Be sure to screen shot any comment you make that you want to preserve, or comments by others that should be preserved. LessWrong is now the sort of site where critical comments silently vanish that cannot by any sane stretch be called trolling.

If your concern is public relations, systematically deleting critique is amongst the stupidest things I can think of you doing. This is the Internet, where that sort of behaviour ensures preservation. A bot to automatically preserve all comments to LW would be ridiculously simple, for example, if MIRI could no longer be trusted to be honest.

Really, MIRI. Just what the hell do you think you're achieving with this?

So, I mentioned here that I might write a "(pure) mathematics for rationalists" post. Would other people be interested in such a post, and if so, what sort of concerns would you want it to address? If there are lots of LWers trying to learn mathematics I would also like to know what their goals are in doing so.

(Edit, 2/10: Thanks for the responses, everyone. I'm in the process of writing this.)

LessWrong has a lot of threads that go like:

Someone: "Gee, it would sure be nice if we had this cool new feature on LessWrong!"

EY/similar person: "Gee, it sure would. Too bad we don't have any development resources."

How would one go about volunteering to do this sort of thing?

I assume that if volunteer work is accepted, it would require testing to prove that it is a quality and non-malicious change before they actually run it on the servers.

So... this is a really personal issue and I'm not sure I have any business bringing it up here, but I'm going to anyway:

I've been on and off suicidal for the past 8 or so years (I'm 18, btw), but I've been especially depressed for the last couple of months. My exact emotions are pretty complicated and the motivations behind my death wish differ from moment to moment. 2 days ago I decided to commit to killing myself and I've spent the time between then and now readying myself for suicide. In the past 10 minutes I've had a change of heart brought on by guilt.

Help.

I imagine the wise thing to do would be to seek professional assistance, but I don't want to for various reasons. I've told several friends that I want to die, but they don't really believe me because of the casual way I bring it up and my disposition towards seeking attention. There was a case of suicide by someone in this community awhile ago and I believe some of the commenters on that thread offered to talk to anyone who was feeling self destructive, but that was some time ago, so I'd like to inquire as to whether the offer still stands.

I think I'm likely to have more in common with the average Lesswronger than with an... (read more)

I gave a talk in Chicago on using Ideological Turing Tests to avoid some mindkill-y problems and have better, more interesting arguments. The video is now up.

In an Ideological Turing Test, you answer one set of questions honestly and another as your best model of your ideological opponent. It's a nice way to spot and burn strawmen and to get curious about why your opponent thinks the thing zer does instead of just angry that they won't concede. Other material included: tips on skipping generic argument scripts and cribbing from LARPing to build a line of retreat.

Since its inception in early 2009, has this community ever (1) changed its collective opinion on something (2) had a debate in which there were two sides and there was a clear victor?

Fun example of the bystander effect in everyday life: last night, I hosted a Twelfth Night party, where people came over and all read the the play aloud and ate boozy cake ("Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there will be no more cakes and ale?")

We all had a lovely time, and someone asked why we hadn't done this before. And I realized that it was because Shakespeare could happen any time, so we were never pushed to schedule it any particular time. We only managed Twelfth Night because it's pegged to the actual holiday of Twelfth Night.

In some kind of identity crisis I am looking for a well-paying, preferably mathematical, career where I can use broad knowledge of physics, biology, chemistry, cognitive science, economics ... I was thinking actuary or statistician. Any similar thoughts?

I was thinking whether Mensa could be used for CFAR purposes (raising the rationality waterline), and I would like to hear your opinions. Also, I am interested how many LWers are in Mensa, and how many think that Mensa is useful for anything more than satisfying social needs of its members.

For me personally, Mensa was a huge disappointment. (I am not sure how much that reflects only Mensa in Slovakia, and how much applies for other countries too. I know many people in other countries are disappointed too, but it also seems to me that Mensa in other countries does more useful activities.) The easiest way to explain it is that when I first heard about Mensa, I imagined something like CFAR Minicamps. It did not occur to me that someone would spend their energy to create a worldwide organization for highly intelligent people, only to do... nothing. Because that is exactly what most Mensa members do, in my experience. They meet, they talk about something, but usually only to signal their own superiority, then they solve puzzles. Everyone wants to be a leader; almost no one is willing to be a team player. So all they do is confirm each other's superiority, and then lament about why the w... (read more)

There will be <=3 MLP-related posts on LessWrong in January 2013 (80%; marked right):

Since people are whining about the MLP-fics that LW is ruined, ruined, while I think it’s a temporary spurt exhausting a limited reservoir of such posts.

The MLP discussions were obviously going to die down, as indeed they have; 'Friendship is Optimal' is done, 'Myou've got to be kidding' has ceased to draw any attention and slowed updates, and Vaniver still hasn't done anything with his. The problem solved itself. People here can be such drama queens.

Of interest for the data science angle. Also it includes the word "bayesian" and links to Paul Graham. That's got to make it more or less on-topic, right?

I recently took this collection of text messages (from Hilary Mason's collection of research-quality data sets ), and attempted to build a simple Bayesian spam filter for text messages.

This was mostly just a fun exercise. I wasn't expecting to produce a usable product (and I didn't), but as an exercise it was pretty informative and well worth my time. I've put some observations in rot13, as anyone else undertaking this exercise may benefit from observing them by themselves.

Vg'f n irel tbbq qrzbafgengvba bs cbjre nanylfvf pbaprcgf, naq gur genqr-bss orgjrra frafvgvivgl naq fcrpvsvpvgl. Jura znxvat gjrnxf gb gur pynffvsvre, vg ernyyl unzzref ubzr gur vqrn gung ryvzvangvat glcr-V reebef pneevrf gur pbfg bs zber glcr-VV reebef.

Gur birenyy zrgubq (anvir onlrf pynffvsvpngvba) frrzf gb or fvtavsvpnagyl yrff hfrshy sbe grkg zrffntrf guna sbe rznvy zrffntrf. Gurer ner n ahzore bs boivbhf ernfbaf sbe guvf, naq n srj yrff boivbhf barf. Grkg zrffntrf ner n ybg fubegre guna rznvyf (hfhnyyl yrff guna 140 punenpgref, juvyr rznvy... (read more)

What's the community norm on cross posting? Suppose I have a couple of relatively short ideas I want to write about and post on my blog, but I also think the LW community might be interested (I do). I could post them as discussion posts here and on my blog, or just post them on my blog and links to them as discussion posts. I prefer the former, but is there a norm against it?

Thanks.

Here's a question perhaps not posed too often. I'm new here, and finding the sheer amount of effort people seem to put into the status quo topics quite daunting. I recognize the objective value in many of the things discussed, in that by discussing them there is moral benefit. But day-to-day, I find myself envious rather than spurred to action that people are able to put forth the effort.

For far too long, I've been frustrated and in a mental lull, and I find little to attribute this to except a decrease in effort about the things I know I am capable o... (read more)

What if I told you that you that I had a reform proposal that would give us nearly all of the same benefits we gain from spending on Medicine and Education in First World Nations but for half of the cost? While this is a radical and bold course of action that would require substantial political capital to acheive, I'm not as madly optimistic as to expect the funding freed up to be spend on Efficient Charity or Existential Risk Mitigation (that is what Altruistic Piracy is for). Even slightly lower taxes resulting in higher economic growth lifting more peop... (read more)

I'm currently a Ph.D. student in mathematics, which seems like it's not unheard of around here, and I'm beginning to realize (about halfway through the expected life of my program) that I'm not particularly interested in staying in academics.

What sorts of other career options are there, coming from pure mathematics?

And in particular I don't do anything related to graph theory, probability theory, or other fields with obvious connections to other career paths; what are some skills that would complement a PhD in mathematics on a resume?

The top of my list ri... (read more)

Found on Wikipedia:

There is an ongoing controversy in metaphysics about whether or not there are, in addition to actual, existing things, non-actual or nonexistent things. [...] Note that "actual" may not mean the same as "existing". Perhaps there exist things that are merely possible, but not actual. (Maybe they exist in other universes, and these universes are other "possible worlds"--possible alternatives to the actual world.) Perhaps some actual things are nonexistent. (Sherlock Holmes seems to be an actual example of a fictional character; one might think there are many other characters Arthur Conan Doyle might have invented, though he actually invented Holmes.)

IIRC he self-identified as such. And what he said did fit with the definition in the lead of the English Wikipedia article on radical feminism.

There's something weird about how my mind works. The latest example was with this article. The first time I tried reading it, my eyes sort of glided off the page and I couldn't understand anything. I waited a day, without thinking about the article at all, then tried reading it again. And suddenly everything was completely obvious and I couldn't see any difficulty. The same thing happens with math problems (when I was a kid I would often wake up with a solution to some problem I heard the day before), complicated programming tasks, etc. Any ideas why this happens?

The Human Brain Project seems to have garnered some media attention recently. None of it particularly deep or informative, what are your thoughts?

This catalog of shaming tactics from a rather polarizing organization A Voice For Men is quite interesting, regardless of whether you approve their agenda, and is probably applicable to many other cases where an attacker uses the emotion of shame to achieve their goals. I'm wondering what cognitive biases are in play here? Having been on the receiving end of many of these attacks, I cannot calmly think through the answer on my own.

I'm planning on teaching myself a programming language (probably Python, via LPTHW) and I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on whether Anki would be helpful in this endeavor. Normally, I'd just go ahead and do it, but some of my friends who know how to code said it wouldn't be helpful, even though they were hesitant to give reasons when pushed.

Just leaving a note here; I've dropped Coursera "Drugs and the Brain"

Dropped after finishing the first section's quiz; presentation was weirdly scattershot, going into great depth on some details and overviewing others, assumed a lot of chemistry & physics background, and the material turned out to be too low-level to be useful to me in reading up on nootropics even though I was initially pleased nicotine would be discussed throughout the course.

It does leave me time to do Data Analysis, which is going well so far (it's essentially applied R).