Edit: Yvain, the great guy that he is, is handling this amazingly. In my eyes, consider this resolved.
(This is an anonymous nick for the moment, but this issue needs to be raised and I'm not comfortable at this point doing it publicly under my own name.)
tl;dr as provided by Daniel_Burfoot: "Yvain is awesome, it's a shame he locked up his old stuff, let's lobby him to open it back up". I heartily endorse this summery, and it pretty much sums up what I have been saying.
[Due to some remarks, have redacted the links to Yvain's blogs, old and new. This is absurd, in my opinion. Yvain's new blog is a Rationality Blog in the Recent on Rationality Blogs part of the sidebar, and his old livejournal blog is linked to in many of his old posts. So I do not think that it is even meaningful to redact them. However, in the interest of not inciting argument, I have redacted them regardless.]
All of us here know of Yvain. He has posted much great stuff both here on Less Wrong, and on his blog. Insightful, brilliant stuff. If you go and look at the list of top rated Main posts, Yvain's stuff top's the lot.
A year ago, he switched blogs, from [old blog] to [new blog]. Well and fine. He had g...
All right, I'll look through my old stuff later this week, find a very few embarrassing or controversial things I want to hide, and unlock the rest.
Is there a means by which one might buy you a virtual beer as thanks for all the writing?
I've unlocked my old blog minus five or ten private articles. You should be able to read the rest. If you can't, let me know.
All right, I'll look through my old stuff later this week, find a very few embarrassing or controversial things I want to hide, and unlock the rest.
Obvious question: will the Meditations on assorted social subjects (notably including 'privilege' and 'conceptual superweapons') make the cut? (I could see this going either way, hence I'm asking.)
For the record, Bryan Caplan, of Myth of the Rational Voter fame, recommends one of these posts as "possibly the most reasonable piece I've ever read" on the relevant controversy. I tend to ascribe higher relevance to such reactions than the trollish commentary that may be found in some blog comment sections.
Oh. Does that mean I can no longer send people the link to "Last Temptation of Christ"? Yvain, please repost that one!
This is my point. This a hundred or a thousand times over. That story, and the story of Emily and Control, and all his posts about conceptual superweapons, and the non-central fallacy, and so on and so on for a hundred or a thousand nuggets of awesomeness. That is why I make my plea.
I'm Livejournal friends with Yvain and can see all his archives. If he gives me permission to do so (and not otherwise), I am willing to fetch and carry specific posts that people wish to have dug up out of flocking obscurity so he doesn't have to deal with the requests.
If he wants to delete his old blog, it's up to him, he isn't accountable to anybody. Don't punish people for posting quality material on the internet.
What solutions are there? There are a few. My favorite so far is for Scott to restrict access by LW karma, which would allow him to maintain his privacy against the web, while still not denying those brilliant, humorous, and insightful posts to those who would truly appreciate them.
Are you willing to fork out the money to hire a programmer to implement something like that? It's not trivial at all.
Also, Yvain's policy of reposting worthwhile stuff to his new blog seems like a very sensible solution to what you're complaining about.
I actually agree with you: He is under no obligations whatsoever. None. But I still am allowed to plead my case to him, for him to decide as he wills, and to spread the issue and discuss it so that the best possible solution can be reached.
As to programming something like that: I am willing to personally implement something like that if asked, although I was more thinking of the manual method of those who want access PMing Yvain or his designated representative and asking for access. Again, I am willing to have the burden of such a task placed on my own shoulders, should Yvain agree. I honestly am trying to find a solution, and am willing to invest a fair amount of personal effort in this.
About the reposting: Yes, I agree. However, there was a lot of stuff on the old blog. Literally thousands of posts, and it would be impractical to repost them one by one. A possible alternative though is for Yvain to repost them en masse, simply redacting the few that he doesn't want around. That is actually a workable solution, if Yvain agrees, all we need is for this to come to his attention. (And again, if that takes grunt work and effort, I am willing to invest it.)
I view this as a crime against humanity, almost
This comment makes you seem crazy. You should have just said "Yvain is awesome, it's a shame he locked up his old stuff, let's lobby him to open it back up".
OK, fine. I guess I got carried away in the heat of the moment. I do suppose I got a bit to worked up over this. I will go back and edit it state this a bit more calmly.
Speaking of the sidebar, is there any way to make it optional whether a post goes up there? Maybe by including [LW] in the title or something? I enjoy blogging about rationality, but I also enjoy blogging about random things that go on in my personal life, and it's kind of embarrassing to have those show up on the LW sidebar.
Better and easier than cluttering the title, you should just be able to choose a tag for the purpose: WordPress provides feeds for posts with specific tags, so you could ask Tricycle to use that tag-specific feed's URL in the sidebar configuration instead of the entire-blog feed.
It appears that if you post a comment in response to a thread, and any upstream post in that thread is subsequently voted down to -4 or below, your comment will no longer appear in your own overview page (the one reached by clicking on your username). However, it will still appear in your comments page (/user/yourname/comments).
This confused the heck out of me for about ten minutes just now.
I've been exercising every morning lately (pushups and situps), and am looking for ways to optimize my morning routine without it taking too much time.
So, where can I find good tips on a morning ten-minute exercise routine, that doesn't require any special equipment? Preferably from a credible source.
I'm not trying to lose weight (I'm pretty skinny as is), just to be healthy.
(I found some tips here, but it's a bit more than what I want to do right now, and requires a Gym)
Something I want to write before I forget it:
In the Sequences there are many links to books. Some of those links go to Amazon, some of them go to Google Books. Please make sure the book links in the e-book have the MIRI referral code.
This should be quite easy to check: Just make a script that selects all Amazon or Google Books hyperlinks from the book source.
In the first place
We hear a lot about innovative educational approaches, and since these silly people have been at this for a long time now, we hear just as often about the innovative approaches that some idiot started up a few years ago and are now crashing in flames. We’re in steady-state.
I’m wondering if it isn’t time to try something archaic. In particular, mnemonic techniques, such as the method of loci. As far as I know, nobody has actually tried integrating the more sophisticated mnemonic techniques into a curriculum. Sure, we all know useful acronyms, like the one for resistor color codes, but I’ve not heard of anyone teaching kids how to build a memory palace.
I’m just suggesting taking the idea out for a spin, see if it works well in some small, statistically-careful trials. I’m not talking about foisting it on everyone nationwide, willy-nilly. Which shows just how out of it I am.
I wish someone would test spaced repetition software for high schoolers or undergrads. That even has the excuse of everyone needing a PC or a tablet to do it, and we being able to easily afford that only recently, for why it hasn't been done before. Mnemonics are great for quick low-effort cramming for remembering things overnight, but spaced repetition can be for life.
I'm having trouble coming up with any complex instruction given in schools that doesn't directly lead to being tested in an exam. Can think of very few lessons in any sort of metacognition, some half-hearted mindmap thing mostly, and none at all where a specific metacognition method was being used in concert with an actual course.
My labmate is doing research on the interaction between the plant circadian rhythm and the plant immune system. Their various immune hormones (along with all kinds of other things) are modulated by a rhythm that anticipates the diurnally-varying likelihood of fungal infection and can be phase-shifted not just by light but by humidity. The hormones that modulate this are systemic and get carried throughout the plant and can easily be taken up through roots.
After poking his plants in the lab he came up with the idea of getting our tomato plants we were growing together this summer to sacrifice a little bit of biomass in favor of fungus resistance by watering them with dilute aspirin (a slightly modified version of a plant immune system hormone originally extracted from willow bark) in the early mornings, and we discovered that other people had been doing this successfully for decades without any particular known mechanism. That chemical is easy enough for them to make and some plants (like willows) are absolutely full of it. Would not be surprised if they secreted it into the soil and if it bled over into adjacent plants. They also do not limit their interactions to other plants - I have seen research to the effect that most plants actively secrete sugars into the soil around their roots to attract bacteria which break down minerals and nutrients into forms they can absorb, and that they actively allow many symbiotic fungi into their roots without mounting immune responses.
Because each step in the food chain involves energy loss, the shorter the chain, the fewer plants need to be killed to support you. Thus being a vegetarian saves plant lives too.
I have several relatives, and want to keep them alive.
There is a high likelihood of death occurring in India. As far as I can tell, no cryo-institutions in india - source
Assuming I can convince at least one of them to get on board with this, would it even be possible? I'm think freezing / transport to a facility is the only option - but if there are other ways I'd like to know.
You are approaching this problem from the wrong angle. You are asking "how do I set up cryonic arrangements in India", which as far as I know nobody has ever done and is probably going to be very complicated and risky and expensive to figure out and carry out by yourself. Instead, you should ask "how do I bring my relative from a 3rd world country to America", which is a MUCH more studied problem, with already established methods and infrastructure that are known to reliably work.
Convincing them to get frozen is hard enough as it is...I'm up against belief-in-reincarnation for at least 40% of them.
Also, I myself doubt that completely uprooting the life you do certainly have, in exchange for a shot at immortality which has a high likelihood of not actually working, is worth it. There are established business in place, and losing proximity to extended family together is a huge deterrent, even for most of the younger generation.
At best, it would be worth it for the very oldest relatives who are nearing the end of their lives...but those are both the hardest to convince ideologically and the ones who are most attached to the family infrastructure to survive and the ones for whom the nifty life-insurance trick doesn't work.
I'd still try to convince them, but the likelihood of me succeeding is reduced with each additional deterrent. I'm looking for a way to remove at least some of these deterrents before making my sales pitch.
By some metrics, my relatives actually have a higher quality of life in India than my own family does in America. The absolute income is lower, but the purchasing power for common goods and services is higher. It's harder for them to buy a computer, for example...but much easier to buy housekeeping services (though this is quickly changing as income disparity decreases).
Practically speaking, this translates to a better diet and much more free time.
If more people in the 1st world countries understood what sort of purchasing power they could have in the 3rd world, I'd suspect that many of them would move - though maybe not to India, which is accelerating fairly rapidly as of late.
AI Safety and MIRI appear in Slate:
And it even gives a mostly accurate description of the relevant risk factors!
These researchers are not exactly thinking about a Battlestar Galactica-type situation in which robots resent their enslavement by humans and rise up to destroy their masters out of vengeance—a fear known as the “Frankenstein complex,” which would happen only if we programmed robots to be able to resent such enslavement. That would be, suffice it to say, quite unintelligent of us. Rather, the modern version of concern about long-term risks from AI, summarized in a bit more detail in this TED talk, is that an advanced AI would follow its programming so exactly and with such capability that, because of the fuzzy nature of human values, unanticipated and potentially catastrophic consequences would result unless we planned ahead carefully about how to maintain control of that system and what exactly we wanted it to do.
After trying and failing to grasp Objective-C for quite a while, I stopped Googling things like "Objective-C tutorial," "Objective-C documentation," and "Objective-C examples," and instead looked for "Objective-C for C++ Programmers" and "Objective-C for Python Programmers" because those are my two strongest languages. This was just tremendously efficient for a large number of reasons, the most obvious of which is that new information is expressed explicitly in terms of direct contrast to information with which you are familiar. The typical "computer language tutorial," in contrast, is in my opinion a very shoddy document from a pedagogical standpoint, usually appearing totally clear to anyone familiar with the language but vague and ambiguous to its target audience.
As someone who spends a lot of time reading Internet, I don't recall ever reading this advice before - learn new languages faster in context of languages you know - so I thought I'd post the thought here.
So recently I've been toying with a new idea. It seems that for many of us -- at least for my friends and I -- living a maximally efficient rational life is difficult as one's irrational emotions tend to get the best of us.
To overcome this I have been experimenting with living my life as if I were in a game.
Let me explain:
If I view my life as a (potentially) single shot 'spawn' in an open ended MMORPG, I seem to be able to do more high risk/high reward things with much less irrational restraint.
My first method is to set up a HUD in my head. By visualizing...
...They said "There'll be snow at Christmas" They said "There'll be peace on Earth", But instead it just kept on raining, A veil of tears for the Virgin's birth.
I remember one Christmas morning A winter's light and a distant choir And the peal of a bell and that Christmas-tree smell And their eyes full of tinsel and fire.
They sold me a dream of Christmas They sold me a Silent Night They told me a fairy story Till I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in Father Christmas And I looked at the sky with excited eyes 'Till I woke with a yaw
Recently I ordered some free info material from my government in Germany about preparing for catastrophes and correct behaviour in case of one. It was surprisingly informative to read and I missed the long list of cited sources at the end but still I am willing to believe their advise.
This made me then wonder: What other quite 'fundamental' info of that kind is out there? I am wondering more specifically about info about infrequent but important events - either positive or negative - because that is where human rationality tends to fail horribly. Edit: I a...
Big wodge of information about first aid, emergency preparedness, and what to do if the emergency happens, posted at Making Light, which has smart well-informed commenters. I would assume that it's an accurate summation of what was known when it was written.
Anyone else finds it rather annoying that the anglophone internet is full of USA citizens who consider themselves to be the default human condition (not to mention those who seems not to even realize anyone but Americans actually exist)? You ask a question about something and people casually throw FDA this, IRS that, like they are fucking universal constants.
/rant off
Robert Wright's 'The Moral Animal' is a popular introduction to the field of Evolutionary Psychology for a lay audience, and was third on Yudkowsky's bookshelf of 'Books that changed my life' and also third on 'Books of knowledge'.
I'm looking to gauge interest on a post about it - I'm currently working on a summary for my own benefit. Are people more interested in a short review with a couple of key quotes/ideas, or a longer summary which covers the whole book? Contrast Lukeprog's extensive summary of How to Measure Anything with his shorter review of Thin...
I recently bought an e-reader. I found that PDFs of technical books or scientific papers are quite small. Does anyone around here use e-readers to read technical material? If so, is there an easy way to have a better reading experience on a kindle or do I just have to deal with it?
I often find myself reading PDF material on my Kindle, and I think I found some pretty decent workarounds. My three workarounds are:
If possible, try to find an epub or mobi version. For the more obscure, technical stuff, this is impossible, but for the more popular stuff, this is doable.
Try to use calibre to convert the PDF to a mobi. For some PDFs, this comes out with a good quality mobi, but often the PDF is formatted so that it does not.
But what often end up doing is a lot simpler: I turn the screen rotation sideways. Rather than the height of the Kindle being the height of the page, if it is the width of the page, you actually get a decent view. The width of the e-book reader becomes the height of the part of the page you can see, but thats what scrolling is for.
The third option works so well that I often don't bother with the first two, but all three are on the table for when I find a PDF I want to read.
I came across a study that showed that when women are given a romantic prime, they publicly volunteer more. I'm wondering if this explains what I see in my swing dance community, where the people who volunteer are mostly women (e.g. possibility of meeting and entering a romance with a high status dancer = more volunteering?). Has this study been replicated?
I found a slightly related study, where when women are romantically primed, they choose more "helpful" careers like those in the humanities and shy away from STEM fields.
Does anyone have any recommended "didactic fiction"? Here are a couple of examples:
1) Lauren Ipsum (http://www.amazon.com/Lauren-Ipsum-Carlos-Bueno/dp/1461178185) 2) HPMoR
The reason I'm not optimistic about cryonics is because I don't think it's likely that I'd be revived in the future, even if the technology would work perfectly if used properly. Imagine modern-day explorers find 5000 people cryogenically frozen in a cave 1000 years ago, and we can revive any number of them. How many would be revived? I doubt even half of them would be - because, if revived, what would they do? What would 5000 people from around 1000 AD do in modern times? And the faster pace of social and technological change compounds the problem. So if ...
All the people currently signed up for cryonics but not dead.
Alcor at least also requires boardmembers to have loved ones currently in suspension so there's another incentive.
Let's suppose it's 50 years in the future and you're signed up for cryonics with, say, Alcor. How confident are you that you'd know if Alcor had quietly disposed of some of their patients from 50 years ago?
If your answer, like mine, is "not very", then how strong an incentive do you think the fear of lawsuits from other signed-up people is, against any temptation to dispose of old patients to increase their profits?
(I am not suggesting that they do, or should do, that. Only that that particular incentive probably doesn't change their behaviour much.)
All the people currently signed up for cryonics but not dead.
An interesting question -- when are cryopreserved people supposed to be revived? Obviously when it becomes possible, but are there any other criteria? Let's say we learned how to unfreeze people but there's no effective immortality in sight (through uploading or biohacking or anything else) -- should they be revived at this point?
That question is relevant here because at the point where effective immortality is possible no one has any reason to sign up for cryonics. Everyone has already uploaded/ascended/whatever, so why would they revive a bunch of frozen primitives?
Here is a puzzle about Relativity that I am not able to solve; please help:
Imagine that Harry Potter is using his magical powers to test Relativity experimentally. He finds a very small room in a tower in Hogwarts, with two windows in opposing walls. He also finds a broom that is just a bit longer than the distance between the windows.
So, Professor Quirrell stands in the room and watches Harry fly through the room very fast. From Harry's point of view, the room became shorter. But from Professor Quirrell's point of view, it's Harry's broom that became shor...
When a person argues that Pinochet was good, because Allende would have been worse - what kind of fallacy is this?
It's not a fallacy, it's just different definitions of the word good. To some people good means better than the most likely alternative, to others good means the best out of all the alternatives.