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Story from https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt (my thoughts follow):
...For those of us who understand that the obvious is not
always the solution, and that the facts, no matter how implausible,
are still the facts ...A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:
"This is the second time I have written you, and I don't blame you
for not answering me, because I kind of sounded crazy, but it is a
fact that we have a tradition in our family of ice cream for dessert
after dinner each night. But the kind of ice cream varies so, every
night, after we've eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice
cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it. It's
also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac and
TLDR: ↓
With access to a 3D printer and some lack of regard for aesthetics, you can build a Levoit 300 (a popular air filter) clone for roughly 25% of the price.
- And against the cheapest possible competition, it is roughly price per volume of air competitive/better but much quieter + modular + not soft vendor locked to their filters.
Why not just buy n many X filters?
If there is one thing I associate the LW community with, that would be the undying love for Eliezer Yudkowsky and his role as the rightful caliph[1] Lumenators and Air Filters.
Ever since my allergy diagnosis, I've thought of various schemes to cover my house with the latter. The obvious decision is to acquire as many as IKEA/Levoit/CheapInc. filters as fast and as cheaply per...
upvoted, i think this article would be better with comparison to the recommendations in thomas kwa's shortform about air filters
In light of reading through Raemon's shortform feed, I'm making my own. Here will be smaller ideas that are on my mind.
Does Jessica's Anti-Normativity post or Ben's Can Crimes be Discussed Literally & Guilt, Shame, Depravity posts make sense to you? If there's specific posts you want to talk about not making sense / not being clear what the point is, I'm down to chat about them.
Thanks again.
I am currently holding a rough hypothesis of "when someone is interested in exploring psychosis and psychedelics, they become more interested in Michael Vassar's ideas", in that the former causes the latter, rather than the other way around.
1About 15 years ago, I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. He profiled Chris Langan, an extremely high-IQ person, claiming that he had only mediocre accomplishments despite his high IQ. Chris Langan's theory of everything, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe, was mentioned. I considered that it might be worth checking out someday.
Well, someday has happened, and I looked into CTMU, prompted by Alex Zhu (who also paid me for reviewing the work). The main CTMU paper is "The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory".
CTMU has a high-IQ mystique about it: if you don't get it, maybe it's because your IQ is too low. The paper itself is dense with insights, especially the first part. It uses quite a lot of nonstandard terminology (partially...
I did some more thinking, and realized particles are the irreps of the Poincaire group. I wrote up some more here, though this isn't complete yet:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LpcEstrPpPkygzkqd/fractals-to-quasiparticles
One of the first things they teach you in algebra is that the letters you use to signify variables are arbitrary, and you can use whatever you want[1]. Like most of the 'first things' students are taught, this is almost entirely a lie: every letter has implicit connotations, and if (for example) you use "n" for a non-integer variable, it'll confuse someone reading your work. More importantly, if you don't know what symbol choices imply, it'll be harder for you to understand what an equation is implicitly communicating, making it even more difficult to grasp the concepts that are actually being laid out.
So I've decided to go through the English alphabet and explicitly explain the connotations of each character as they might be used by a [unusually-bright-highschooler|reasonably-clever-college-student]-level...
I'm confused by what you say about italics. Mathematical variables are almost always italicized, so how would italicizing something help to clarify that it isn't a variable?
In an attempt to get myself to write more here is my own shortform feed. Ideally I would write something daily, but we will see how it goes.
practically all metrics of the EA community's health and growth have sharply declined, and the extremely large and negative reputational effects have become clear.
I want more evidence on your claim that FTX had a major effect on EA reputation. Or: why do you believe it?
Edit: relevant thing habryka said that I didn't quote above:
...For the EA surveys, these indicators looked very bleak:
"Results demonstrated that FTX had decreased satisfaction by 0.5-1 points on a 10-point scale within the EA community"
"Among those aware of EA, attitudes remain positive a
1Previously: Sadly, FTX
I doubted whether it would be a good use of time to read Michael Lewis’s new book Going Infinite about Sam Bankman-Fried (hereafter SBF or Sam). What would I learn that I did not already know? Was Michael Lewis so far in the tank of SBF that the book was filled with nonsense and not to be trusted?
I set up a prediction market, which somehow attracted over a hundred traders. Opinions were mixed. That, combined with Matt Levine clearly reporting having fun, felt good enough to give the book a try.
I need not have worried.
Going Infinite is awesome. I would have been happy with my decision on the basis of any one of the following:
The details I learned or clarified about the psychology of SBF...
Is that a claim of this post? It's a long post so I might be forgetting a place where Zvi writes that, but I think most of the relevant parts of this book review are about how MacAskill and EAs are partly responsible for empowering Sam Bankman-Fried, for supporting him with great talent and trust with funders and a positive public image.
