All of TrE's Comments + Replies
Or their mom might be a hacker.
Incidentally, there are many cases where I don't care about my username at all and have to come up with something. I'd find it acceptable if they'd just give me a number and a password, or let me register just with a password (perhaps provided by them?), maybe plus e-mail.
How do you know meetups all meetups attract "losers"? What is - to you - the defining characteristic of such "losers"? How certain are you that your personal experience with one kind of meetup generalizes well to all meetups? How do you know there are fewer or no losers elsewhere, e.g. on the internet?
You might want to post this on the hpmor subredit page instead - or in the latest open thread. I don't, however, think that a top-level discussion post is necessary for this.
In any case, Snape saying that the number of valence electrons of carbon is a meaningless fact is weak evidence that he didn't read it in Harry's mind.
Most vessels are spherical or cylindrical, which is already pretty good (intuitively, spherical vessels should be optimal for isotropic materials). You might want to take a look at the mechanics of thin-walled pressure vessels if you didn't already.
It's important to note that the radial stresses in cylindrical vessels are way smaller than the axial and hoop stresses (which, so to say, pull perpendicular to the "direction" of the pressure). This is also why wound fibers can increase the strength of such vessels.
Materials science undergraduate student here (not a mechanical engineer, my knowledge is limited in the area, I did not go to great lengths to ensure I'm right here, etc.).
A typical method to generate high pressures in research are diamond anvils. This is suitable for exploring the behavior of cells and microorganisms under high pressure.
For human preservation, however, you'd need a pressure vessel. As the yield strength of your typical steel is on the order of 100, maybe 300 MPa, you're really up against a wall here, materials-wise. I don't doubt that sui...
I think that only makes it worse. But thanks. You could say that anonymous criticism benefits both parties by enabling criticism without causing a social rift. But you could also say it removes any penalty for making criticism, which incentivizes strategic harassment. And trying to enforce social norms seems especially to me to be something that shouldn't be done anonymously--norms should be enforced by people with some standing, to avoid unstable norms; and a person speaking out for a true group norm should feel less need to be anonymous.
If you're reading a pdf with multiple pages, zooming out to show the entire page (or even displaying two pages at once if your display is wide enough) enables super-fast scrolling through the document. I have seen people not do this and it was painful to watch.
Also, some pdf readers (including adobe reader) have a "magnifying glass" feature, which achieves what you described without having to open the document a second time.
I meant, "in the comments of the new article". I'm sorry if that wasn't clear.
The goal was to get some discussion and new advice going, and that's difficult if you just link to the old repository, which means one more click on the way, one trivial inconvenience more.
I had thought about copying all the advice (or the good pieces only) over to the old repository once this one is obsolete, i.e. once the rerun repository for march is posted, and I might do this then, if I find the time.
Then he should give reasons why that's possible. As it is, it seems to me like he is simply ignoring the math behind ageing. The following would be a better argument, IMO:
...The Gompertz law describes human mortality as it currently is. It says that human mortality over time increases more than exponentially. To defy the Gompertz law, bold steps are necessary. Constant maintenance via external drugs that do what our immune system currently does or re-setting our immune system to a younger age may be necessary, as well as keeping the length of our telomers c
the probability of a 25-year-old dying before their 26th birthday is 0.1%. If we could keep that risk constant throughout life instead of it rising due to age-related disease, the average person would – statistically speaking – live 1,000 years.
That's just not how the relevant model works. Unless there's very good reason to believe we can overcome the limits set by this model, this calculation is like saying
...the number of radioactive atoms decaying to stable atoms in this 1kg lump of nuclear waste in the first hour after its formation is
. If we could
Keep your work desk productive.
De-clutter your work desk regularly, getting rid of things you don't actually use. This includes equipment, paper, plants and even furniture that's doing nothing. Put misplaced items back to their designated space. Designate spaces for supplies and references if you haven't already. Free nearby spaces which are cluttered with things you don't actually use. Put those things out of reach, fill the space with other things.
A good idea is to remove every single item on your desk and think about what you actually need. Repeat this monthly. Put everything back to its place at the end of the day. Repeat this daily. If you find that you need to fetch something daily, put it closer.
Summary of best comments on the original repository
The best advice posted (best comments) in the original repository included (I blatantly pirate-copied it over from their various authors):
Avoid commuting, or failing that, commute effectively (i.e. by train or bicycle and not by car, so you can do some useful work or exercise).
Start your posts with a summary if it's more than 3-5 paragraphs. Use paragraphs.
Treat craigslist as a free storage. You don't need to physically own all the tools if you can pick them up for <(0.1 paychecks). Treat those th
Some ideas of mine:
- really bright lights
- a cook book with healthy, easy, and quick recipes
- some computer hardware, like a better keyboard or mouse, or a second computer screen
- a few meditation lessons
- good headphones (in terms of quality, not price)
- some room decoration, e.g. plants
- paying a delivery service instead of buying things yourself
- an electric teeth brush (assuming you don't own one)
What about larger investments, i.e. $200-$500? If they lead to a proportionally better life, these might be worth considering as well.
Should we have some sort of re-run for the various repositories we have? I mean, there is the Repository repository and it's great for looking things up if you know such a thing exists, but (i) not everyone knows this exists and more importantly, (ii) while these repositories are great for looking things up, I feel that not much content gets added to the repositories. For example, the last top-level comment to the boring advice repository was created in march 2014.
Since there's 12 repositories linked in the meta repository as of today, I suggest we spend e...
A valid reason would be the scarcity of resources. Further technological progress will be severely constrained by which chemical elements are available cheaply and which are not. Lots of interesting and useful chemical elements are not available in sufficiently concentrated ores, or they are rare in all of earth's crust, having sunken down inside earth's core during its formation.
These elements thusly are produced only as by-products of other elements which are more concentrated in their ores. This is valid not only for most of the lanthanides, but also fo...
I'm happy that you adressed this topic. It adresses a certain failure mode about instrumental rationality that may commonly cause high-status people to make poor decisions.
However, I don't think your narrative about human civilization, the birth of politics etc. is actually necessary for your conclusion. I think at best it's dubious as far as historical accuracy goes, and entertaining as a metaphor for the different layers for human interaction with each other and the environment.
The example with the persons' heads, I found much more helpful at understandi...
On the contrary, from my experience it isn't.
Sorry, I could not resist the opportunity. But seriously, I don't often see people disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing. More often, they'll point out different aspects, or their own perspective on a topic. To be honest, support and affirmation are perhaps a bit rarer than they should be, but I've rarely perceived disagreement to be hostile, as opposed to misunderstanding, or legitimate and resolvable via further discussion.
More datapoints, anyone?
I limit my daily internet usage with LeechBlock (for Firefox; compare StayFocus'd for Chrome). Until a few months ago, I had allowed myself to access all of the internet only from 8pm to 10pm. LessWrong, Wikipedia and similar sites are freely accessible. This has led to me always going to bed after 10pm, and often much later than that.
A few weeks ago, I shifted my "allowed internet time" to the morning hours, to 6-8AM. Then even further back, and now I wake up at 4:30 and may then browse the internet for an hour.
I now reliably get up at 4:30, and...
What could be learned by getting to know more of those numbers? What's the benefit of knowing them now over waiting, e.g., 100 years when computing power is cheaper and better algorithms might exist?
And what else could be done with the computing power?
Although you can indeed never know the outcome of research, I think we can estimate whether particular research is worthwhile.
We can safely reason that the typical human, even in the future, will choose existence over non-existence. We can also infer which environments they would like better, and so we can maximise our efforts to leave behind an earth (solar system, universe) that's worth living in, not an arid desert, neither a universe tiled in smiley faces.
While I agree that, since future people will never be concrete entities, like shadowy figures, we don't get to decide on their literary or music tastes, I think we should still try to make them exist in an environment worth ...
As I wrote above, in the limit of large stacks, long pondering times, and decisions jointly made by large organizations, people do actually behave rationally. As an example: Bidding for oil drilling rights can be modelled as auctions with incomplete and imperfect information. Naïve bidding strategies fall prey to the winner's curse. Game theory can model these situations as Bayesian games and compute the emerging Bayesian Nash Equilibria.
Guess what? The companies actually bid the way game theory predicts!
I'm pretty sure "Humans, please ignore this post" wasn't serious, and this article is mainly for humans.