All of SeekingEternity's Comments + Replies

Moderately true of Seattle as well (two group houses, plus some people living as housemates or whatever but not explicitly a Rationalist Group House). I'm not sure if our community is big enough for something like this but I love this idea and it would be a point in favor of moving the bay area if there was one there (that I had a chance to move into) but not one here.

Hell, it's not even just the bay area; Seattle has two explicitly-rationalist-group-houses and plenty of other people who live in more "normal" situations but with other rationalists (I found my current flatmate, when my old one moved out, through the community). Certainly the bay area rationalist community is large and this sort of living situation is far from universal, but I've certainly heard of several even though I've never actually visited any.

Gah, thank you, edited. Markdown is my nemesis.

Agreed that the above won't work for all people, not even all people who say

I haven't and probably can't internalize it on a very deep, systematic level, no matter how many times I re-read the articles

Nonetheless, I find it a useful thing to consider, both because it's a lot easier (even if there isn't yet such a group in your area) than writing an entire LW-inspired rationality textbook, and because it's something that a person can arrange without needing to have already internalized everything (which mig... (read more)

For what it's worth, I got relatively little[1] out of reading the Sequences solo, in any form (and RAZ is worse than LW in this regard, because the comments were worth something even on really old and inactive threads, and surprisingly many threads were still active when I first joined the site in 2014).

What really did the job for me was the reading group started by another then-Seattleite[2]. We started as a small group (I forget how many people the first meetings had, but it was a while before we broke 10 and longer before we did it regularly) that simp... (read more)

I don't think "converse" is the word you're looking for here - possibly "complement" or "negation" in the sense that (A || ~A) is true for all A - but I get what you're saying. Converse might even be the right word for that; vocabulary is not my forte.

If you take the statement "most beliefs are false" as given, then "the negation of most beliefs is true" is trivially true but adds no new information. You're treating positive and negative beliefs as though they're the same, and that's absolutely not true. In... (read more)

Replying loooong after the fact (as you did, for that matter) but I think that's exactly the problem that the post is talking about. In logical terms, one can define a category "human" such that it carries an implication "mortal", but if one does that, one can't add things to this category until determining that they conform to the implication.

The problem is, the vast majority of people don't think that way. They automatically recognize "natural" categories (including, sometimes, of unnatural things that appear similar), and t... (read more)

Agreed. "Torture" as a concept doesn't describe any particular experience, so you can't put a specific pain level to it. Waterboarding puts somebody in fear for their life and evokes very well-ingrained terror triggers in our brain, but doesn't really involve pain (to the best of my knowledge). Branding somebody with a glowing metal rod would cause a large amount of pain, but I don't know how much - it probably depends in the size, location, and so on anyhow - and something very like this on a small scale this can be done as a medical operation t... (read more)

I haven't investigated selling it, but up to a certain multiple of my annual salary it's included in my benefits and there is no value in setting it lower than that value; I wouldn't get any extra money.

This is a fairly standard benefit from tech companies (and others that have good benefits packages in the US), apparently. It feels odd but it's been like this at the last few companies I worked for, differing only in the insurance provider whose policy is used and the actual limit before you'd need to pay extra.

Nitpick: The article talks about a rabbit kidney, not a mouse one

It also isn't entirely clear how cold the kidney got, or how long it was stored. It's evidence in favor of "at death" cryonics, but I'm not sure how strong of evidence it is. Also, it's possible to survive with substantially more kidney damage than you would even want to incur as brain damage.

Many employers provide life insurance. I've always thought that was kind of weird (but then, all of life insurance is weird; it's more properly "death insurance" anyhow) but it's a think. My current employer provides (at no cost to me) a life insurance policy sufficient to pay for cryonics. It would currently be given charitably - I have no dependents and my family is reasonably well off - but I've considered changing that.

Speaking as a SCUBA diver, the equipment is not designed to handle high airflow (such as you need when working hard on a bicycle), so even if the air tank itself wasn't a problem you'd need, at a minimum, a heavily-adjusted second-stage (the one with the mouthpiece) regulator. Possibly a different regulator set altogether. On the other hand, one of the design considerations of a second-stage reg is that the purge valve needs to resist water pressure, including the pressure of swimming; air would generally not have that problem (and you probably wouldn't ha... (read more)

How many technologies are you aware of that don't have a harmful potential application? I mean, (electronic) computers were invented for military purposes and can enable all kinds of mischief on the Internet. Refrigeration makes military logistics a lot easier. Hell, internal combustion drives tanks and other military vehicles. GPS makes cruise missiles easier, but pre-GPS ICBMs just used inertial targeting; that's close enough for thermonuclear bombs.

In HPMOR, Harry figures out a large number of ways to make weapons out of the materials present in a low-t... (read more)

The social stigma of something like that seems like you're basically throwing away any hope of rehabilitation, but it's hardly as if the US is much good at that anyhow.

Orion requires quite a few detonations, though; even with a massive craft (much of which is pusher plate and shock absorbers) to absorb the impact, you have to use fairly low-yield bombs and each only provides a relatively short period of thrust. You could possibly design something that takes higher yields (especially higher relative to the vehicle mass) that would survive reaching orbit on one detonation, but it would be subjected to extreme acceleration - the kind that would crush any satellite launched thus far - and I suspect there might be too much risk of tumbling given the non-uniformity of the atmosphere.

That's worth checking (both in terms of what Apple claims, and in terms of what any relevant legal precedents claim; a hardware warranty certainly shouldn't be at risk from a software modification). On the other hand, it should be easy to "un-jailbreak" a device; just restore an un-jailbroken image onto it (for example, from a backup made before jailbreaking), and you can do so before sending the device in for warranty service. If the device is "bricked" to the point that you can't restore it, then Apple probably can't tell that it was jailbroken, either.

Creating a post in Discussion only requires "a few" points of karma; creating one in Main requires 20. I believe 20 is also required for creating a Meetup post; in most ways those appear to be treated as posts to Main (for example, up- and down-votes on them count for 10x the usual amount of poster karma).

Source: The LW FAQ, specifically http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ#Why_do_I_want_high_karma.3F

5+ years later, I'm curious: have you attempted this? If so, how did the attempt go? If not, is there a clear reason?

It's probably a lot more effective to draw the water from ~10m down; the infrastructure costs are far lower, you'll probably not need to insulate the water quite so much for coastal regions (to keep it from warming en route to the surface), you won't need to pump so hard (you won't have a vertical kilometer of buoyancy for your denser-than-shallower-water to fight).

For coastal regions, this might actually work, though those tend to be relatively moderate to start with (courtesy of the water). It would be a ton of infrastructure to get in installed in more ... (read more)

Disclaimer: I don't use iThings except occasionally for work, and those ones are always jailbroken. My knowledge of what Apple does and does not permit the nominal owners of their devices to do is limited.

You may be able to save a backup of your iPad's current state to your computer, with the possibility of future restoration. This would back up both the apps and their data. You could then delete the apps (which deletes their data). If you wanted to play the apps again, you may be able to take a new backup and then restore the old one. Obvious downside her... (read more)

Agreed. If you're not willing to say "Nope, you crossed the line. See you next time, I'll decide when that is, goodbye" (or similar) and leave (cut them off to whatever degree is needed to stop the harmful behavior), then you need to not give them an opportunity to start again. If you are willing to do so, though, or some other approach to ensuring your boundaries are respected, go ahead.

For the record, while I have a pretty good relationship with both my parents, I do not buy the line that a person always has an obligation to their parents. Sure... (read more)

For what it's worth, I see a surprisingly large number of (attractive and female) dancers on OKC. It seems like one of those things that, if you want to meet desirable women who are looking to meet men, is an obvious approach to take. Meet them at the dance studio, or at events with dancing, or online from a position where you can speak to their interest. Go on a date to a place that has dancing, or put on music and ask her to dance at home (there's on OKC question about this; nearly all women - not just the ones who otherwise say they like dancing - indic... (read more)

TL;DR: Agreed on the "check the match questions, especially the 'unacceptable' ones" comment! The enemy rating can be a total lie.

Oh jeez, OKC match questions. I'm sometimes amazed that the site works as well as it does when the match questions (and their answers) are so terrible. Some very common problems I have with them:

1) Questions where the only possible answer is nuanced - "Would you date a person who ?" for some X that has a wide range of possible meanings - and the only possible answers are yes and no. No "maybe", much... (read more)

Sure, I can explain. Bear in mind that this is all based on my personal experiences (male, atheist, mid-to-late 20s, college degree, lives in Seattle, WA, only interested in dating women) and that although I have developed it over around four years I'm not claiming I've found the perfect strategy so far.

First of all, filter match ratios pretty hard. Anybody below a 90% is probably not worth checking unless they checked you first, below an 80% not even then. Above that it starts being more a matter of enemy ratio; above 10% is probably not worth it, above 1... (read more)

Interpreting the statement generously, ChristianKI probably meant "The raw gender ratio for the site as a whole doesn't matter, only the success rate for people in your demographic (which is partially determined by the gender ratio in the relevant demographic but is not exclusively driven by it)."

For the record, a few ways that raw gender ratio may matter less than you think:

1) It doesn't take orientation into consideration; that's probably even (you "lose" the same percentage of women to lesbianism as you can "subtract" gay m... (read more)

Anecdotally, my success in the dating world went up dramatically when I started using OKCupid; to put it simply, it got me past the "is she even interested in dating, much less dating me?" hangup that I tended to have, and led to a lower fear of rejection. Basically, I no longer worried about whether the attention was undesirable, something that I had a really hard time telling from in-person interaction back then (I've gotten better at it; this was years ago).

Also, while it's certainly true that there are tons of guys on such sites and women ten... (read more)

Edited the wiki entry for Seattle to include a reference to the "Rationality, AI through Zombies" reading/discussion group, which is starting up (again). Next meetup is here: http://lesswrong.com/meetups/1ey

That exposes the maximum surface area for combustion, I guess (the surface area actually increases as the propellant is burned, interestingly) so blowing the top would work, yeah.

Whoops, you're right. I thought the gimbaling was just on the SSMEs (attached to the orbiter) but in retrospect it's obvious that the SRBs had to have some control of their flight path. I'm now actually rather curious about the range safety stuff for the SRBs - one of the dangers of an SRB is that there's basically no way to shut it down, and indeed they kept going for some time after Challenger blew up - but the gimbaling is indeed an obvious sign that I should have checked my memory/assumptions. Thanks.

Anecdotal, but I know of one case where the beggar got angry about being given food (I think it was something like a grocery store deli sandwich, still wrapped and unopened) and ranted at my friend about thinking they know better than the recipient about what they need and how the giver must not trust beggars with money and so on. It's kind of funny in retrospect, but at the time it was disturbing and confrontational and (of course) extremely ungrateful, so there were definitely no warm fuzzies derived therefrom (more like a highly unpleasant fight-or-flig... (read more)

Best guess, it's simply because Typical Mind is overwhelmingly more common (though this could be an example of TMF at work right here!). Humans are social animals, who value the agreement of others with their own views. It's easy and comfortable to assume that other people will think similarly to you. There's an even deeper level than that, though: you are the only person whose mind you are truly familiar with, and so there's a huge availability bias in favor of your own thought processes on any subject. It requires more thought to consider what other peop... (read more)

You're also talking about fundamentally different kinds of rocket boosters. The Space Shuttle used solid fuel boosters, which are basically nothing except a tube packed full of energetically burning material, an igniter to light said material, and a nozzle for the generated gases to come out. They couldn't throttle, couldn't gimbal, couldn't shut off or restart, didn't use cryogenic fuel so didn't need insulation, didn't rely on pressurized fuel so they didn't need turbopumps... In fact, as far as I know they basically didn't have any moving parts at all!

Y... (read more)

I think part of the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of what parachuting into the ocean does to a rocket motor. The motors are the expensive part of the first stage; I don't know exact numbers, but they are the complicated, intricate, extremely-high-precision parts that must be exactly right or everything goes boom. The tank, by comparison, is an aluminum can.

The last landing attempt failed because a rocket motor's throttle valve had a bit more static friction than it should, and stuck open a moment too long. SpaceX's third launch attempt - the la... (read more)

The hypothetical scenario stipulates that the illusion is perfect so long as you're driving the car. That may be an unrealistically difficult goal to achieve, but if you take its success as given, it means that the illusion really is as good as the true thing... so long as the illusion is never pierced. The problem, of course, is that with a car the illusion would be all too easy to pierce; just pop the hood. Even if the actual goal is not to drive an internal combustion car but merely to *believe" you drive such a car, one glance beneath the hood (or having once been told the truth) still means a loss of value.

For the record: I'm not sold on "completely reasonable to prefer just that" at all. It may be simply because I experience almost no jealousy - the only "rules" in my relationship are about the things that could actually hurt me (whether I knew what she was up to or not) - but I really don't see the cheating itself as a problem. Now, it does indicate that your partner is less trustworthy, less true to their promises, than you might have expected. That could be a problem. But in the hypothetical situation that my partner only breaks promi... (read more)

Either that or it was posted almost a year in advance...

Not so much in response to your specific question, but when trying to figure out what I can afford, I actually take a pretty simple approach: my liquid assets (mostly in the bank) plus things I could easily liquidate (stocks, etc.) minus a "rainy day fund" (this has varied in size over the years, but tends to sit at between 2 and 10 thousand USD, based on how hard I think it would be to get a job or find housing in the event that I lost one or both). Things like 401K and HSA are omitted; they're already earmarked for specific things and mean I do... (read more)

For anybody reading this: save for one very lucky encounter at 18, I was too. It happens. Three years later, I've spent nearly all that time in sexual relationships, sometimes more than one at once. The turn-around can come really quickly. I'm not sure I have enough information to pinpoint the changes I need to make, though.

If you're in a box, then the computational resources available are finite. They might change over time, as those outside the box add or upgrade hardware, but the AI can't just say "I need some highly parallel computing hardware to solve this problem with" and re-invent the GPU, or rather, if it did that, it would be a GPU emulated in software and hence extremely slow. The entire simulation would, in effect, slow down due to the massively increased computational cost of simulating this world.

Now, if you cut the AI off from any type of real-time cl... (read more)

Voldemort has an absolute truth oracle, or at least a sufficiently good approximation thereof, available too him. If Harry needs his wand to teach V one of his secrets, make him say so in Parseltongue. If H does demand his wand, make him state whether he intends to use it for anything but demonstrating a secret.

The wonderful thing here is that this gives all kinds of opportunities for V to screw up without realizing he's screwing up. PT is a secret for which H needs his wand. H is, in a sense, demonstrating PT. Unless V was very careful about making H stat... (read more)

Similarly, it would be seriously pushing it to rely on any scientific advances of the last (real-world) decade or so, unless there's a reason Harry would be able to at least semi-plausibly pre-discover them himself. Not that I can think of any of those which would help anyhow, but it's something to keep in mind.

Future tech - even things we think we could perhaps do - is probably right out. Harry could conceivably transfigure something (his epidermis, for example; has anybody mentioned that yet?) into a material that we know exists or could exist, and can d... (read more)

Huh, my comment shows as being 4 days older than the post itself. The actual upcoming session is https://www.facebook.com/events/1552575281693265/. Are comments on this post preserved week to week?

Good to know. I hadn't actually bothered to check; I just used a unique password and email address as a matter of course - but I'm glad anyhow. Of course, that doesn't guarantee they're storing the password verifier, but I certainly could go read the source myself and find out.

Of course, if I was actually concerned about the security of my account here, I wouldn't use the site at all because it's only available unencrypted. Given how easy and cheap (even free) it is to enable TLS these days, I'm honestly surprised this site not only defaults to plaintext but doesn't support encryption at all. Intercepting network traffic is easy (promiscuous mode on open WiFi, run your own hotspot with an expected SSID, ARP spoofing, etc.)

It's worth noting that the SAT2 (subject tests) are much more rarely taken; while all students who anticipate tertiary schooling in the US take the SAT, only a relative handful take the SAT2 (or did when I was looking at it). My 740 in math (SAT1) was substantially higher percentile than my 790 in the SAT2 math subject test

I also thought that the College Board's claim that the SAT 1 is not an IQ test was really odd. The test is (or was, in 2004/2005) full of the following categories of problem: 1) Things a reasonably competent high school math student coul... (read more)

It also raises worrying considerations about how passwords are stored in the database. Passwords should never be stored in plain text, nor with reversible encryption. Instead, each account should store a password verifier value (and a salt, unique to the user).

A password verifier is the result of running a password, its salt, and possibly another input that isn't kept in the DB all through a function that produces some deterministic value that is nigh-impossible to brute force. A property of password verifiers is that they produce output of a constant leng... (read more)

One possible solution is to use a proxy. There are a number of specialized HTTP[S] or SOCKS proxies, some of which may be ideally suited for this use or at least easily adaptable to it. The proxy I use most often is called Burp Suite, and is intended for web site testing and isn't really ideal for your use, but it could technically be coerced into doing what you want.

Preserving the actual TLS traffic including authentication and integrity is a bit of a weird/tricky thing to do. You can record it easily enough using any tool capable of packet capture, but unless you store handshake, the traffic, the symmetric (bulk) encryption key, and the integrity metadata, it will be tricky to prove any given server sent that data.

Kind of a silly question, but it came up in our Sequences reading group yesterday: in EY's An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, we found the following statement:

It's like the experiment in which you ask a second-grader: "If eighteen people get on a bus, and then seven more people get on the bus, how old is the bus driver?" Many second-graders will respond: "Twenty-five."

Anybody have any idea where this finding comes from initially? We found several people who referenced EY's post, including one second-grade teacher who cla... (read more)

There's a new weekly Sequences reading/discussion group in Seattle (in addition to the ~monthly EA meetups). Currently every Monday evening at 6:30PM, UW CSE building (Paul G. Allen center). Upcoming one is https://www.facebook.com/events/342180419325773/?ref=4 or see the Seattle EA group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/221612131358071) for posted future events. These Sequences-focused meetups are still getting started and don't have a FB group (or similar) of their own yet..

There's a new weekly Sequences reading/discussion group in Seattle (in addition to the ~monthly EA meetups). Currently every Monday evening at 6:30PM, UW CSE (Paul G. Allen center). Upcoming one is https://www.facebook.com/events/342180419325773/?ref=4 or see the Seattle EA group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/221612131358071) for posted future events. These Sequences-focused meetups are still getting started and don't have a FB group (or similar) of their own yet..

Citation still needed

This is not Wikipedia. If you really believe that average people would not behave this way, say so. If not, asking for a citation is just filibustering.

You really think it's appropriate to object to somebody calling out your unsupported claims as unsupported when they are A) obviously disagreeing with you, to the point where there's absolutely no need to explicitly state it, and B) providing evidence in support of their own claims, with both reasonable arguments and supporting links? In that case, what would it take to convince ... (read more)

Just to check: there's no issue with leaving the flight at the "layover" instead of continuing to your final destination? I mean, I have no objection whatsoever to confusing somebody's database of "where cbhacking is supposed to be" but if it would lead to legal hassles or similar inconveniences I'd like to know.