Haha, a bit of a drive yea.
Synthesizers and guitars, mostly.
Death Grips - Hip hop/punk/noise
Bizarre, aggressive, and ridiculously creative music. I'm fascinated by musicians that manage to be simultaneously reckless and focused, though I should expect nothing less from any project that includes the drummer from Hella.
Songs: Hunger Games, Takyon Full Albums: Exmilitary, The Money Store, No Love Deep Web
Lola y Manuel - Flamenco
A husband and wife songwriting duo from mid-70's Spain. Arab-influenced singing, technically spectacular guitar, and quite progressive compositions that expand, rather than abandon the traditio...
Great idea, I'm going to join you. Nothing of value will be lost.
March 26th: Reddit crashes as we open infinitely many new tabs in a fit of Burroughs-tier depravity.
Went cold turkey on caffeine a couple weeks ago after sustaining a 3-6 cup daily intake for months. Been feeling unmotivated, taking the occasional mid-day nap, and having unpleasant thoughts along the lines of 'where's my god damn coffee' when urges went unfulfilled. The first 3 days were lazy, headache-clouded, and unproductive.
After that, though, I started to notice that I felt like working on projects in the afternoon and evening. It's a minor change in mood that's led to a major change in behavior, at least in the short term. Worth the costs, even if only for a brief change of pace.
I'm working on an algorithmic music system. The (likely unachievable) goal is to make a generative clone of my own creative process. It's a kind of catharsis, bringing every unspeakable intuition bubbling up to the surface to be translated into a hierarchy of computational processes. Lots of trial and error, red herrings, and accidental success. My short-term goal is to be able to co-perform with it live in an entirely improvised manner, maybe by the end of 2013.
The current focus is 'groove', and it's been a nightmare trying to find a common thread between...
As an American male who went to work the day after breaking his collar bone, I can testify that without a doubt, my rugged outward appearance would get thrown aside if proper health care and sick time were available to me. Scamming an x-ray by using a fake name at the hospital and carefully rationing what little methadone I could buy from local junkies, while Cowboy As Hell, is a pretty awful way to get by. I'd much rather be at home in bed mending then lifting boxes of apples with one arm and ensuring that my bones set at an odd angle.
I think that if European style health care was available here that we'd adapt pretty quickly, rugged independence be damned.
Different audience, different language. I'm just impressed that a NY Op-Ed actually contained these sentences:
...My case for these conclusions relies on three main observations. The first is that our own intelligence is an evolved biological solution to a kind of optimization problem, operating under very tight constraints of time, energy, raw materials, historical starting point and no doubt many other factors. [...] Second, this biological endowment, such as it is, has been essentially constant, for many thousands of years. It is a kind of fixed point in
Not in the slightest. DH does a good job of providing you with the things that he later asks you to use.
When in doubt, frame all drug talk as harm reduction.
You have a point! Updated for correctness and humor.
And given that rituals, whether religious or civic, are pretty much standard and often spontaneous in most communities, I don't see how having a ritual for some subgroup would harm the High Ideals of Rationality.
Rationality Itself remains unphased by a backyard party blog meetup, that's for sure.
I think Academian's post on the role of narrative in self-image touches on the seemingly disjointed purpose of a Rationalist Ritual. We all have our unique approaches to rational thought - my own experience consists largely of the dissolving of narratives in se...
I have never received evidence that I am less likely to be overconfident about things than people in general or that any other particular person on this site is.
You've never caught yourself in the act of falling for a cognitive bias detailed on this site?
...My judgment of this site as of now is that way too much time is spent discussing subjects of such low expected value (usually because of absurdly low expected probability of occurring) for using this site to be worthwhile. In fact I hypothesize that this discussion actually causes overconfidence relat
RE: Cryonics - that particular Kool-Aid doesn't come in my flavor yet
"Kool-Aid" is now a term that can be used to mean not committing suicide?
I've lurked on LW for a long time and can shrug off the second-hand embarrassment without fail, but I'll be damned if I ever link anyone I know to this web site. This undercurrent of LW does more damage than anything Roko ever posted.
I'm no stranger to ritual/awe/group bonding (Merzbow & MDMA: the reason for the season), but there is some hazy aesthetic line past which I cannot follow. Nor will I risk being associated with. Sorry.
If you enjoy this stuff, than more power to ya. Have a blast. Just keep in mind how many people are seriously turned off from LW because of it.
[in agreement with, rather than directed at, drethelin]
I'm on a computer all day at work and the bulk of my activities at home are computer-based as well. I've been able to get into a nice habit of taking daily walks, usually right when I get home from work (before even going in the door). It's quite enjoyable and sometimes I end up wandering around for miles/hours before some other motivation urges me home. Just being in a place where things can be >100 feet away feels novel most of the time. Computer usage is bizarrely user-centric, compared with the outside world; a contrast that shouldn't feel as profou...
We should exempt any imagery fitting of a Slayer album cover, lest we upset the gods of metal with our weakness.
I appreciate the honesty of it. No one here is going to enact any of these thought experiments in real life. The likely worst outcome is to off-put potential SI donors. It must be hard enough to secure funding for a fanfic-writing apocalypse cult; prepending violent onto that description isn't going to loosen up many wallets.
Not all fanfics are created equally, eh?
Curiously, none of this prevents people from seriously talking about interactive animatronic puppets as if they had emotions.
For now!
It will be interesting to see the cultural confusion when 'simulations' are as complex and deep as the real deal. I wonder if robots will look at me with (simulated?) disgust when I joke about circuit bending my friend's little sister's furby? Will I simulate shame?
......Which is to say that whenever there is (a physical arrangement with) a logical structure that matches (is transitive with) the logical structure of consciousness - then there would be consciousness. It gets more complicated. If you draw a line with a pencil on a piece of paper, so that it encodes a three dimensional trajectory over time of a sentient being's consciousness - you basically have created a "soulful" being. Except there's just a drawn line on a piece of paper.
(Assuming you can store a sufficient amount of bits in such an encoding
Hmm, when jokes about medically experimenting on cancer patients with bleach don't register as being all that dark (until someone takes it seriously), then I think it might be time to reevaluate my sense of humor.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread this is not the same as saying they all are 100% fallible.
No disagreement here. Where we seem to disagree is whether or not the 22% remaining unknowns qualify as positive evidence towards anything.
Where did you get these statements from? Thin air? Any references on it? You obviously hasn't looked into this.
I assumed that if there was physical evidence then you would have used it to bolster your argument. Is there any?
I read the wiki article you linked to. I came out believing that the study concluded that 22% of...
Seriously, is this the level of discussion: "the study discarded some eye witness reports, so I am fully justified in discarding the rest as well" ?
The trend is for these mysteries to have boring solutions. Eyewitness testimony is known to be unreliable. There is no physical evidence. All that is left is a very small amount of people who claim to have seen something that they don't understand; color me unimpressed.
But it leaves a massive phenomena to be explained, which should spark massive scientific investigation.
I would imagine that th...
Also by the way: how can you so easily dismiss thousands of eyewitness reports as evidence? The studies does not align with that conclusion:
The study itself dismissed thousands of eyewitness reports.
...About 69% of the cases were judged known or identified (38% were considered conclusively identified while 31% were still "doubtfully" explained); about 9% fell into insufficient information. About 22% were deemed "unknown", down from the earlier 28% value of the Air Force studies.
In the known category, 86% of the knowns were aircraft, b
but your first question seems unrelated - as if it exists only to be snarky.
Oh, that is unintended. Apologies. The last couple times I've encountered that word used it was a placeholder for "vague feelings of dis/approval", though I should probably give LW more credit. I still have doubts about the usefulness of 'legitimacy' as a metric.
Do you disagree that voting reinforces the sense of the populace that the democratically elected government has a "right to rule"?
No, I agree with that. Though, if the 'sense of the populace' was ...
What do you mean by 'legitimacy'?
How does activist non-participation accomplish anything when it looks no different from apathy to an outsider? Any medium you might use to spread your message can be used regardless of if you vote or not. You might as well vote for a lesser evil while claiming non-participation, unless you think a possible greater evil will be somehow more likely to dissolve its own power.
Has this study been corroborated? 13 years should be enough time for a modest amount of supporting evidence to become known.
If you plug 'Brain aging and midlife tofu consumption' into Google Scholar, one of the little links under the first hit points to 'Cited by 176'; if you click on that, you can hit a checkbox for 'Search within citing articles'; then you can search a query like "experiment OR randomized OR blind" which yields 121 results.
The first result shows no negative effect and a trend to a benefit, the second is inaccessible, the second & third are reviews whose abstract suggests it would argue for benefits, and the fourth discusses sleep & mood bene... (read more)