http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7404730.stm
Professor Alan Bittles, director for the centre for human genetics in Perth, Australia has collated data on infant mortality in children born within first-cousin marriages from around the world and found that the extra increased risk of death is 1.2%.
In terms of birth defects, he says, the risks rise from about 2% in the general population to 4% when the parents are closely related.
Heh. Qualify this under "crazy ideas". Chinese tech companies are motivating programmers by hiring cheerleaders. It would be interesting to know if this increases productivity. Do cheerleaders help improve results sports teams?
My instinct is that cheerleaders don't improve results for sports teams, but that that also isn't their function.
On the original topic, I've actually encountered the situation of "environment filled with dude programmers with poor social skills suddenly gets a few very attractive ladies who have incentives to be nice to them." My frat went co-ed senior year.
To put things mildly, productivity did not improve.
On the other hand, a lot more guys wanted to join up. So my guess is that the office cheerleaders do not make existing programmers more productive (and may in fact do the opposite), but that they may make the office more desirable as a work environment to prospective hires.
That depends on what you consider to be the main purpose of a sports team - winning matches or providing entertainment and selling tickets to their games.
If there's one thing I enjoy about this site, it's reading practical advice from its members.
*fixed the 3AM typo
I'd rather not have a forum de facto moderated by a troll.
Please don't post image macros.
My approach was very simple: find the best public school system in my area and move there. "Best" is defined mostly by IQ of high-school seniors proxied by SAT scores. What colleges the school graduates go to mattered as well, but it is highly correlated with the SAT scores.
What I find important is not the school curriculum which will suck regardless. The crucial thing, IMHO, is the attitude of the students. In the school that my kids went to, the attitude was that being stupid was very uncool. Getting good grades was regarded as entirely normal ...
Having these organic experiences lead to the development of skills which don't exist in isolation, but instead play a role in knowing how to deal with women successfully in the rest of life.
I often hear claims like that here on LW, but they sound very implausible to me. I never had a girlfriend until I was 26 but I'm not under the impression that before then I was deficient in otherwise dealing with female friends/professors/etc. in a way that I no longer am, or in a way that I was not with male friends/professors/etc. (In particular, in most of my late...
Bentham’s Fallacies, Then and Now by Peter Singer
...Bentham collected examples of fallacies, often from parliamentary debates. By 1811, he had sorted them into nearly 50 different types, with titles like “Attack us, you attack Government,” the “No precedent argument,” and the “Good in theory, bad in practice” fallacy. (One thing on which both Immanuel Kant and Bentham agree is that this last example is a fallacy: If something is bad in practice, there must be a flaw in the theory.)
Bentham was thus a pioneer of an area of science that has made considerable p
The good, the bad, and the ineffective: social programs in America
...Do people know which social interventions work just from hearing about them?
To do a test, we made the following game. We've described ten major US social interventions, and you'll have to guess whether they had a positive effect, no effect or negative effect.
The interventions were taken from those reviewed by the Campbell Collaboration, which brings together all the highest-quality research that's available on major social interventions to decide whether they're effective or not. We chose
Remote Exploitation of anUnaltered Passenger Vehicle by Dr. Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek
...Target – 2014 Jeep Cherokee
The 2014 Jeep Cherokee was chosen because we felt like it would provide us the best opportunity tosuccessfully demonstrate that a remote compromise of a vehicle could result in sending messages thatcould invade a driver’s privacy and perform physical actions on the attacker’s behalf. As pointed out inour previous research [6], this vehicle seemed to present fewer potential obstacles for an attacker. Thisis not to say that other manufact
Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases by Scott O. Lilienfeld1, Katheryn C. Sauvigné, Steven Jay Lynn, Robin L. Cautin, Robert D. Latzman and Irwin D. Waldman
...The goal of this article is to promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science by curbing terminological misinformation and confusion. To this end, we present a provisional list of 50 commonly used terms in psychology, psychiatry, and allied fields
Murder is basically a victimless crime, because when you murder someone, there is no one left to be a victim. Murderers should be punished only for inconveniences that murder caused to other people who are still living.
Causing extinction of humanity would be a perfect victimless crime.
As far as I can see, VoiceOfRa is the lone neoreactionary actively posting.
He isn't. Neoreactionaries are normal people.
Metrication of kitchen units: no.
Why?
WELP.
Tacit Knowledge: A Wittgensteinian Approach by Zhenhua Yu
...In the ongoing discussion of tacit knowing/knowledge, the Scandinavian Wittgensteinians are a very active force. In close connection with the Swedish Center for Working Life in Stockholm, their work provides us with a wonderful example of the fruitful collaboration between philosophical reflection and empirical research. In the Wittgensteinian approach to the problem of tacit knowing/knowledge, Kell S. Johannessen is the leading figure. In addition, philosophers like Harald Grimen, Bengt Molander a
I am a lazy and selfish person. I want to get more rational myself, but I don't want to put any effort into helping others become more rational.
A Scientific Look at Bad Science
...By one estimate, from 2001 to 2010, the annual rate of retractions by academic journals increased by a factor of 11 (adjusting for increases in published literature, and excluding articles by repeat offenders) [2]. This surge raises an obvious question: Are retractions increasing because errors and other misdeeds are becoming more common, or because research is now scrutinized more closely? Helpfully, some scientists have taken to conducting studies of retracted studies, and their work sheds new light on the situation.
“Ret
You assume people will commit suicide if their life is not worth living. People have a strong instinct against suicide, so I doubt they'd do it unless their life is not worth living by a wide margin.
Keep kindergartens dirty to help children avoid developing allergies.
This is called emancipation of minors.
Employment at a single company is the plan.
Previously on LW, I have seen the suggestion made that having short hair can be a good idea, and it seems like this can be especially true in professional contexts. For an entry-level male web developer who will be shortly moving to San Francisco, is this still true? I'm not sure if the culture there is different enough that long hair might actually be a plus. What about beards?
(I didn't post in this OT yet).
Legalize doping and other artificial human enhancements in sports, but require them to reveal what drugs they are using. Create new sports if you want to encourage specific enhancements.
It would lead to arms races between medical teams and pharmaceutical companies and even if it would harm sportsmen themselves, the fact that new drugs would constantly be invented and perfected would help even ordinary people, because after a while those new drugs and other human enhancements would become available on the market.
Use already existing Paralympic Games to test artificial limbs.
If I have an account but want to change my user name, is there a way to do that?
The similar formatting of the comments suggests that in this thread it's mostly one person with a lot of links to share.
Personally, I just haven't been bothered to make an account, and have been using the username account exclusively for about 5 years. I'd estimate 30-50% of all the posts on the account were made by me over this timeframe, though writing style suggests to me that a good number of people have used it as a one-shot throwaway, and several people have used it many times.
No, maximizing expected utility (still) should not be abandoned.
Stupid question: if you think that huge improvements in medicine and radical life extension are just around the corner, should you castrate yourself or your children to increase your chances to survive up to that point in order to uncastrate yourself later with the help of new improved medicine? Potentially high rewards strategy, even if it's very risky.
Violence requires at least two people, you can be irrational even when you are alone.
An Introverted Writer’s Lament by Meghan Tifft
...Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over
This is interesting, but I think that it is using an incorrect definition of introversion. I interpret an introvert as someone who prefers to spend time by themselves or in situations in which they are working on their own, rather than in situations in which they are interacting with other people. This does not mean that they necessarily need to feel extreme stress at public speaking or at parties/social events. They may feel bored, annoyed, frustrated, or indifferent to these events, or they may even like them, but feel the opportunity cost of the time th...
Impulsive Rich Kid, Impulsive Poor Kid, an article about using CBT to fight impulsivity that leads to criminal behaviour, especially among young males from poor backgrounds.
...How much crime takes place simply because the criminal makes an impulsive, very bad decision? One employee at a juvenile detention center in Illinois estimates the overwhelming percentage of crime takes place because of an impulse versus conscious decision to embark on criminal activity:
“20 percent of our residents are criminals, they just need to be locked up. But the other 80 percen
if I could give them back just ten minutes of their lives, most of them wouldn’t be here.
He's wrong about that. He would need to give them back 10 minutes of their lives, and then keep on giving them back different 10 minutes on a very regular basis.
The remainder of the post actually argues that persistent, stable "reflexes" are the cause of bad decisions and those certainly are not going to be fixed by a one-time gift of 10 minutes.
Composing Music With Recurrent Neural Networks
...It’s hard not to be blown away by the surprising power of neural networks these days. With enough training, so called “deep neural networks”, with many nodes and hidden layers, can do impressively well on modeling and predicting all kinds of data. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I recommend reading about recurrent character-level language models, Google Deep Dream, and neural Turing machines. Very cool stuff!) Now seems like as good a time as ever to experiment with what a neural network can do.
For
Change your name by Paul Graham
...If you have a US startup called X and you don't have x.com, you should probably change your name.
The reason is not just that people can't find you. For companies with mobile apps, especially, having the right domain name is not as critical as it used to be for getting users. The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company. Whereas (as Stripe shows) having x.com signals strength even if
Dead enough by Walter Glannon
...To honour donors, we should harvest organs that have the best chance of helping others – before, not after, death
Now imagine that before the stroke our hypothetical patient had expressed a wish to donate his organs after his death. If neurologists could determine that the patient had no chance of recovery, then would that patient really be harmed if transplant surgeons removed life-support, such as ventilators and feeding tubes, and took his organs, instead of waiting for death by natural means? Certainly, the organ recipien
...One long-held theory has been that people become socially isolated because of their poor social skills — and, presumably, as they spend more time alone, the few skills they do have start to erode from lack of use. But new research suggests that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the socially isolated. Lonely people do understand social skills, and often outperform the non-lonely when asked to demonstrate that understanding. It’s just that when they’re in situations when they need those skills the most, they choke.
In a
The moral imperative for bioethics by Steven Pinker.
...Biomedical research, then, promises vast increases in life, health, and flourishing. Just imagine how much happier you would be if a prematurely deceased loved one were alive, or a debilitated one were vigorous — and multiply that good by several billion, in perpetuity. Given this potential bonanza, the primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence.
Get out of the way.
A truly ethical bioethics should not bog down research in red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecutio
Great idea! But I am crap at tutoring, any knowledge exchange would be very unequal.
Thanks for posting this - I'm in a cold climate and have been looking for a beanie with head protection built in. One question - is there a noticeable hard shell under the fabric to the touch?
I've been wanting to get a hat with d3o in it, but I haven't been able to find anything after their announcement a few years ago. Anyone know anything about that?
I did my undergrad engineering capstone project at the beginning of this year creating a linear accelerator to subject networks of mouse brain cells to repeated 50g acceleration loads, based specifically off of football helmet impact data.
I was only assisting the PI running the research so I hadn't read all of the literature, but from what I know the jury is out on a good model of risk from repeated head impacts. We can tell you pretty well what the risk is for single impact events, but expect a few years for the first characterization of repeated trauma to be published. This is based on my lab's timing of course - I'm not sure how far along other labs are with this.
I have two magnetic implants, and would be happy to answer questions (see also the AMA I did about two years ago: https://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vvg7j/ ).
The sensations are as OP described, though mine are small enough that I don't have any issues with knives/ferrous materials moving to stick to my fingers. Judging by OP's 20cm range on microwaves, this smaller size is negated by the fact that my magnets sit a lot closer to the nerves - I believe we feel just about the same strength of fields.
Or why you should care, or what you should do next. (Learn more, join the org, sign up for cryonics?)
Needs catchy bylines, and about 500 fewer words.
That is something usually better settled by experimentation than by argument.
Scott Adams tweeted that you can't be with someone less happy than you. I'm trying it anyway.
Does anyone have any experience with this? In particular, is there a way to not always sacrifice my happiness for theirs at rapidly diminishing rates of return until we are equally (un)happy?