All of gucciCharles's Comments + Replies

Ya, that must be it. I've been on here for like 3 years (not with this account though) but only after the diaspora. Really excited that things are getting posted again. One major issue with such a system is that I now feel pressure to post popular content. A major feature of this community is that nothing is dismissed out of hand. You can propose anything you want so long as it's supported by a sophisticated argument. The problem with only giving voting privileges to >x karma accounts is that people, like myself, will feel a pressure to post things that... (read more)

"I would strongly suspect humor doesn't make you more rational/smarter/scientific, but is a fun grounds for playing around with strange ideas and patterns."

Most humor (aside from physical comedy or a silly persona) seems to require deep verbal concept formation. Pointing out unexpected similarities based on the structures of ideas isn't cognitively trivial; it means that the comedian is able to extract essential features across superficially different subjects.

The consequences of our beliefs about status and signalling. For example given how pervasive signaling is in our lives should we optimize our lives for the most status etc.

We know that we care about status. We know that we can't talk to people about that in real life. Should we then make status our motivating terminal value?

..his reverend or something like that told him (hypothetically). He beleives it the same way Obama beleives that a man can rise form the dead. He was told by people he trusted, but the opinion wasn't widespread. I doubt that he came up with the idea on his own. It seems to have some group of believers.

0ChristianKl
Trust in a single person and trust in an institution are two different qualities. To stay with the analogy, even when we believe individual scientists can fail us we trust in the scientific community as a group. A person who believes that global warming is a hoax because he found a scientist who told him, is doing it wrong. It's the same for a person who takes the beliefs of a random priest as the truth instead of the Christian community

On that topic how you upvote? I've never been able to figure it out. I can't find any upvote button. Does anyone know where the button is?

6arundelo
It's a thumbs-up that is in the lower left corner of a comment or post (next to a thumbs-down). It looks like the top of these two thumbs-ups (or the bottom one after you've clicked it): If you don't see it, it may be that they've turned off voting for new or low-karma accounts.

Isn't teaching itself a skill? So what that she was a bad musician, she was obviously a first rate teacher (independent of the subject that she taught).

She gives a pattern of feedback that makes the students practice well? In the sense that she gives positive feedback she functions more as a motivator than as a teacher. Her skill is teaching, it's only happenstance that she teaches music; has she taught shoe polishing or finger painting she would have produced the best shoe polishers and the most skilled finger painters.

Perhaps she doesn't have many complex skills but has strong fundamentals (think Tim Duncan of the NBA Spurs). She might make her students practice the fundamentals which will allow them t... (read more)

I'm talking about in the case of the humans.

And where on the graph would you put yourself now?

To what degree does this hold. Yes, in certain cases showing vulnerability is endearing.

But imagine an anxious person that obviously struggles to talk to you, that forces herself to interact even though she's not very good at interactions. In this case the vulnerability isn't endearing at all. I've witnessed people in such situations and the result was non-edearing.

On the other hand, I think of a friend that has high status but always makes himself vulnerable, giggles and blushes. In his case vulnerability causes endearment.

I'm not claiming to know which ... (read more)

How would that work though. This isn't magic and I assume that there is some feature of north (something like magnetics) that explains how this works. I mean, it must be the case that there is some feature of facing north that we can learn to detect. However how can you detect the direction of a person, it's not like they are likely to emit some kind of planet wide signal.

0chaosmage
GPS and cell connection.