All of Divide's Comments + Replies

By and large, when people are unwilling to carefully consider arguments with the goal of having accurate beliefs, this is evidence that it is not useful to try to think carefully about this area. This follows from the idea mentioned above that people tend to try to have accurate views when it is in their present interests to have accurate views. So if this is the main way the framework breaks down, then the framework is mostly breaking down in cases where good epistemology is relatively unimportant.

That's one clever trick right there!

I've been a bit confused by the relationships question. I'm currently seeing three people romantically on a semi-regular basis, so I put in 3, but I wouldn't say any of those relations qualify as "relationships", so I selected 'single'. I hope that's the preferred method.

Thanks, and sorry. Fixed.

If you use X11 you'll find that even though the selection clears just after releasing the mouse button, it's been nonetheless placed in the selection buffer (so you can middle-button it somewhere).

33 - gurer vf n cnggrea ba qvntbanyf tbvat sebz fj gb ar: ubevmbagny, iregvpny, qvntbany. 34 - rnfl, artngvir va, cbfvgvir bhg, nqqvgvba. 36 - va rirel (ynetr) ebj/pbyhza gurer ner 9 juvgr obkrf, naq rnpu bs 5, 6 naq 7 bs bgure funqrf.

Anybody up to take on the others?

I dunno, on my test it came up higher than expected (and higher than the result of a pro test they gave me in primary school once).

Huh, I got the date almost right - sadly, the date of death.

Thank you for sharing. This seems so obvious, and yet, it has helped me and works wonderfully. I've been able to get started and quite far along the way already (in just a day or so) writing reports that were due months ago and I couldn't have brought myself to work on them even though I find the topic interesting.

Just took it.

About the probability questions: I thought you were supposed to answer them instantly for your intuitive stance at the moment, without additional research, though I see some of responders apparently did research. Perhaps it should be better specified what is meant.

drawing an analogy between my social networking behaviour and annealing

Could you elaborate on that?

Would you be interested in writing up the results of your investigations? A structured article on tested useful drugs, if only with a terse summary of what each of them is good for, would be an interesting starting point for studying this topic further. Most such resources on the Internet seem to focus mainly on illegal drugs, which makes their use somewhat problematic.

Same in Poland; although many people do tip in restaurants. I'm always a little bit confused by the American tipping rituals whenever I see it in a movie or whatever.

How about the rest of Europe?

We can only hope that this was an artful stroke made from the shadows by some great master of the Dark Arts, and not a mere snowballing of an ignorant question.

Actually, I'd hope quite the opposite. Perhaps it'd be a sad conclusion, but yours strikes me as potentially more dangerous.

Did he? I thought he just meant 'odds' when he said 'probability'.

Try and do that with Rudy Rucker, I dare you. I only endured first thirty or so pages of his "Postsingular" before all that was left of my suspension of disbelief were sad ashes and smoke started to come out of my ears.

EDIT: Although, to be fair, I haven't tried his other books. I hear the 'ware' trilogy is quite good. I can't shake off the distaste after trying "Postsingular", though.

Thanks for the explanation, wouldn't have thought about it from this angle without it. It's pretty good when read in this way. Upvoted.

Ouch. Comic Sans.

Good cookbook, though.

The stronger answer to many of those questions is "nobody knows."

Perhaps, but it would at best be a rethorical answer, and at worst an ignorant one.

For example, 341, 0011001100110001, and XXXI all represent the same number using different systems of representation.

Okay, this is silly, but I can't for the life of me figure out what that number and those systems of representation are.

That's not particularly well-formed, is it now?

It should work now, please test. Sorry about that problem.

I needed to change the method to pick a random entity -- no easy feat in app engine, apparently. As a side effect, there might be some apparent nonuniformity in sampling when you have few todos. It will smooth out as you start/stop them and add more.

Thanks for the report! I'll look into it.

I thought I'd share my pick-thing-to-do-at-random app that helps somewhat. You just add things and then it shows you them at random. You can click to commit to do something for a while, or just flick to another thing if you can't do that now. I've added hundreds of both timewasters and productive activities there and it's quite cool to do this kind of lottery to determine what to do now.

Obviously it won't work if you just keep flicking until you happen upon a favorite timewaster, nor when you have something that needs to be done now. It's also essential to... (read more)

This is spot-on. That's exactly how I do it, although I seem to have a good coprocessor for emotional empathy (tuned towards the opposite gender, no less), which does help tremendously; I only have to do social in software and while I'm rather bad at it, the empathy compensates for that and makes people more forgiving for miscalculations.

Consequently I tend not to like and avoid my own gender, because the empathy processor fails there and what's left is pure awkwardness.

That, or I'm just rationalizing over competition anxiety.

(EDIT: BTW, I got 32 on the t... (read more)

And here I thought lesswrong would be the one place on teh internets where I wouldn't get confused by obscure Harry Potter references and consequently feel out of place for not reading it.

I agree, all that good grammar just gets in the way. There's too little appreciation for bad grammar here on lesswrong.

“is an accurate belief” is a property of the belief only

Technically, it's a property of the (belief, what-the-belief-is-about) pair. Beliefs can't be accurate by themselves; there has to be an external referent to compare them with. (Only-)self-referencing beliefs degrade straighforwardly to tautologies or contradictions.

That's the remaining 10%. You know, the part which isn't covered in 'teach yourself GTD in one hour' audiobooks.

But seriously, there's much stuff about higher levels of planning in GTD. See 'someday maybe' lists, monthly review, putting analysis tasks on monthly lists, analysing farther horizons periodically, etc.

I'm not quite sure that's what the parent meant. I understood it literally and it does make sense as well.

Hi!

(Lurking since Eliezer had still been writing his sequences on OB.)

In Poland there's a whole genre of jokes based on one-upping such ad hoc status markers. It could well be "my husband is so stupid that he...". "I'm so ill that..." fits the genre perfectly.

I reckon it is public good anyway, insofar as public libraries are public. In fact, you can most probably access many of those journals for free at your nearest public library, even if not necessarily by direct web access, but by requesting a copy from the librarian.

EDIT: Of course if you want convenience, you have to pay. (Perhaps) luckily enough people and institutions are willing to.

I think he meant people doing self-surgery on their own. Ie. you can't go to a pharmacy and buy lidocaine just because you want to implant an RFID chip in your hand. As for why, well, that's perhaps another point.

But five hundred years ago ancient Greeks hadn't lived for centuries already.

Any pointers to those studies?

Is it to say, if you had to make such a bet (at a gunpoint, if you will), you'd be indifferent and might as well flip a coin to choose? If so, fair enough. If not, what's more to it? (Assuming you don't want to get killed on refusing to take the bet.)

For satisfying SoullessAutomaton's curiosity I think phrasing it differently would have been better: which one would you bet (say, $100) if you had to do and could only pick one? (Assuming that both questions would get truthfully answered immediately after making the bet. It's just so that you wouldn't pick one of these just because the question seems more interesting.)

s/D端hring/Dühring/. Perhaps review OB->LW conversion scripts?

How about corporate AI evolution? You'll find a clever depiction of such (runaway) evolution in Accelerando, www.accelerando.org. Great book, that, btw, in other respects, too.