All of shullak7's Comments + Replies

I'll tell you how it comes across. It comes across as focusing on the other men and ignoring the women's contributions. Treating the men as rivals and the women as prizes. Sucky for everyone all around.

Thank you for this. As a younger woman, I became reluctant to join conversations at conferences or other professional meetings because I had noticed that the dynamic of the group sometimes changed for the worse when I entered the discussion. As I get older, I'm no longer as much of a "prize", so it doesn't happen to me as often (which is hones... (read more)

Thanks for the paper (that's a lot of authors!). The complexity you mention makes it difficult to determine whether substance X (caffeine, alcohol, eggs, etc.) has a net positive or negative for any given person when it comes to health benefits. Coffee has been linked to some positive health effects, but maybe only for those people who don't get the jitters....that's the sort of thing that would be cool to know. Until then, I'm just going to listen to my body and minimize consumption.

Is there any research on why caffeine seems to affect some people more/differently than others? Anecdotally, I've noticed over the years that I get the "jitters" after two cups and have to stop because I can't stand the feeling, whereas others can drink half a pot and barely notice the effects.

I initially thought that these others had just 'pushed through the jitters' and built up a tolerance, but some of them have told me they've never experienced the jittery feeling I'm talking about. Or maybe it just didn't make them as uncomfortable as it makes me?

7gwern
The answer, as with most questions like 'why does X seem to work well for some people and not others' is going to be complex. For example, one of the recent links in my newsletter touches on this topic: * "Genome-wide meta-analysis identifies six novel loci associated with habitual coffee consumption", The Coffee and Caffeine Genetics Consortium et al 2014 (excerpts) Aside from finding some hits, caffeine consumption has long had meaningful heritability estimates (some are cited in that paper, others can be found in Google Scholar with the obvious query 'caffeine heritability'). So that seems to be part of it: genetics.

The people I know who retired or are scheduled to retire the quickest
Cops.

Also military. Defined pension benefits and health care (such as it is) for the rest of your life. Of course, you must be in the military for 20+ years, which I'm guessing is not what the OP is looking for based on his/her other comments. :-)

Oh, and a practical question (for the US people) -- once you retire at, say, 40, what are you going to use for health insurance and does your retirement planning cover the medical costs?

I experienced this to some extent (a long story I w... (read more)

Thanks Vaniver. I am going to take this to mean that I'm young at heart.

It looks like the median age is 27.67, but I'm curious to see the age-range breakdown as I've frequently assumed I'm "old" for the group (over 40). Oh....never mind.....just saw the link to the Excel spreadsheet and will sort it myself.

1421 respondents supplied their age: 1292 (90.9%) of them were less than 40. The modal age is 25.

I truly wish that I was in a position to help make rationality training part of the public school curriculum because I think that would be of tremendous value to our society. I do work at a library and people hold workshops there...libraries could be a good place to "spread the word" to people who might be interested in rationality education, but may not have heard about it. The workshop would have to be free of charge, though, and CFAR isn't there yet.

I think that is one of my questions; i.e., is some form of natural language required? Or maybe what I'm wondering is what intelligence would look like if it weren't constrained by language -- if that's even possible. I need to read/learn more on this topic. I find it really interesting.

I think that "the role of language in human thought" is one of the ways that AI could be very different from us. There is research into the way that different languages affect cognitive abilities (e.g. -- https://psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-am-2011.pdf). One of the examples given is that, as a native English-speaker, I may have more difficulty learning the base-10 structure in numbers than a Mandarin speaker because of the difference in the number words used in these languages. Language can also affect memory, emotion, etc.

I'm guessing... (read more)

2NxGenSentience
This is a really cool link and topic area. I was getting ready to post a note on intelligence amplification (IA), and was going to post it up top on the outer layer of LW, based on language. I recall many years ago, there was some brief talk of replacing the QWERTY keyboard with a design that was statistically more efficient in terms of human hand ergonomics in executing movements for the most frequently seen combinations of letters (probably was limited to English, given American parochialism of those days, but still, some language has to be chosen.) Because of the entrenched base of QWERTY typists, the idea didn't get off the ground. (THus, we are penalizing countless more billions of new and future keyboard users, because of legacy habits of a comparatively small percentage of total [current and future] keyboard users. It got me to thinking at the time, though, about whether a suitably designed human language would "open up" more of the brains inherent capacity for communication. Maybe a larger alphabet, a different set of noun primitives, even modified grammar. With respect to IA, might we get a freebie just out of redesigning -- designing from scratch -- a language that was more powerful, communicated on average what, say, english or french communicates, yet with fewer phenomes per concept? Might we get an average of 5 or 10 point equivalent IQ boost, by designing a language that is both physically faster (less "wait states" while we are listening to a speaker) and which has larger conceptual bandwidth? We could also consider augmenting spoken speech with signing of some sort, to multiply the alphabet. A problem occurs here for unwitnessed speech, where we would have to revert to the new language on its own (still gaining the postulated dividend from that.) However, already, for certain kinds of communication, we all know that nonverbal communication accounts for a large share of total communicated meaning and information. We already have to "drop back"
1mvp9
Lera Boroditsky is one of the premier researchers on this topic. They've also done some excellent work on comparing spatial/time metaphors in English and Mandarin (?), showing that the dominant idioms in each language affect how people cognitively process motion. But the question is more broad -- whether some form of natural language is required (natural, roughly meaning used by a group in day to day life, is key here)? Differences between major natural languages are for the most part relatively superficial and translatable because their speakers are generally dealing with a similar reality.

This correlates with my experience in the military. I had a job for a while that did not allow time for thoughtful analysis before each decision. In order to become competent, I had to do simulation after simulation after simulation, then live exercise after live exercise after live exercise...to the point where I could just react (hopefully competently).

Although I was well-trained in that role, it didn't automatically make me good at "Being Responsible For This Shit". Being Responsible (well, being good at Being Responsible) requires consid... (read more)