arrogant to think that LW was being specifically targeted.

(And anyway, I would hope that LW-style rationalism would understand the reason why chess's rules are like that. The "rationality" displayed in the comic is a straw-vulcan.)

Woah, woah, woah!

Polls! And even with graphs! Tricycle is awesome!

If you add .votes to that selector, then you also hide the points on comments and posts. I.e.

@-moz-document domain("lesswrong.com") {
  span.label, span.score, span.monthly-score, .votes {
    display:none !important;
  }
}

I think it requires at least 3 downvotes for the penalty to apply.

(Links are created by writing [ text ] then ( url ), you seem to have used parentheses for both.)

(If a comment like this is wanted, then it is probably better for it to be by JohnWittle, otherwise a reply to this thread might go unnoticed, as you get the notification, not JohnWittle.)

This is a little late, but:

• you should Google things. I know this isn't so useful often, but, especially with popular online courses, others may have posted answers, which can help you over the hump. Also, it's an intensely useful skill/habit to have.

• you can ask questions on StackOverflow. Be careful to phrase it as "I'm learning x, and I'm not sure how to do y, could someone point me in the right direction" (where y is quite specific), rather than "Give me the code to do y" or something too general. As an essentially arbitrary exampl

Maybe you might like trying Python (there are some more tutorials listed here; specifically, Learn Python the Hard Way, #2 in the Python section, is a nice next step after Codecademy), it has a "cleaner" syntax, in that it doesn't require braces or so many brackets; this could help you to practice without so many distractions.

(And yes, once you've practiced more, you'll be able to keep track of more of the program in your head and so the white space is a navigational aid, rather than a hinderance.)

I assume you mean Project Euler? If so, I heartily second that, and I have introduced at least one person to programming (in Python) via it, and she was extremely enthusiastic about it. (Admittedly, she was/is extremely mathematically talented, so there is a confounding factor there.)

It's a simple program, and probably not as efficient as it could be, but i didn't look at any spoilers and feel like a diabolical genius after having solved it.

For me, this is one of the best bits about solving Project-Euler-esque questions: often one can make progress and... (read more)

(I think you missed copying the title of the story!)

I have read stuff that posited that hunters have front eyes (I think the reason given was for more accurate depth perception), and that prey-animals have eyes towards the side of their head to give a wider field of vision.

I'll see if I can refind any of that stuff.

I didn't find exactly what I was thinking of (I think it was probably a book), but a section of the Binocular vision wikipedia article has some information (uncited, unfortunately). Specifically:

Some animals, usually but not always prey animals, have their two eyes positioned on opposite side

Oh, yeah... nevertheless, the history of the post & comment authors contains some "trolling".

The most obvious example of trolls right now is this post and some of its comments, although as far as trolling goes, neither are very effective.