All of eurg's Comments + Replies

eurg20

As others pointed out, "memory wipe" is a broad category, but assuming that this is about episodic memory:

How about sending yourself a letter via delivery service on a specific date in handwriting + audio-recording? This of course completely ignores any other faked messages that would need to be discarded, but even with only episodic memory loss, I assume I'd be so confused as to be easy game for even the most incompetent scammer.

If this is about formal guarantees, we need to have some more precise ideas about the "memory wipe" and the adversary in question. In the most general case, likely game over.

eurg370

Did it, as every year. Thanks for your work.

eurg30

Similar experience, and not much of real advice. I mostly solve it by setting up obligations by myself. However, I revert to this only for stuff that is important. Examples:

I've announced and discussed doing some boring accounting and controlling for the hackerspace, and people now expect some specific results.

On anothor note, instead of procrastinating about finding a better workplace, I gave my notice. Once I was out of the job, I simply had to start looking.

Finally, I do not need to be perfect. More people than I expected have the odd day or two during the workweek, and knowing this I have reset my expectations regarding my own performance to something more humane.

eurg30

I was doing this in the past to heavy-weight books for very pragmatic reasons: Gödel, Escher, Bach is worthless to me if the book would just sit around in a corner, but to take it with me and read it while commuting, I had to get the weight down.

Since learning this amazing trick, any book I read and that's inconvenient to hold has to fear the knife.

eurg20

Depending on personal specifics, such stuff is also used in psychotherapy; overburdening oneself is not an uncommon problem. For me this helped even though such substitutions were all but universal, I don't know about how important it is in general, though.

eurg10

I'm sorry to have not answered for so long, I had some busy weeks.

Depression: I'd suffered many months from a depression bad enough that I was not able to work the hours of a part-time job, let alone achieve any acceptable performance. I was using alcohol as replacement for other diluted variants of H2O. This was also not the first time of being depressed, and needless to say, such things can fuck up your life, and are generally not very desirable.

I recovered as well as I think possible: I feel well. I can work. I enjoy, and can concentrate on stuff t... (read more)

eurg10

What do you enjoy most in software development, and why are you going to be looking for a job again soon? What's your dream SW dev job?

Cannot really answer what I enjoy most; I like almost every job that comes up, with only a few exceptions. I hate repeating myself, and I hate having to do things in a ... ... ... way against my better judgement. I prefer to work more time (as in effort and calender time) doing the architecture/design/coding parts, but I also prefer doing other stuff once in a while more than being purely a lonely coder.

I will give my n... (read more)

eurg40

What's your motivation for veganism?

Moral reasons. All else equal, I think that inflicting pain or death is bad, and that the ability to feel pain and the desire to not die is very widespread. I also think that the intensity of pain in simpler animals is still very strong (I think humans did not evolve large brains because otherwise the pain was not strong enough). I also think that our ability to manage pain slighly reduces the impact of our having the ability to suffer more strongly and with more variety. But I give, for sanity check reasons, priority... (read more)

eurg60

This was surprisingly simple: I got myself to want to run, started running, and patted myself on the back everytime I did it.

The want part was a bit of luck: I always thought I "should" do some sports, for physical and more importantly mental health reasons, and think that being able to do stuff is better than not being able, ceteris paribus. So I was thinking what kind of activity I might prefer.

I like my alone time (so team- or pair-sports are out), I dislike spending money when I expect it to be wasted (like Gym memberships, bikes, et al.). An... (read more)

eurg00

No, not by myself. Wouldn't have the skillset for it, anyways. So I only try to introduce people to things like MIRI, to improve the chances that future discussions might not stop dead in fatalistic and nihilistic clichés. Effective altruism is an angle where I try to get a sense if a worthwhile elaboration is possible, as steering the arguments is somewhat easier when not starting with the most crazy stuff first.

eurg120

Ask me almost anything. I'm very boring, but I have recovered from depression with the help of CBT + pills, am a lurker since back from the OB days and know the orthodoxy here quite well, started to enjoy running (real barefoot if >7 degrees Celsius) after 29 years of no physical activity, am chairman of the local hackerspace (software dev myself, soon looking for a job again), and somehow established the acceptance of a vegan lifestyle in my conservative familiy (farmers).

0FiftyTwo
I'm also working on depression with CBT and pills. I find I function well when I have structure and external obligations but revert to inaction when left to my own devices, any similar experience? Any general advice?
0Gimpness
Could you go into a little more detail by what you mean by recovered from depression and what aspects of CBT assisted the most?
7pinyaka
What steps did you take to start enjoying running?
6Daniel_Burfoot
That's not boring, it is impressive and admirable. Well done.
2Anatoly_Vorobey
What's your motivation for veganism? What do you enjoy most in software development, and why are you going to be looking for a job again soon? What's your dream SW dev job?
eurg20

Value of information is zero. Do it if you are curious, or take the money and watch some movies with friends.

eurg10

Also, in many European countries it means "pre- and post some different tax". Because one part is payed by the employer, and the other by the employee. Populism, Politics and Economics. Good results guaranteed.

2hyporational
Yeah, and don't forget VAT and similar taxes.
2kalium
US also does this.
eurg360

Survey taken, as always. It sure was well prepared. It's worth starting it for the first option (ruining everything), and continuation is always just one click away...

eurg20

You are right, of course. I did not want to imply that a vegan diet would have been feasible until recent advances.

eurg30

The asking for forgiveness may indicate that people somehow thought of the act as killing, but that did not change their actions. Humans have had a distinctive influence on the local megafauna wherever they showed up. A cynic might write that "humans did not really care about the well-being of ...". We for instance also have taboos of eating dogs and cats, but the last time I checked it was not because of value their lives, but because they are cute. It's mostly organized lying to feel OK.

8RomanDavis
What? Of course people care about the lives of dogs and cats. Anecdotal Evidence: All the people I've seen cry over the death of a dog. Not just children, either. I've seen grown men and women grieve for months over the death of a beloved dog. Even if their sole reason for caring is that their cute, that wouldn't invalidate the fact that they care. There's some amount of "organized lying" in most social interactions, that doesn't imply that people don't care about anything. That's silliness, or puts such a high burden of proof/ high standard of caring (even when most humans can talk about degrees of caring more or less) as to be both outside the realm of what normal people talk about and totally unfalsifiable.
5MugaSofer
More because we regularly socialize with them. People are not, generally, in favour of killing just the ugly pets. (And, this is purely anecdotal, but viewing animals more as less-intelligent individuals with a personality and so on and less as fleshy automatons seems to correlate with pets.)
1someonewrongonthenet
Asking for forgiveness is usually a hunter-gatherer thing. Before agriculture brought starchy grains and dairy on the scene animal fat was the major calorie source, and vegetarianism would have meant only fruits, nuts, leafy vegetables, and tubers. And you'd need a lot of tubers in order for this to be a sufficiently calorie rich diet.
2metastable
I guess I'm not cynical? People have to eat. It's consistent to feel that animal life has value but to know that your tribe needs meat, and to prioritize the second over the first. The fact that you value an animal life doesn't mean you value it above all else. And the fact that humans wiped out the Giant Sloth/Mammoth/whatever only necessitates that we were really good hunters. It says nothing about our motivations. Also, I think you would find it really hard to disentangle cuteness from empathy, if that's what you're trying to do.
eurg10

Read a 350-page novel in your 2nd language: 9 hrs (work & elapsed)

eurg00

In Austria, where for all practical matters and purposes charity donations are not tax-deductible, the animal welfare group Vier Pfoten is doing this. Doesn't make it more attractive to me, though...

eurg00

after tax pay of 75k a year isn't crazy unusual [...] in major cities

Less than half of that isn't crazy unusual everywhere else. Of course, anybody can just move there, and is qualified and lucky enough to find such a job.

Still doesn't change the OPs point, though; living on 15k/year is still a very convenient life.

eurg00

Also, if you want to pick up such a signal, it is helpful that you are not totally overworked or tired, and also not under the influence of a significant amount of disinhibiting substances.

eurg220

"What else is there to explain?"

After about 0.5 seconds of thought, I might become interested whether suicide after status-loss has a different frequency in different cultures, and if yes, whether this difference can be explained in the respective way of handling the death of the person. The simple emotional question behind that is whether in all cultures suicides after a status-hit are more strongly motivated by the pain of the status-loss itself, or also by the expected development after death. I might even be interested in whether this ques... (read more)

1Creutzer
At the risk of saying something obvious, there's a possible confound: You have to make sure that the cultures assigning high status to suicide don't assign extra-low status to refraining from it (à la "it really would have been the decent thing for him/her to kill him-/herself"), so that those not committing suicide will experience greater status loss in this culture than in others that don't assign high status to suicide. There's also the problem of comparing cross-culturally the severity of status loss.
eurg10

I cannot fathom how this comment can be so downvoted. Snarky remarks do hurt, and pointing that out is necessary. Placing the duty to be charitable on the receiver is one of the primary failure modes of communication. I do understand that both LW and programmers draw an above average amount of their demographics from non-NT people, but rejecting the reality of emotions in the majority (even in the programmers group) will not improve anyone's experiences.

eurg00

If the meet up would happen on a weekend, and be easily accessible with public transport, I'd visit.

eurg00

Also, if you buy RGB(W) LEDs and add some work, you can choose your rooms color temperature at will. Keep it at 6k if you want to work, let it shift gently to 2k3 to help with a regular sleep rhythm, make it turquoise for a party...

eurg60

Depends on how the bulb is build. The important factors are

  • light temperature: color tone; the temperature at which we would perceive a black body radiator to be of the same color
  • color rendition index: how good its light spectrum is compared to a black body, meaning if it doesn't miss any frequencies which we would perceive; incandescent bulbs have 100, good LEDs about 90, and currently average at 80 for living room LED bulbs
  • lumen/watt: efficiency as in perceived brightness per watt; not efficiency as in electric energy -> photons conversion

Most ol... (read more)

-1prase
Also note that sales of incadescent bulbs stronger than 60W are now forbidden in the EU and perhaps even some non-EU countries because of environmental concerns (incadescent bulbs being fairly inefficient at converting electricity to light). I used to import 200W bulbs from Russia to EU before they were banned in Russia as well.
eurg10

Well, I thought Kawoomba knew it better than me, and it would be a u-declination (africanus, -u). But no, according to the English Wictionary entry on africanus, it is a/o. So, africanam. Though the last time when I was learning latin was eight years ago, so...

(edit) When we are at it, what's it in Lojban?

3prase
I am not a Latin specialist, so I have to rely on Wikipedia in this, but it seems that u-declension is a category for nouns, not adjectives, which seem to never have -u- in feminine accusative singular ending; also, even a u-noun would have -um, not -us, in singular accusative. I have no idea about Lojban.
eurg20

It seems I am too incompetent to make myself understood.

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ahartell120

I would just like to register my preference that those who retract comments leave the original text in place. In most cases, I believe the retraction itself serves the purposes of retraction pretty well, whereas replacing the text is sort of overkill and detracts from the conversation.

0MixedNuts
Oh, for Pete's sake! I understand you were describing a view you don't share, I was just pointing out middles in the dichotomy.
5MixedNuts
It's not that simple. Sometimes the illness is perfectly treatable, but in practice you're never able to get treatment before you die, unless one of the people you talk to goes far beyond the call of duty and drops their whole life to help you get treatment and magically divines how and when to help instead of behaving like a bull in a china shop and making everyone else terrified of mentioning depression.
eurg00

Luckily enough, that blog seems much better than your introduction of it. My troll accusation is founded on your highly repetitive deliberate misunderstanding of the OP. It must be deliberate, as you are usually much smarter than that, and also better in style.

Also, Sister Y is not pro-suicide per se, but against anti-suicide positions; at least that's how I read it.

eurg00

Forget about it.

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5[anonymous]
I'm not trolling. I quite like reading Sister Y's stuff and have said so in the past.
eurg00

Thanks for clarifying!

eurg20

Is this another variation of the theme that one needs to assume the possibility of inductive reasoning to make an argument for it (or also assume Occam's Razor to argue for it)? Also, the specific example he gave seems to me like an instance of "given very skewed data, the best guesses are still wrong" (there was sometime a variation of that here, regarding bets and opponents who have superior information). Or are you thinking of something for subtle?

9IlyaShpitser
Even if you assume that we can do induction (and assume faithfulness!), conditional independence tests simply do not select among causal models. They select among statistical models, because conditional independences are properties of joint distributions (statistical, rather than causal objects). Linking those joint distributions with something causal relies on causal assumptions. I think the biggest lesson to learn from Pearl's book is to keep statistical and causal notions separate.
eurg40

If "anything like that" includes reciting prayers, practically all catholic private schools in Europe will count.

2A1987dM
Well, that's what I thought too, but in those schools everyone is (supposed to be) a Catholic, and if not you (well, your parents) can choose a different school, whereas if I understand correctly children are asked to say the Pledge in all American schools, so (short of emigrating) you (and your parents) have no choice. (Then again, some otherwise non-confessional schools in Italy keep a crucifix in each classroom -- I think it used to be mandated by law, but it no longer is and a few years ago a Muslim sued his son's school for that and managed to have it removed. But keeping around a sculpture that pupils might not even notice --I honestly can't even remember which of certain classrooms in my high school had one and which hadn't-- is a lot less scary than have everyone pledge allegiance every morning, IMO.)
2thomblake
Yes, FWIW catholic schools in the US do that too.
eurg60

Through use of the "seq_epistemology" tag this is possible via the "Article Navigation". Maybe this tag was only added after the comment? However, it works quite well!

2AlexMennen
Thanks for pointing that out. I forgot to check for tags, so I'm not sure whether it was already there. I still think it should be made more direct, though.
eurg-20
  • unnecessary link and opinion retracted -
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5A1987dM
In principle, we could have different thresholds for the karma penalty to replies and for the removal from Recent Comments.
4drethelin
I don't see why not. Karma isn't that important, and if someone is losing or gaining karma because the small number of people that prefer to see dead threads up or downvote them I don't think it will really change anything. Allowing this to be an optional feature seems like it would be a perfect compromise between people who want to participate in these conversations and moderators who don't want to see them.
eurg00

Which is too bad, as all incorrect options should have the same rights (for moral reasons).

eurg00

Thanks for digging that up! Also, I did not want to imply that only silly things are measured, but rather that the most interesting questions are still unanswered due to various constraints.

eurg100

I am a software developer, and have glimpsed over many similar questions. To summarize: There are enormous individual differences in how one can become a better programmer, and even more so on the opinions on it. It is not even easy to agree on what basic skills should be there at the "end" (i.e., the beginning, after your first two years real experience), much less on how to get those skills.

That said, most commonplace advice is valid here:

  • there is with high probability no really significant innate aptitude for programming (intelligence has a
... (read more)
eurg00

Is this really so strange?

No, but context and wording is sometimes everything. I assume that datadataeverywhere has imported some HN style startup discussion context here.

eurg00

Off-Topic Nit-Picking:

Evidence is building that High intensity interval training, e.g. Tabata sprints, is more effective at physical conditioning than low intensity endurance techniques.

"physical conditioning" is a very general term. For instance: Is evidence building that Tabata sprints are more effective for preparing for a 100k ultra-marathon?

Of course competitive runners do some sort of interval training, and -- if information on The Internet (reddit) is to be believed -- runners do not train the full distance. And if basic health and loo... (read more)

eurg20

I haven't heard of any studies in that direction, although a few people try to do find something, like "how long are the programs comparatively" etc., similar to this quickly googled IEEE paper.

I assume that because

  • programming languages are used by humans, and
  • most of a programming language's quality is based upon its actual effects on humans in the target group, and
  • for real work we value long-term effects

such a study is unfeasible, i.e. too much effort, too expensive. And probably not that much related to programming language features (as m... (read more)

1[anonymous]
That's the short version. The full paper is here. I found it while looking for a similar comparison that I remembered seeing mentioned several times when I had been interested in Common Lisp and it turned out to be a follow-up to that. Oh, and those things actually looked at time spent programming, so they didn't measure only silly things like program length.
eurg70

In many social groups touching initiated from women is often received just as bad as from men, and fairly so. I am sure there are lots of groups with this specific double standard, but it is not universal, not by a large margin.

Also, "only explanation": Really?

eurg00

2nd'd too. I also recommend looking into c't ActiveAid (http://www.heise.de/download/activaid.html). It's a AutoHotkey script collection by the German computer magazine c't, and contains many goodies. The linked page is in German, but the application supports English.

I especially liked it for the excellent Multi-Monitor, Window-Placement, date/time/calendor, notetaking and screenshot support. Most of it is less important with Windows >= 7, but it's still helpful.

eurg10

I may be misreading this, but it seems to me that you inverted the meaning of akrasia.

0DanielLC
Fixed. I know what it means; I just wrote the sentence wrong.
-2DanielLC
Whoops. Fixed. I know what it means, I just typed it wrong.
-2DanielLC
Whoops. Fixed. I know what it means, I just typed it wrong.
2Viliam_Bur
After careful reading, my understanding is that DanielLC is saying: "Akrasia generally harms your instrumental rationality only. Except that you need some basic knowledge to bootstrap your epistemic rationality -- and if akrasia prevents you from ever learning this, then it has directly harmed your epistemic rationality, too." as a reply to JGWeissman saying: "If you know akrasia harms you significantly, and you don't make solving this problem your high priority, you are not even epistemically rational!" Which, by the way, made me realize that I really am not epistemically rational enough. :(
eurg00

There's an oversight: You have added the non-regular April meet-ups as "upcoming".

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0FrankAdamek
This was actually posted on the 27th of April. I believe the date at the top indicates the last time the post was changed (when I moved it to discussion).
eurg30

My comparison would be someone screaming at Dmitri Ivanovsky in 1892 "do not research viruses until you know that this research is safe!".

I want to second that. Also, when reading through this (and feeling the -- probably imagined -- tension of both parties to stay polite) the viral point was the first one that triggered the "this is clearly an attack!" emotion in my head. I was feeling sad about that, and had hoped that luke would find another ingenious example.

eurg00

It is explicitly mentioned (somewhere) that the wiki is only for referencing ideas and terms that have been used/discussed/explained in LW posts.

So, yes, inconvenience, but not solely.

eurg10

Ah, I just looked up my calender, and indeed, I have an important obligation on Sunday 22 already. In case anybody wonders, I'd have time the week after, and the one after that...

eurg00

I would rather avoid Tik-Tak as meet-up location, as well as similar bars/cafés. Loud music/loud crowd, little light, much smoke... These reasons are behind my suggestion to go to somewhere more restaurant-like.

I myself will refrain from proposing further places, as too many options won't make it any easier.

0lazado
there is actually a non-smoker area in the "bar" in wich it is rather quit, because there aren't any people in there.
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