All of username2's Comments + Replies

I have become very used to the interface here and the various ways it can be manipulated, so I prefer it greatly even if this is just due to inertia. Glad to see more than 6 names on the Last 30 Days list. But it's clear that this is a dead zone and I've become resigned to the idea that this will soon be gone.

I do enjoy what's going on at LW2 even though it's still open beta, a bit broken in a few areas and cluttered by too many specific requests and follow-up about personal preferences for site look and feel. And moderator chat that really feels like i... (read more)

Thank you very much. I read LW primarily for the discussions that are spurred by posts/articles and the comments are effectively impossible for me to read with the standard interface. On a small glance/browse I'm very encouraged about trying Greaterwrong as my regular reading mode.

Please keep posting here. Your powers of persuasion are amazing.

Sorry, I used the ambiguous term "traffic", meant "amount of new discussion/comments" rather than web traffic. were it not for curi's recent flurry there would almost be nothing here.

1Elo
I suspect that if curi were not talking, other people would be.

I went down the rabbit hole of your ensuing discussion and it seems to have broken LW, but didn't look like you were very convinced yet. Thanks for taking one for the team.

0Lumifer
Too deep we delved there, and woke the nameless fear... I suspect there is an implicit max thread depth and once it's reached, LW's gears and cranks (if only!) screech to a halt.

Another take: This site is dead with practically no traffic. LW2.0 has various issues and missing features: from a development team perspective it's still in a lengthy beta phase but practically speaking and from a general user viewpoint it can be considered to have fully replaced this site.

1bogus
The biggest "issue" with LesserWrong right now is not whatever "features" are missing; it's that performance on that website sucks, to the point of making it quite simply unusable. It feels like LW 0.2, not LW 2.0 - it's even a lot worse than Arbital, which is hardly a high-performing website itself! The way I see it, everything else is secondary - unless this situation is improved well before the vote, I can only assume that lots of people will be voting against the merge, since LW-as-we-know-it would be dead either way, and the "against" option at least keeps archives easily accessible! For the record, this is not what I, or even most of us (or so I would imagine) actually want! We want a usable LesserWrong, of course. But will we get it?
3Elo
I can't speak for 2.0 but 1.0 still has traffic.

You could also simply continue working on the review: you are clearly motivated to explore these issues deeper so why not start fleshing out the paper?

Note that I said "continue" rather than start. The barrier is often not the ideas themselves but getting it written in something approaching a complete paper. this is still the issue for me and I have 50+ peer reviewed papers in the past 20 years (although not in this field).

0DragonGod
I will then.

The recommendation by "someone else" is anything but anonymous, adamzerner's comment quotes and links directly from Matthew Butterick, author of the online book that provides said guidance (and also explicitly makes the point about print vs. online).

While I fully agree with you about strong distaste for the visual design of LW2 (at least using default display settings in the current beta) you have failed to make a valid argument here.

I can't get a rss feed specifically for featured posts right now can I ?

My vision is not great and I simply cannot see the difference between quoted text and normal text in comments.

1Said Achmiz
Try installing one of these themes—they make the blockquotes easier to distinguish!

I find it very difficult to find and follow discussions on the new site. The content is very slow to load for me (on various devices) and I've given up rather than trying to work my way down.

The scoring system doesn't make sense to me but this may just be a matter of getting used to it / users settling into some kind of routine. Anyway easy enough for me to select "most recent" and squint past the scores based on other users' ratings for now.

I'm also embarrassed by the term "Sunshine Regiment". I can see what you're trying to do but it has an incredibly strong negative impact on me whenever I see it.

7Lumifer
Yeah, that. My associations tell me that this expression stands for a militarized police unit with a newspeak name (its main purpose is to disappear undesirable comments and posts, is it not?)

i do statistical consulting as part of my day job responsibilities, i'm afraid to say this is not how it works.

if you came to me with this question i would roll back to ask what exactly you are trying to achieve with the analyses, before getting into the additional constraints you want to include. unfortunately it's far more challenging if the data owner comes to the statistician after the data are collected rather than before (when principles of experimental design as ilya mentioned can be considered to achieve ability to successfully answer those quest... (read more)

Unfortunately, due to the shape of modern web development

What does that even mean :))

Have you given some thought towards numbering these ? Similar to how newsletters do ? It might help if one day it gets archived and Numbering them also gives a good sense of advancement.

Also where else do you post this ? (except for discord and r/ssc)

4sapphire
This gets posted only on r/ssc and lesswrong. The daily version is posted on discord and my blog deluks917.wordpress.com

Is there a pdf version available for The Codex as it appears on lesserwrong ? I see it's different from the Library of Alexandria.

2Ben Pace
Not yet - one great person already turned it into a kindle (mobie) book though.

People sure like to talk about meta topics.

This one is also attractive in that primes are not repeated.

I think Lumifer can be annoying as hell at times. But has been entirely consistent from the very start and has continued to engage in entirely the same way with whatever members are posting here.

Perhaps the different post rating system in LW 2.0 (if successfully launched and managed) will allow members who don't like this sort of thing to more easily avoid or hide from this kind of dialogue but I expect (hope?) Lumifer will remain immune to shifts in the incentive structure.

I appreciate you are working under challenging circumstances but surely moderators should be permitted and willing to remove undesirable content. Please, yes.

Even an empty forum is preferable to embarrassments like this post series.

0cousin_it
Done.

I'm currently going through a painful divorce so of course I'm starting to look into dating apps as a superficial coping mechanism.

It seems to me that even the modern dating apps like Tinder and Bumble could be made a lot better with a tiny bit of machine learning. After a couple thousand swipes (which doesn't take long), I would think that a machine learning system could get a pretty good sense of my tastes and perhaps some metric of my minimum standards of attractiveness. This is particularly true for a system that has access to all the swiping data acro... (read more)

2MrMind
"Once" does exactly what you have described.
0ChristianKl
I think it's highly likely that an App like Tinder doesn't do the matching completely random but optimizes for some factor. Your analysis ignores the fact that Tinder principle is about woman only getting messages from guys on whom they previously swipped left and thus signaled that they want to receive messages from the guy. That ritual has psychological value. If you do want a more explicit recommendation system, sites like eharmony can provide for that need.
2Viliam
Or maybe some kind of recommendation system: "Users who dated this person also dated these: ..."
2LawrenceC
Why do you think this doesn't exist?
5drethelin
There aren't that many people, so the benefits would be minor. Once you've swiped a couple thousand times you're probably through most of the tinder users within your demographic preferences.
0disconnect_duplicate0.563651414951392
I considered creating something like that to be used with Tinder's (unofficial) API. There are a bunch of freely available algorithms one might use for this purpose. I did not seriously attempt this because it's a hard problem, the algorithms are unreliable and difficult, and I'm not even sure if it's something I want or could profit from. As for why Tinder hasn't done this. It goes against their business model. They would make less money. Tinder wants to keep you as an user for as long as possible, and the whole process of swiping, always wondering what the next one will be like, is their most addictive feature. Ideally they'll only let you go on dates if it's really necessary to keep you as a user. I'd guess that a significant portion of their users just use the app for swiping.

Fellow username2s, I think that's the least of our worries. Recent comments there: 7 days ago; 19 days ago; 23 days ago; a month ago. Although to be fair, it's not really about the content at this stage.

Why is anonymous posting not welcome?

0username2
Fellow username2s, I think that's the least of our worries. Recent comments there: 7 days ago; 19 days ago; 23 days ago; a month ago. Although to be fair, it's not really about the content at this stage.

How is development of the new LW platform/closed beta coming along? Does it look like it will actually get off the ground?

I realize username2 will not be welcome there but am very interested in signing up with a normal username when it launches, if there's anything to sign up for. I'm hoping all the action there has just moved out of public view rather than just subsiding as it appears from outside.

0username2
Why is anonymous posting not welcome?

As you say, there indeed many examples, even of three literally consecutive primes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_prime

In http://kajsotala.fi/2017/07/how-i-found-fixed-the-root-problem-behind-my-depression-and-anxiety-after-20-years/ Kay Sotala recommened the Steve Andreas book Transforming Your Self. Unfortunately, while the book is listed on lib.gen it's not downloadable and the listed version is listed without page numbers. I would deeply appreciate if someone would upload a working copy.

0gwern
It downloads fine from libgen.io for me, and importing into Calibre, it looks like a valid ebook. Not sure what your problem was, but I've copied the EPUB to Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ndoxl0dzepvhjaj/2012-andreas-transformingyourself.epub?dl=0

Wilson's Six views of embodied cognition gives a broad overview of embodied cognition in 12 pages and has a few good references. https://people.ucsc.edu/~mlwilson/publications/Embodied_Cog_PBR.pdf

I decided to read Holyoak et al.'s Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought when Surfaces and Essences started feeling drawn-out.

0Lumifer
More like buying into a particular set of EA arguments (and yes, this subgroup is or used to be represented on LW).

What is the selection pressure now?

0Lumifer
As Thomas said, many kinds of. One kind is favouring believing in a very traditional variety of religion (Orthodox Judaism, conservative Catholicism) and not being an environmentalist :-P
0Thomas
Many pressures, of course. How well you deal with diseases, accidents, how successful are you in spreading your genes around... Many, many selection pressures, no doubt about that. The idea, that there is no pressure anymore since the end of WWII or since any other date - is just plain silly. Still, that view is a kind of mainstream. For a polite society, the evolution has stopped long ago. But a polite society itself is a kind of selection pressure, too.

Empirically that is not so. There are major world religions based on the fact that everyone should hold the one true belief and accord with its god-given morality. Followers of such religions profess, and those of the evangelist variety follow through with imposing their morals on others and believing it is the right thing to do.

Somewhat more secular is, say, the belief in equal rights for women or minorities. Lots of people on both sides have strong views about forced wearing of the hajib in some muslim countries. Advocating for woman in Saudi Arabia to have the right to drive, when you don't live in or have any connection to that region of the world is trying to enforce one's morals on another, right?

It ... doesn't? That's where it works from. No external access.

This year is 5777 in the Hebrew calendar. So someone has been counting for roughly that long.

Nitpick (as it doesn't affect your general argument): What actually happened was at some point some king advisor or prophet applied some guesswork to oral history that bordered on myth (e.g. Noah living 950 years) and decided the world was created in 3761 BCE. This is, in fact, exactly the same logic used by creationists to date the Earth to be ~6000 years old. That's the origin of the Hebrew calendar. There hasn't been 5777 years of continuous counting. More like 3500, maybe.

2JenniferRM
There are poorly documented rumors running around on the net that the Yorùbá have a religious system that contains a chronological system that says our year 2017 is the year 10,059. This claim deserves scrutiny rather than trust, and might stretch the idea of a calendar a bit... It is very hard to find formal academic writing on the subject... Reading around various websites and interpolating, it seems that the cultural group was split in two by the Nigeria/Benin border and so I think there may be no single coherent state power that might back the calendar out of unifying nationalist sentiment. Also they may have no native word for "calendar"? Also it is a lunar calendar of 364 days and the intercalary adjustments might not be systematic and it may have been pragmatically abandoned in favor of the system the international world has mostly been standardizing on... Still, I personally am interested not only in old surviving institutions but also in things that function as edge cases. Straining words like "old" or "surviving" or "institution". The edge cases often help quite a bit to illustrate the optimization constraints and design pressures that go into very long running social practices :-)

On a central command and control server it owns, and pays bitcoin to maintain.

0lmn
Ok, so where does it store the administrator password to said server?

The difficulty has gone up 12 orders of magnitude. The bitcoin price hasn't had that good of a return.

Um, no it hasn't. Not in bitcoin. Botnets had an effect in the early days, but the only ones around in this asic age are lingering zombie botnets that are still mining only because no one bothered to turn them off.

You need to earn minimum amounts before you can receive a payout share or, worse, solo mine a block. With the asymmetric advantage provided by optimized hardware, your expectation time for finding enough shares to earn a payout using cpu mining is in the centuries to millenniums timeframe. This is without considering rising fees that raise the bar even higher.

With bitcoin botnet mining this was briefly possible. Also see "google eats itself."

0lmn
I don't think this could work. Where would the virus keep its private key?
0turchin
why "was briefly possible"? - Was the botnet closed?

That assessment is actually quite common with approaches to radical longevity "likely leads to more cancers."

I am encouraged for the long term prospects of SENS in particular because the "regular maintenance" approach doesn't necessarily require mucking around with internal cellular processes. At least not as much as the more radical approaches.

attention moderator(s?) - spam cleanup needed in Ann Arbor meetup thread http://lesswrong.com/lw/nae/meetup_ann_arbor_meetup_21916/

A number of additional spam posts in this meetup thread.

someone please remove this spam and the user's other junk posts

0username2
A number of additional spam posts in this meetup thread.
3ChristianKl
Making posts like this produces unnecessary noise. The post stays per default even when the spam gets deleted.
0casebash
I can't see any option to report it :-(

I feel no qualms for calling a spade a spade.

How is that not the point of peer review, whether formal or informal?

419eater.

P.S. "rat" is a terrible label, I would even prefer "cult"

Also the first few dozen chapters of HPMoR are terribly written. It is rather horrid, strained, constipated writing. Particularly if you view the early releases of the text, not the revised text that is currently available. The writing got decently good towards the middle, and was top notch by the end. But that was after thousands of pages written and lots of feedback on every chapter. No surprise, lots of writing practice and (critically, to the point of this thread:) feedback leads to becoming a better writer.

2[anonymous]
I feel uncomfortable criticizing HPMoR for its writing when it clearly succeeded at its job beyond all expectation.

Your post said:

Most people cannot do lone wolf, but if you can do lone wolf, you will probably be much more successful than the average person.

Maybe we disagree on what it means to "lone wolf." If I try to steel-man your position, I can come up with a weak and a strong interpretation:

The weak interpretation is that being a autodidact (capable of learning things on your own) will bring you higher chances of success. Being an autodidact myself, I agree from anecdotal experience. Also just being an expert in your field means developing autodidac... (read more)

This is a mean vs median or Mediocristan vs Extremistan issue. Most people cannot do lone wolf, but if you can do lone wolf, you will probably be much more successful than the average person.

I cannot disagree with this more strongly. I am serial entrepreneur, and a somewhat successful one. Still chasing the big exit, but I've built successful companies that are still private. Besides myself I've met many other people in this industry which you'd be excused for thinking are lone wolfs. But the truth is the lone wolf's don't make it as they build things t... (read more)

0Daniel_Burfoot
I agree with you in the context of entrepreneurship, but the OP was talking about self improvement. The best strategy for learning or self-improving may be very different from the best strategy for building a company.
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