Majored in philosophy. I don't think I learned much worthwhile and it's makes it harder to get a job.
If anyone wants to teach English in China, my school is hiring. The pay is higher than the market rate and the management is friendly and trustworthy. Must have a Bachelor's degree and a passport from and English speaking country. If you are at all curious, PM me for details.
What vegetarian things can I eat that won't leave me hungry an hour later?
In general girls are also more likely to be aware that language has many lavers of meaning besides communicating facts.
Please say "women" unless you are talking about female humans that have not reached adulthood.
A lot of developers have tried to make this app. I first noticed a version in 2007, back when Facebook had just started with apps.
Edit:* Holy shit, apparently it's worth $30 million.
I've found "machine problem-solving" goes over with laypeople better than "machine intelligence."
This is my first LessWrong discussion post, so constructive criticism is greatly appreciated.
This is above-average quality for a discussion post. I look forward to reading your future posts.
There's at least one predictable value shift I can think of coming from human biology, namely puberty, that a hypothetical prepubescent rationalist should absolutely take into account when planning sufficiently far into the future
Yeah, but you're not going to value what your future self is going to value unless your utility function already includes "increase future self's utility" in it.
Downvoted for creating a new thread. I'll give you back the karma if you delete and repost this in the open thread.
I can think of a few examples but they're all political.
Not sure if this is political, but I understood why people in America were so obsessed with gay marriage much more when I realised that spouses get health care automatically. So people weren't really (or not exclusively) getting upset over a symbolic distinction but a practical one.
I'm not on this site very much anymore,
:-( Thanks for the time you've spent here. Wishing you luck in whatever you've moved on to.
If you like psychology research say "I'm sure this is much more efficient than the wars or farm subsidies the government was going to use this money on."
If you don't like psychology research say "This is an outrage! We could preventing malaria with that money"
Or "mostly the same science funding agencies fund both fMRI and non-fMRI psychology with mostly fixed budgets, so they should reallocate funding away from fMRI and towards studies with sample sizes large enough to be adequately powered for finding real effects."
Really? I've never had the guts to tell the server that my meal was "satisfactory".
That's not taboo. If you go ahead and do it, you won't face ostracism. Your feeling awkward about it doesn't count. Otherwise, asking someone out on a date would be taboo.
When the server asks if the meal was good, it usually wasn't good. Most meals are satisfactory or poor.
Life would be better if God existed.
Which god?
Most sexual relationships are between people who are settling for what they can get.
settling for what they can get.
You mean optimizing.
Cynicism about love is taboo? Where have I been?
Dissolve the question.
One question I like to ask in response to questions like this is "what do you plan on doing with this information?" I've generally found that thinking consequentially is a good way to focus questions.
Note that this is from someone who's never heard of "Cal Newport" or "Scott H. Young" before now, or perhaps just doesn't recognize the names.
They seem to get more respect on LW than average career advice bloggers, so I was hoping someone who was familiar would comment. Nonetheless, I'm upvoting you because it's good to hear an outsider's opinion.
Did I meet you at the Less Wrong meetup in December/January?
Cal Newport and Scott H. Young are collobarating to form a start deliberate practice course by email. Here's an excerpt from on Cal's emails to inquiring people:
...The goal of the course is simple: to teach you how to apply the principles of deliberate practice to become a stand out in your job.
Why is this important? The Career Capital Theory I teach in my latest book and on Study Hacks maintains that the skills that make you remarkable are also your leverage for taking control of your working life, and transforming it into a source of passion.
The goal for
Errh
On an uncharitable reading, this sounds like two wide-eyed broscientist prophets who found The One Right Way To Have A Successful Career (because by doing this their career got successful, of course), and are now preaching The Good Word by running an uncontrolled, unblinded experiment for which you pay 100$ just to be one of the lucky test subjects.
Note that this is from someone who's never heard of "Cal Newport" or "Scott H. Young" before now, or perhaps just doesn't recognize the names. The facts that they've sold popular books w...
Are these life advice threads (like how to get a job in Australia, or how to be poly-amorous) appropriate for Less Wrong? Because if they are, there's a few procedural knowledge gaps I'd like to fill.
Yeah, if we could use these posts to learn about women's experiences instead of constantly doubting everything they say...that would be great.
No, we take their experiences as fact.
It is not clear, though, why we must automatically take their interpretation of the policy relevance of their experiences as fact.
Doubting that a person is honestly and accurately relating their experiences is one thing, doubting that the generalizations they draw are accurate is another. I upvoted the post, but I think V_V brings some legitimate considerations to the table here.
Women and men tend to have somewhat different experiences in life, and it's useful for them to be exposed to each others' experiences and learn from them. But I don't think we can assume that the generalizations any particular woman draws from her experiences will be accurate, any more than we can assume that...
Yeah, if we could use these posts to learn about women's experiences instead of constantly doubting everything these they say...that would be great.
I think that this would make women more willing to describe their experiences. I also think on LW learning and engagement often look like doubt and criticism, and that epistemic hygiene is very important.
If you're saving for your own retirement, you might want to consider the risk of dying before you can spend that money. A 25-year old male has an 18.6% chance of dying before he reaches 65, so he should discount his expected return accordingly.
I've never heard of this before but reading the article reminded me of an experience I had in a Pentecostal setting. I was praying for the Holy Spirit to make me speak in tongues. I was very concentrated and prayed a chant over and over. I was lying in my bed and my chest started tingling. It was sort of like how your leg feels when it falls asleep. I also felt physical warmth and muscle relaxation, and lot of pleasure. The tingling spread all over my body and I became paralyzed. But it felt good so I didn't care.
I re-induced it lots of times until I saw a...
I was going to do it for honor/karma.
Would it be inappropriate to host a Less Wrong March Madness bracket pool?
Edit: Not going to do it.
No, and Google is failing me. Is there somewhere I can read about it?
If computer hardware improvement slows down, will this hasten or delay AGI?
My naive hypothesis is that if hardware improvement slows, more work will be put into software improvement. Since AGI is a software problem, this will hasten AGI. But this is not an informed opinion.
Please delete this comment and don't bring up the subject again. Or if you must, bring up the subject only in the Politics Open Thread.
While the way it is phrased here is politically inflammatory, the general piece of advice "be cautious about entering contracts even if your peer group seems blase about them" is probably good.
General idea: On the follies of letting guilt motivate you.
Story idea: Once upon a time Kay (future superhero) and Pluto (future villain) were union busters. Together they crippled and broke up almost all the unions in the city, often through illegal and unethical means. One day they realized they do something Truly Horrific, and they realize what monsters they are. They quit busting unions, but the damage is done.
~10 years later, Kay is working as a repossession agent, while Pluto has become a community organizer. Pluto has managed to organize the workers...
What's the problem with the "compound interest will make you rich" meme? Is it inflation?
Compound interest gains most of its power when large amounts have been saved. So if you don't make much money, compound interest simply won't make you rich, you won't be able to save enough (though you can still have a decent retirement). If you make a lot, it doesn't matter as much anyway. If you're middle class and willing to save half your income, then it might make you rich, but that is a painful 30-40 years. Explore the graphs and savings calculator here for examples of what you would need to do to have a million by 60.
What's the probability of a major war between Japan and China in the next decade?
Any ideas why this is blocked by Trend Micro?
Maybe you should instead donate any leftover money to CFAR, so as to avoid the donor illusion.
He could start a giving war by setting up a fund for AMF and a fund for CFAR. At the end of the year, he could donate a total of 30% of his income to both charities, splitting the fund in proportion to how much each charity raised in the giving war.
To get a real war going you want some advantage to escalation. Simply spitting it in proportion to the total giving diminishes the value of a marginal dollar. Maybe an all-pay auction (like a dollar auction) would be better: whichever of AMF and CFAR got more donations would get the full match from me. Among rational mixed-strategy-utilizing donors this should result in $X moved by an $X pool on average, but people being imperfect I would expect to see more than $X moved.
Or until he posts his next obviously influenced by transhumanism comic, which shouldn't be too long.
Downvoted for being mean.
Are donations to the Singularity Institute tax deductible in Australia?
You should start a blog.
Hmm, still doesn't work for me. That's odd.
Did they take it down?
Moreover, the objections made about the recent health-care mandate were not made by and large based on gender equality issues.
Sure. My point was that no one was requiring employers to cover vasectomies, so of course no one will get angry about having to provide vasectomy coverage.
Someone started a rumor last decade that a large portion of health insurers cover Viagra but not birth control. It's not true.
So this is an interesting point but actually reinforces the sorts of claims being made by Xachariah, since the amount of objection to vasectomies is much smaller than the amount of objection to birth control, which is consistent with his hypothesis.
If you're thinking about US politics in 2012, most of the "objection to birth control" was objection to Obama's mandate that insurance companies to fully cover birth control for women, but not men.
If a middle-class couple in a first world country decide to create and raise a child, they have done
[pollid:379]
Instead of the whole 'soul' thing, lets go with "Women deserve to be punished for having sex," and that 'life-begins-at-conception' is just a rationalization.
Every pro-lifer I've ever met has shared two characteristics: they don't think women who have abortions should go to jail, and they think that women who have abortions are worse off than women who choose to give birth. That doesn't fit with the pregnancy-as-punishment theory.
(It does however, expose another type of misogyny: they refuse to believe a mature woman in a sound mind could ever choose abortion.)
Possible explanations:
One sex knows something the other sex doesn't:Perhaps since men are treated as the default gender, women understand what it's like to be a man better than men understand what it's like to be a woman.
How to test: Turing test. Create an anonymous panel of 4 male and 1 female economists, and then let a group of males ask them questions. Afterwards, the males vote on which panelist was female. Reverse the test. Whichever sex knows something the other sex doesn't will do a better job at passing the turning test and a spotting one of the...
Other factors that could explain:
The difference is not as large, either because of the file drawer effect, or because someone selected / massaged the data to make the difference look bigger (the researcher or the journalist).
Selection effects: men and women may go into economics for different reasons; for example (as a bit of a caricature); men who want to get obscenely rich study economics to get into business, and women who want to get obscenely rich try to marry into money, and money-grabiness is correlated with pro-free market views.
Differences in peer...
For starters, write lots of letters to the editor stating that war is always wrong. Don't just attack the easy targets like the Iraq War. Try and write things that will make your average dove say "Well that's going a bit far." (ex, saying the American Revolution was unjustified.)
A rule not ultimately backed by the threat of violence is merely a suggestion.
You can threaten non-violence, like a boycott.
A philosophy degree is definitely better than nothing. But I should have used that time to major in something more lucrative.