All of jswan's Comments + Replies

There are so many variables here. I think most people underestimate the violence involved in a high speed motor vehicle crash. Years ago, I was involved in EMS and responded to a lot of crashes. If we eliminate a) crashes without seatbelts worn (1), and b) crashes without frontal airbags (cars without frontal airbags are relatively uncommon these days, I'd say that most survivable TBIs were caused by either a) side impacts, with the head hitting the window glass, or b) the airbag itself (2). Of those two, the low-to-intermediate-speed side impact is the on... (read more)

It seems like diet is a good case of where it might be better to satisfy than optimize: it's clearer that some things are bad than that other things are optimal.

I think that long-term goals should be qualitative and subjective, and supported by short-term goals that are quantitative and objective. I like my short-term goals to be achievable within 12 weeks at the outside, and preferably much less.

One reason for this is that as I learn by pursuing and achieving short-term goals, my outlook on the long term changes. Another reason is that the pursuit of long-term goals is hindered by getting stressed out over specific numbers or metrics, and made easier by pushing the edge of my subjective performance envelope. In o... (read more)

The shooting sports have a lot of attributes that appeal to different mental aspects of rationality:

• they require careful observation of internal mental states
• academic knowledge can directly contribute to success (such as knowing a lot about human vision)
• lots of opportunities to indulge in obsession over microimprovements
• pre-event, post-event and on-the-fly computational skills are immensely useful
• unusual conscious states, such as time slowdown, are relatively easy to achieve without chemical assistance

Potential drawbacks: associated in the USA with right-wing politics; distrusted by liberals; expensive; requires ownership of dangerous tools.

In the event that exercise becomes a persistent habit, what is optimal changes a lot over time as you age and as you improve.

Speaking from the perspective of having exercised 5-7 days a week for over 20 years now, doing both strength and endurance work, I can say that my interests, capabilities, and my response to exercise has changed in fascinating ways over that time. Most people don't stick with an exercise program long enough to even really understand it, let alone wear it out, but if you do, what you do will probably change a lot.

I realize that's a pretty vague statement, but while I think your advice is pretty good overall, the idea of optimal is not something that stays fixed over long periods of time.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein writes philosophical fiction. She is my favorite contemporary literary fiction author. Her biographies of Gödel and Spinoza are also brilliant.

In his 1985 paper he seems to be arguing that he uniquely extends the Church-Turing thesis.

Deutsch claims in the article to have proved that any physical process can in principle be emulated at arbitrarily fine detail by a universal quantum Turing machine. Is this proof widely accepted? I tried to read the paper, but the math is beyond me. I've found relatively little discussion of it elsewhere, and most of it critical.

I always recommend that people who are even remotely interested in this kind of stuff take a wilderness medicine course. Wilderness medicine is all about decision making under conditions of limited time and information, so it seems like the kind of thing that would interest LWers.

Well, one answer may simply be that militaries are class-and-tradition-laden bureaucracies that are hostile to change. Certainly this has been the experience of the US when attempting to build a western-style NCO corps into the militaries of allied developing nations.

Another answer might be that it's already possible in principle: somebody has probably already mentioned this, but one can go from a NCO role into an officer role; the traditional term for this is "mustang officer".

Another answer might be division of labor: traditionally, western mi... (read more)

I don't think it's correct that the structure described here fits militaries cross-culturally, except in name. In the US and most Western European military structures, the senior NCOs are the critical link. The degree of authority and autonomy given to senior NCOs in the west is fundamentally different from that in most other military structures. I can't comment on this from personal experience, but every US military service member I've known who has served extensively alongside militaries outside the US, Canada, or Western Europe has commented on this, an... (read more)

I realize that LW collectively doesn't like unreferenced definitions, but in this case maybe it's OK... a friend of mine whose PhD is in decision theory explained aleatory uncertainty to me as the uncertainty of chance with known parameters: if you roll a normal six-sided die, you know it's going to come up with a value in the range 1-6, but you don't know what it will be. There's no chance it will come up 7. Epistemic uncertainty is the uncertainty of chance with unknown parameters: there may not be enough data to know the bounds of an event, or it may have such large and random bounds that trying to place them is not very meaningful.

Just logged in for the first time in a month... the reason I think it helps is that he now uses the terminology himself: he talks about believing or not believing things based on evidence fairly frequently, and occasionally talks about testing things. Small steps.

We have a nine y/o boy (an only child, by choice), and the one thing that seems to have made a difference specifically with rationality (for some value of "rationality"; children are not the first examples of the attribute that come to mind) has been constantly trying to phrase things in terms of simple scientific method: what do you think? why do you think that? what evidence do you have for that? how would you test that?

I suggest that people go check out the Less Wrong Fitocracy group. Lots of people of all different fitness levels busting ass and making progress in almost every way you can dream up. Experience is everything when it comes to fitness. Pick something that looks doable and give it a few weeks, months, or years.

A decent place to start would be The Investment Answer, which is a pretty conservative, simple investment strategy. Then branch out from there. Most retirement planning software makes big assumptions about return rates and the linearity of markets; you need to make sure you're aware of that when using it. Most of them are based around Modern Portfolio Theory and the Efficient Frontier, so it's a good idea to be aware of that and its weaknesses.

So much of personal finance planning revolves around your personality type and desires; for atypical personality t... (read more)

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

This is a book about the technical aspects of meditation. I haven't finished it yet (nor put it into practice), but it seems like a very low woo-factor book on introspection practice.

History and Philosophy of Science.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of lifestyle and investment strategy are you planning to support a long-term life of the mind on $1M USD? Or is millionaire more of a figure of speech representing "a whole lotta money"?

If you make 5% a year on that and live a very frugal lifestyle in a low-cost area, you could do OK, but medical expenses, children, inflation, etc could hurt your capital considerably. I think you'd need a good bit more than $1M to have a large safety margin.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's "36 Arguments for the Existence of God". Easily one of my top-10 favorite books ever. Beautifully written and hilarious (a particularly difficult combo for an author to pull of, IMO), a non-linear, recursive loop through the lives of several atheist characters who are inextricably tied to religion in one way or another. The author has quite an interesting life history: philosopher, biographer of Gödel and Spinoza, famous novelist, currently married to Stephen Pinker, among other things.

I have a BA and MA in English from a top US university, and more than half my lifetime later I'd recommend against it unless you are really sure you want to teach it. As an undergrad I thought I wanted to teach English, but I disliked the graduate studies in the field and I didn't much like teaching at the junior college level when I tried it. Being able to write well has been an enormous help in my alternate career, but you can get that in any course of study that forces you to write frequently under direct criticism. If I had it to do over again I'd do some combination of HPS and CS with a smattering of economics; right up your alley. UBC has a good CS department for sure.

I had no idea when I wrote that that the talk I was going to tonight would be closely related to this topic. It was a talk about the 20th century polymath Michael Polyani (physician, physicist, economist, philosopher), given by a former surgeon and teacher of surgery who's made a late-in-life career change into teaching writing. One of the things he touched on, and which deserves a lot more thought on my part, is the relationship between reductionism and heuristics in critical decision making.

A good chunk of medicine (and I think many, but not all, aspects... (read more)

I've known at least one person (and possibly more, it's hard to remember...) who went for a MD after years as a nurse, a couple who went on to nurse-practitioner or PA, and one or two who have shuffled between RN and EMT-P positions as pay and adventure dictate. If you spend some years as a nurse and decide later that you want more schooling, you'll be experienced regarding the options available and probably in a more financially stable position. If you continue to yearn for academia, there are a both teaching and research avenues out there in the nursing and nurse-practitioner fields.

Before I get bogged down in reading all the comments, I just want to say: nursing is one of the most admirable and versatile professions in existence. There are very few people I'd rather have available in any generic critical situation than an experienced and competent nurse. Good on you.

It seems like I can engage in strategic self-deception while acknowledging it as such in order to reduce negative thoughts or tolerate unpleasantness in situations where it's beneficial. Rationality practice seems to be a benefit inasmuch as it allows me to understand better situations in which self-deception leads to negative vs positive outcomes.

Yeah, I think you pretty much called it. It doesn't really work for me, but I guess that if such a communication style is the most effective way to go, drive on.

I'm certainly going to try to be a Rationality Tim Ferris, but I have a ways to go.

Please no. Here's an example. When you say stuff like:

"As an autodidact who now consumes whole fields of knowledge in mere weeks, I've developed efficient habits that allow me to research topics quickly."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/5me/scholarship_how_to_do_it_efficiently/

You sound like Tim Ferriss and you make me want to ignore you in the same way I ignore him. I don't want to do this because you seem like a good person with a genuine ability to help others. Don't lose that.

I have poor circulation (a touch of Reynaud's syndrome) as well, and I've tried a great many products in the context of cycling, ice climbing, and just general being outside in the cold. The short answer is that there are no gloves that will reliably keep your hands warm and allow you to retain dexterity if you're not getting your heart rate up to promote circulation. Mittens work better, by far. In no particular order, here are some more long winded tips:

1) Use mittens whenever possible. Ones that allow skin-to-skin contact between your fingers work best.... (read more)

There are indeed a couple of different ways I do mean it, but my best specific examples come from athletics. About eight or nine years ago I started getting seriously interested in long distance trail running. Like most enthusiastic autodidacts I started reading lots of material about shoes, clothing, hydration, nutrition, electrolytes, training, and so on. As I'm sure you've seen, a lot of people on the Internet can get paralyzed by analysis in the face of vast easily available information. In particular, they have a lot of trouble sorting out conflicting... (read more)

I've been lurking here on and off since the beginnings at OB, IIRC, though more off than on. Expressed in the language of the recent survey: I'm an 43-year-old married white male with an advanced humanities degree working in the technical side of for-profit IT in the rural USA. I was raised in a non-theist environment and was interested in rationality tools from an early age. I had a spontaneous non-theistic mystical experience when I was 17 that led me to investigate (but ultimately reject) a variety of non-materialist claims. This led to a life-long inte... (read more)

Book recommendations:

• another vote for "Starting Strength" by Mark Rippetoe
• "5/3/1" by Jim Wendler. Available here: http://www.flexcart.com/members/elitefts/default.asp?pid=2976

Answering your questions:

1) It doesn't matter that much what you do, as long as you stick with the basic, multi-joint movements (see below); what's more important is that you do it consistently for a long period of time (i.e., years), and you train progressively harder as you make progress. That said, you need to avoid injury. Training with weights near your o... (read more)

Having lurked here for a while, I think that one of the reasons that some LWers have difficulty with exercise and diet is due to a crisis of optimization: given the wildly divergent claims of popular fitness gurus and the murky state of exercise science research, it's hard to know where to start.

I'd suggest that exercise and diet are areas in which experience, persistence, and self-experimentation are unusually important. I've been engaged in the serious practice of some form of physical exercise for virtually all of my adult life, and somewhat more casual... (read more)

About 15,000 people in the immediate area. Longer than four hours to drive to the nearest urban area. There's a college in town, so there's probably a larger intellectually-inclined population than would otherwise be expected. I've lived here a long time and I know a lot of intelligent atheists, but no one so far who's interested in systematic rationality as an explicit endeavor.

I live (by explicit preference) in a small town in the rural mountain west. Has anybody had success with starting a rationalist group in a small town?