I was recently re-reading a piece by Yvain/Scott Alexander called Epistemic Learned Helplessness. It's a very insightful post, as is typical for Scott, and I recommend giving it a read if you haven't already. In it he writes: > When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel...
[Many people have been complaining about the lack of new content on LessWrong lately, so I thought I'd cross-post my latest blog post here in discussion. Feel free to critique the content as much as you like, but please do keep in mind that I wrote this for my personal...
TL,DR: cold fusion is real, apparently. Yes, really - cold fusion. I know. I wouldn't have thought so either. - - - The point of this post is basically to promote to your attention the hypothesis that cold fusion is a real physical phenomenon. For those of you not in...
It's funny, I wrote a blog post arguing against humility not too long ago. I had a somewhat different picture of humility than you:
... (read 460 more words →)People internalize norms in very different ways and to very different degrees. There are people out there who don’t seem to internalize the norms of humility at all. We usually call these people “arrogant jerks”. And there are people – probably the vast majority of people – who internalize them in reasonable, healthy ways. We usually call these people “normal”.
But then there are also people who internalize the norms of humility in highly unhealthy ways. Humility taken to its most extreme limit is not a pretty thing – you
Just wanted to say that I really appreciate your link roundups and look forward to them every month.
I just posted a comment on facebook that I'm going to lazily copy here:
... (read more)At this point I have no idea what's going on and I'm basically just waiting for astrophysicists to weigh in. All I can say is that this is fascinating and I can't wait for more data to come in.
Two specific things I'm confused about:
Apparently other astronomers already looked at this data and didn't notice anything amiss. Schaefer quotes them as saying "the star did not do anything spectacular over the past 100 years." But as far as I can tell the only relevant difference between their work and Schaefer's is that he grouped the data into five year bins
Wait, I'm confused. How does this practice resistance to false positives? If the false signal is designed to mimic what a true detection would look like, then it seems like the team would be correct to identify it as a true detection. I feel like I'm missing something here.
Well, it's both redundant and anti-redundant, which I always liked. But I don't think there's anything more to it than that.
I've had similar thoughts before:
Now imagine you said this [that some people are funnier than others] to someone and they indignantly responded with the following:
“You can’t say that for sure – there are different types of humour! Everyone has different talents: some people are good at observational comedy, and some people are good at puns or slapstick. Also, most so-called “comedians” are only “stand-up funny” – they can’t make you laugh in real life. Plus, just because you’re funny doesn’t mean you’re fun to be around. I have a friend who’s not funny at all but he’s really nice, and I’d hang out with him over a comedian who’s a jerk any day. Besides, no one’s been able to define funniness anyway, or precisely measure it. Who’s to say it even exists?”
(/shameless blog plug)
The first thing to come to mind is that selecting is simply much cheaper than grooming. If a company can get employees of roughly the same quality level without having to pay for an expensive grooming process over many years, they're going to do that. There's also less risk with selecting, because a groomed candidate can always decide to up and leave for another company (or die, or join a cult, or a have an epiphany and decide to live a simple life in the wilderness of Alaska, or whatever), and then the company is out all that grooming money. I feel as though groomed employees would have to be substantially better than selected ones to make up for these disadvantages.
Thanks for the great suggestions everyone. To follow up, here's what I did as a result of this thread:
-Put batteries back in my smoke detector
-Backed up all of my data (hadn't done this for many months)
-Got a small swiss army knife and put it on my keychain (already been useful)
-Looked at a few fire extinguishers to make sure I knew how to use them
-Put some useful things in my messenger bag (kleenex, pencil and paper) - I'll probably try to keep adding things to my bag as I think of them, since I almost always have it with me
All of the car-related suggestions seemed like good ones, but weren't applicable since I don't own a car. Some other suggestions were good but required more time than I was willing to put in right now, or weren't applicable for other reasons.
ROT13: V thrffrq pbafreingvirf pbeerpgyl, nygubhtu V'z cerggl fher V unq urneq fbzrguvat nobhg gur fghql ryfrjurer.
I was recently re-reading a piece by Yvain/Scott Alexander called Epistemic Learned Helplessness. It's a very insightful post, as is typical for Scott, and I recommend giving it a read if you haven't already. In it he writes:
... (read 1449 more words →)When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect, that I could barely bring myself to bother to search out rebuttals.
And then I read the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct, so devastating, that I couldn't believe I had ever been so dumb as to believe Velikovsky.
And then I read
[Many people have been complaining about the lack of new content on LessWrong lately, so I thought I'd cross-post my latest blog post here in discussion. Feel free to critique the content as much as you like, but please do keep in mind that I wrote this for my personal blog and not with LW in mind specifically, so some parts might not be up to LW standards, whereas others might be obvious to everyone here. In other words...well, be gentle]
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You know what’s scarier than having enemy soldiers at your border?
Having sleeper agents within your borders.
Enemy soldiers are malevolent, but they are at least visibly malevolent. You can see what they’re doing;... (read 3400 more words →)
TL,DR: cold fusion is real, apparently. Yes, really - cold fusion. I know. I wouldn't have thought so either.
- - -
The point of this post is basically to promote to your attention the hypothesis that cold fusion is a real physical phenomenon. For those of you not in the know, this very much flies in the face of current scientific consensus (something I'm not usually in the habit of opposing). In this case though the evidence seems to be quite straightforwardly in favour of the cold fusion advocates.
[Note: most researchers working in this area don't like the term cold fusion; partially because of the negative scientific connotations it drudges up, and partially because fusion... (read 2652 more words →)
I mean, Laffer Curve-type reasons if nothing else.