All of RobertChange's Comments + Replies

Addendum: a great "decoupling" event was when countries stopped tying their currency to precious metals (or indeed anything material) ... first it started by introducing paper notes, and now money can exist just as an entry in a bank account. If the economy is just numbers of money then this decoupling means that the economy than grow higher than the number of atoms in the universe which is often cited as a hard upper limit.

I think that economic output is the sum of a lot of other curves. All exponentials come to stagnation pretty fast when they hit their limits, but in our history whenever that happened, there was already a new summand added to the economy which starts a new exponential growth. 

Many of the curves improve factors of things that don't grow any more. For example, many wealthy nations don't have population growth any more, but still increase per-capita output. Likewise, many nations don't have a growth of the energy input, but they're using energy more effi... (read more)

I suggest that some people who want to organize or help with the next meetup will gather on Sunday before or after the official end, so that the date and city can already be announced soon after. We can shoot for a six-month advance notice next time and either stick to this or extend to twelve-months if needed. (12 months advance notice seems to be quite common for big annual events, but not when something new is held the first time.)

"Learned Helplessness" and its opposite "Learned Optimism" are widely replicated results that have now become the basis for some therapeutic approaches in the academic/scientific psychology world. Seligman did a lot of work on this and got his early academy fame on this work. The character strengths and virtues on the other hand are not based on reproducible experiments, rather literature study (as Seligman writes: "lists of virtues from all cultures"). It's not knowledge and results, but rather trying to open up a new area and advocate real experimental research in that field. We'll have to wait at least a decade until the results are in ;-)

Brillyant's comment above basically gives the answer to this: beauty doesn't provide as much long-term happiness as the ICVPI facotrs (individual character, values, preferences, and interests).

Happiness levels in our society are stagnating because materialist desires only provide short-term fulfillment. No matter what good thing happens to you (be it a promotion, inheritance, marrying "the love of your life", ...) your happiness might raise for a certain amount of time but then drop back to its initial level. (Evidence of this is provided in both... (read more)

Of course they do and that's why I wrote "plus other things we don't need to get into here". The point is the beauty-fixation of men which nobody has yet denied. Drethelin even suggests it is so inert that it cannot be changed ;-)

Original for Reference: "Gelehrsamkeit schießt leicht in die Blätter, ohne Frucht zu tragen."

Thanks to all for the warm welcome and the many curious questions about my ambition! And special thanks to MugaSofer, Peterdjones, and jpaulsen for your argumentative support. I am very busy writing right now, and I hope that my posts will answer most of the initial questions. So I’ll rather use the space here to write a little more about myself.

I grew up a true Ravenclaw, but after grad school I discovered that Hufflepuff’s modesty and cheering industry also have their benefits when it comes to my own happiness. HPMOR made me discover my inner Slytherin b... (read more)

Hi LWers,

I am Robert and I am going to change the world. Maybe just a little bit, but that’s ok, since it’s fun to do and there’s nothing else I need to do right now. (Yay for mini-retirements!)

I find some of the articles here on LW very useful, especially those on heuristics and biases, as well as material on self-improvement although I find it quite scattered among loads of way to theoretic stuff. Does it seem odd that I have learned much more useful tricks and gained more insight from reading HPMOR than from reading 30 to 50 high-rated and “foundational... (read more)