I was considering writing some more discussion posts, but am not sure if people would find them valuable. Possible ideas:
1) In light of the relatively recent discussion of the value of history in social engineering, a summary of Politics of the Prussian Army 1640-1945 in order to have a proper case study for whether learning history is a reasonable effort improvement for those trying to raise the sanity line.
2) A post on hyperlexis - the idea that modern society has too much law.
3) Law: Real World Hidden Complexity of Wishes. This post would be useful for showing skeptics why hidden complexity of wishes is an intractable problem. Also, it might help to bring a different discipline's perspective on the problem.
4) A followup to Please Don't Fight the Hypothetical called "When to Fight the Hypothetical"
Thoughts? Suggestions?
I'd be interested in 1-3. But hope to see crunchy facts, not just a restatement of widely shared beliefs with weak evidence.
I've been reading stuff by philospher Wolfgang Spohn. His recent decision theory stuff (like Dependency equilibria and the causal structure of decision and game situations or Reversing 30 years of discussion: why causal decision theorists should one-box) is kind of cool. Like TDT, he talks about rational agents deciding on the basis of "reflexive entangled decision situations" and like UDT he proposes that agents should decide to follow the decisions they would have made in "earlier situations". It's not quite LW style reductionism, but it's close-ish, and it increases my estimation that LW decision theory would be well recieved in academia (after a little self promotion).
Perhaps of some interest to the Moldbug enthusiasts here is the Examining Idealism series recently written by James_G on his blog.
Paul Krugman's hilarious predictions about the Internet / technology ca. 1998:
The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in "Metcalfe's law"--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
Is anyone else watching the CERN announcement? I came in just when he said something about five standard deviations and everyone started clapping. Has Eliezer lost his bet? A boson has been found at 125.3 (+-) 0.6 GeV at 4.9 sigma.
...Feynman once said there's Plenty of room at the bottom (nanotechnology). In the context of human genetics, it's clear there's plenty of room at the top -- possibly as much as +30 SDs based on existing variance in the human population!
...
Finally, regarding the +30 SD number, one could reason in a completely different way. Since only 10 billion or so humans have ever lived, and there are probably many many more distinct genotypes/phenotypes (e.g., 2^(many thousands) based just on gene variants), it is unlikely that the already real
I'm looking to exchange Skype or equivalent with fellow rationalists. It's very hard to find rationalists in real life. My purpose is mainly to exchange information (apparently many of my questions aren't Google-able), but also to try out certain psychological tests/questions (many of them are invented by me) and see how well they score, to test my hypotheses.
...Polilov found that M.mymaripenne has one of the smallest nervous systems of any insect, consisting of just 7,400 neurons. For comparison, the common housefly has 340,000 and the honeybee has 850,000. And yet, with a hundred times fewer neurons, the wasp can fly, search for food, and find the right places to lay its eggs.
On top of that Polilov found that over 95 per cent of the wasps’s neurons don’t have a nucleus. The nucleus is the command centre of a cell, the structure that sits in the middle and hoards a precious cache of
Does anybody here know anything about hypnosis, especially academic research? In this post Armok_GoB posted an interesting link. Especially notable is the video of a hypnotist convincing strangers on the street to give him their wallets, supposedly with a 66% success rate.
It seems like a potentially very important area of research, and could be highly relevant to CFAR's goals.
PZ Myers on why he thinks preserving brains is not presently possible, similar to kalla724's notes on the subject. (He does brain preservation in the course of his own work, on zebrafish.)
...And that’s another thing: what the heck is going to be recorded? You need to measure the epigenetic state of every nucleus, the distribution of highly specific, low copy number molecules in every dendritic spine, the state of molecules in flux along transport pathways, and the precise concentration of all ions in every single compartment. Does anyone have a fixation met
Is it time for another welcome thread? The current one says 2012, but it has over 1200 comments on it, largely due to the infamous infanticide discussion.
Turns out the religious are less prone to emotionally inconsistent decision-making than atheists.
Anyone who knows what these two pictures are and where they come from? Nemesis is doing some I think not very accurate critique of LessWrong on the Swedish Skeptics internet forum. It is in Swedish, and sorry, I have not time to translate into English. But though I do not know, I suspect that Nemesis have not the pictures them by himself but found them somewhere. If anyone knows I would be glad to know. (If someone should know already and recogises them, I do not ask anyone to spend significant time on it.)
There seems to be a PHP Singularity. (Yeah.)
I was recently thinking about this: (1) PHP is a horrible, horrible, horrible language, but (2) many people use it anyway. It means it does some things right (at least for the given set of people), but it also does so many things wrong. Switching to Perl, Ruby or Python is apparently not seen as a good choice by the PHP users, because those languages miss... something. (Perhaps a simplicity for a total newbie, e.g. not having to think about libraries, etc.)
In my opinion, the good solution would be to make a new l...
This post probably only makes sense if you have noticed the pattern that societies with high rates of consanguineous marriage tend to also be clannish societies and are familiar with recent evidence that shows rapid human evolution in the past few thousand years.
After reading this forum for some time, I finally realized that I'm not the only one who finds the standard linkage between romantic relationship and ownership weird. I recall that the statements like "s/he is mine" or "I'm yours" have been baffling me for as long as I can remember, yet most people consider them perfectly normal. A few posts by the regulars, both polys and "monos" show that I'm not alone.
I finished reading Left in the Dark by Gynn & Wright and have posted a review. Summary: it's seriously junk science. If you want a fun read, stick with Julian Jaynes.
It's been asked before, but has anyone found any useful online information regarding The Alexander Technique to improve posture and reduce overall stress and tension in the body?
In my recent reading, thought, and debates with Konkvistador I become more and more of the opinion that a highly refined and ethically grounded theocracy of some sort might indeed be the best solution ever to our political and social dilemmas. Expect the focus of my comments to turn from grappling with Neo-Reaction to exploring this possibility in the coming months.
Well, most people here actually do hope for a "direct theocracy" of FAI rule to turn out very well, so the "only" big leap of logic is to make the case for human institutions...
...It seems to me that people are far too casual about one of the greatest personal threats, that of suddenly being translated into another world, era, or alternate history. This happens all the time. You walk around the horses in a little town near Berlin, in 1809, and you disappear (with a popping sound). You get hit by lightning, and suddenly you find yourself in Ostrogothic Italy or medieval Iceland. Some bruiser hits you on the head with a crowbar, and you wake up in Arthur’s England. While investigating reports of strange gases in an ab
I'm looking for advice on specific insurance policies for the aspiring gambler/test-subject/would-be-immortal.
First question: Term or permanent? Term is far cheaper, but runs the risk of having zero return if I should have the misfortune to enjoy a long and happy life. I'm leaning towards term if only because the costs of brain-preservation seem to be unpredictable over any sustained period of time (scale, plastination, other technological advancements) and the value of a fixed-return permanent policy decreases over time due to inflation.
Second question: H...
Review and discussion of Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders-- of interest to LW because there's a lot about the effects of reading material that breaks various taboos.
Another review which may give you a clearer idea of whether you want to read the book
A believer, a skeptic and a rationalist walk into a séance.
During the séance, the believer heard voices. After the séance, the believer proclaims, “See! See! I heard voices! The spirit world exists: séances work!”
During the séance, the skeptic heard nothing. After the séance, the skeptic proclaims, “I have looked everywhere for evidence of spirits and it is obvious that the mystic has tricked you with cold reading. Quit this nonsense, there is nothing to see.”
During the séance, the rationalist heard nothing, but notices that ...
Looking for fashion advice
I've recently lost a lot of weight and need to buy new clothes. I'm particularly looking for fashionable, casual clothes. Something to portray the picture of a university student who has it together, is high status, but isn't uptight.
The stores I've shopped at so far don't seem to have what I'm looking for. For example, most the shirts have pop cultural or "funny" graphics on them or are a billboard for a company. I'm more so looking for colorful but masculine shirts, something with an interesting design. I think I may ...
Look at this. Does it set off anybody else's quantum woo detector? And yet it's a course offered by a real university, as far as I can see.
..."I just flipped a fair coin. I decided, before I flipped the coin, that if it came up heads, I would ask you for $1000. And if it came up tails, I would give you $1,000,000 if and only if I predicted that you would give me $1000 if the coin had come up heads. The coin came up heads - can I have $1000?"
Obviously, the only reflectively consistent answer in this case is "Yes - here's the $1000", because if you're an agent who expects to encounter many problems like this in the future, you will self-modify to be the sort of agent who an
Thinking Like a Behavioural Economist (dentist edition)
On incentives, professionals and unconscious bias.
Did you know that each country has a different sign language? And they are not similar, even if the spoken languages of the respective countries sound similar. From Wikipedia:
...On the whole, sign languages are independent of oral languages and follow their own paths of development. For example, British Sign Language and American Sign Language are quite different and mutually unintelligible, even though the hearing people of Britain and America share the same oral language. [...] Similarly, countries which use a single oral language throughout may have two
I Want a New Drug, blog post by Gregory Cochran on why big pharma has been fail for the past two decades.
I want to be able to dance at weddings and parties, but I don't know how to break this down into a sequence of learnable subskills. To pick just one step that's not obvious to non-musical me: how do I tell what kind of dance fits the music that is playing? Do any of you have advice on how to quickly achieve a minimum viable level of competence?
I'd recommend beginner swing lessons. You'll learn all the basic turns, the basics of leading, how to fit moves in to a basic step, how to time the dance to the music. Many places have an hour lesson followed by several hours of social dance for cheap.
Once you have these basic skills it's not too tough to learn new dances. Look up nightclub two step, that one works well with lots of types of music. I second blues dance lessons, though I don't really like blues. Learn basic jazz steps by looking up solo jazz routines and copying them.
The good news is that most people (especially men) have absolutely no idea what they're doing on a dancefloor, so the bar for being seen as a good dancer by the general public is quite low. The bad news is that you can't think your way into being a good dancer, so you will have to practise.
The easiest way to develop dance skills is to take some sort of dance class. It doesn't really matter what kind, because they all involve the same transferrable meta-skills. If you're looking at developing improvised solo dancing skills, I'd recommend a solo vernacular dance style, like jazz, tap or hip-hop.
If you wanted to learn a partnered dance (and I wish everyone did, because it's great), you could look into one of the many varieties of partnered dance available. If that doesn't interest you, learning the mechanics of lead/follow would probably be a needless distraction.
If you don't want to attend a class for whatever reason, you have other options. The internet has a wealth of dance-related resources. This is the first in a long series of YouTube videos teaching the iconic dance to Michael Jackson's Thriller. Don't laugh. The instructor on the video takes you through warm-ups, exerc...
Can anyone recommend me any nootropics for raising concentration (executive functions, working memory) that are effective, legal in the UK, not too expensive, and without too much side effects? My concentration is quite bad, if that's relevant.
I have some questions for people who think they believe in quantum worlds that split and join, and/or in "timeless physics".
Consider the sentence that you just read. The implication of such beliefs is that the person who started reading the sentence is not the same person who finished reading the sentence. According to the splitting quantum worlds idea, the person at the start would have split into many different people, who split into even more different people... by the time the sentence was finished. According to the timeless perspective, the...
Not that I care about karma, but I've noticed that mine seems to hold steady at two thirds of the lowest top contributor.
Has anyone else noticed a stable karma ratio?
Does anyone have experience with Vector Marketing? Opinions online range from "fantastic" to "scam." I have an interview schedule with them tomorrow, and am trying to determine whether I should cancel. If it is a scam, it's certainly not worth my time.
// Long comment, no new material, ends with an ill defined decision theory question. Feel free to collapse it and move on.
Player M is playing rounds of PD against increasingly interesting agents. Players swap source code and then return their decisions. The game payoff matrix takes sets of actions (consisting of "C"ooperates and "D"efects, one from each player), and returns payoffs for each player.
PD := (<D,D>, <D,C>, <C,D>, <C,C>) → (<1,1>, <3,0>, <0,3>, <2,2>)
is a set of actions, are...
I'm looking into getting some MCT oil. Prices seem to vary widely on Amazon, and a brief search hasn't turned up any recommendations on a particular type to get. Should I just go with the cheapest, or are there other important factors to consider?
Shouldn't HPMOR have updated just now?
What are people's views on the cow from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (as an ethical dilemma)? For those who haven’t read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the character is explained on wikipedia Ignoring the idea that vegetables don’t want to be eaten,
My own opinion is that breeding such a cow is good because it replaces a non-sapient thing that will suffer being slaughtered with a sapient thing that is...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.