All of jklsemicolon's Comments + Replies

It seems I misunderstood. It didn't occur to me that you might have meant "Muggles" literally (i.e. exactly as used in Harry Potter). My apologies.

The phrase "X Studies" refers to lessons about X, not lessons for X. For example, in Harry Potter (or at least in HPMoR; I'm not so familiar with the original), "Muggle Studies" refers to classes that wizards take to learn about Muggles.

So you're either misusing this phrase, or using "Muggle" to refer to LWers instead of non-LWers.

4polymathwannabe
That's precisely the point---to look at those strange creatures, the Muggles, see how they eradicated smallpox and put men on the Moon, and ask: how do they do such amazing things using only their brains?

TV/movie audience desire to view people who possess high-status markers...I don't think this has anything to do with respect

This is a contradiction.

4Stabilizer
Sorry if it was confusing but you are taking it out of context. I actually meant: the fact that we don't have a proportional number of old people in TV/movies as in real life is not because we respect old people less in real life. It is simply a reflection of the freedoms available in TV/movies.

I would seriously not be surprised to find that fat people have starved to death without their fat cells releasing fat, and blinded by preconceptions, nobody managed to notice or note down when this occurred.

Out of curiosity, I googled, and indeed it turns out that some of the heaviest people on record died of starvation.

2JQuinton
A lot of diets only focus on what you eat, and not your general lifestyle when your general lifestyle is the determining factor. If you eat healthy and exercise correctly, but only get 4-5 hours of sleep every night, you will not lose weight. And without the exercise part, you will probably gain weight even if you are eating "healthy". There's also the risk of sleeping too much also being linked to weight gain. Burning the midnight oil every now and then is ok, but making a habit of it definitely is not. I used to stay up late coding all the time, because laying in bed about to go to sleep for some reason makes my brain think of solutions, and then I would only get about 4 hours of sleep pretty consistently. That scumbag brain meme comes to mind. IIRC there are some other lifestyle choices that are linked to being overweight, like having a long commute. A long commute is probably putting yourself under a lot of stress hormones like cortisol for extended periods of time, and cortisol levels are linked to unhealthy weight gain.

(In the Recent Comments sidebar, this looked like:

Nietzsche is dead God

which is rather different!)

1TimS
I saw that, and it ruins the joke a bit. Sigh. FWIW, I really like Nietzsche.

Sexual Weirdtopia: It's illegal to be a virgin past a certain age, say 25. Each person must show proof that they've had sex at least once before their 25th birthday, or face punishment (which could range from a fine to execution, depending on the level of dystopian-ness desired). Stories could deal with the difficulties faced by unpopular or unattractive people in meeting this deadline, or with the complications entailed by the requirement of proof.

An interesting variation would be for the rule to apply only to one sex, say males.

1Strange7
You're supposed to describe something that doesn't already exist.

Whom use...can signal an excessive concern with pedantry

Speaking of pedantry, I have no doubt that you meant:

"Whom" use

The "bannination" is here.

EDIT: and here is Eliezer's explanation.

that some single large ordinal is well-ordered

An ordinal is well-ordered by definition, is it not?

Did you mean to say "some single large ordinal exists"?

1drnickbone
Well, supposing that a large ordinal exists is equivalent to supposing a form of Platonism about mathematics (that a colossal infinity of other objects exist). So that is quite a large statement of faith! All maths really needs is for a large enough ordinal to be logically possible, in that it is not self-contradictory to suppose that a large ordinal exists. That's a much weaker statement of faith. Or it can be backed by an inductive argument in the way Eliezer suggests.
3Eliezer Yudkowsky
Yeah, it's hard to phrase this well and I don't know if there's a standard phrasing. What I was trying to get at was the idea that some computable ordering is total and well-ordered, and therefore an ordinal.

It is neither deep (enigmatic or inferentially distant) nor punchy (counterintuitive or contradicting received wisdom). If anything it's too obvious. (By contrast, if I said "Be evil", now that would be deep/punchy.)

It was meant as a companion to this.

Yes; "do that thing" should not be confused with "do only that thing".

If you're good at something, do that thing.

(Obvious caveats apply.)

4FiftyTwo
The Joker
6Qiaochu_Yuan
So it's not obvious to me that this is a good idea. On the one hand, comparative advantage. On the other hand, fixed vs. growth mindset: you can change what you're good at, and this might be valuable. Aaron Swartz wrote a nice blog post about how restricting it is to be good at one thing because it feels like you shouldn't do other things that I can't currently find.
3handoflixue
Downvoted for being deep/punchy instead of practical.

When does the job start, and how long does it last? Could someone apply to do it over the summer, say? Will the person(s) have work every week (and thus a "steady job"), or is it all sporadic and ad-hoc?

0Paulovsk
Yes, good points. Same doubts here.

My personal belief is that female utility is maximized by a man who is alpha

Note that "utility" is not the same thing as "sexual pleasure".

It sounds to me like you might be in some kind of depression or low-enthusiasm state. I don't hear a coherent critique in these comments, so much as a general sense of "boo 'rationality'/LW".

Contrast:

Are you not comfortable with that happening at all, or not comfortable with being involved in one?

I'm not comfortable with it existing. I think it's not useful.

and

People with a common interest meeting up seems natural enough.

Well, if there are other people who feel that way, they're free to meet up to share that interest

This feels inco... (read more)

[anonymous]220

That turned out to be the case.

Now and then I go a bit crazy and find it difficult to value anything. Luckily the worst symptom is that I don't get much done for a while, and post gloomy comments on websites.

If SIAI were being founded today, it would surely be called the Rationality Institute.