My experiments with nootropics continue. A few days ago, I started taking sulbutiamine (350mg/day), a synthetic analog of thiamine which differs in that it crosses the blood-brain barrier more readily. The effects were immediate, positive, and extremely dramatic - on an entirely different order of magnitude than I expected, and probably the largest single improvement to my subjective well being I have ever experienced. A feeling of mental fatigue and not wanting to do stuff - a feeling that leads to spending lots of time on blogs, playing video games and otherwise killing time suboptimally (though not necessarily the only such feeling) - just up and vanished overnight. This was something that I had identified as a major problem, and believed to be purely psychological in nature, but was, in fact, entirely biochemical. On the first day I took sulbutiamine, I felt significantly better, worked three hours longer than normal, and went to the gym (which would previously have been entirely out of character for me).

That said, I do have a concrete reason to believe that this effect is atypical. Specifically, I believe I was deficient in thiamine; I believe this because I'm a type 1 diabeti... (read more)

Bridging the Chasm between Two Cultures: A former New Age author writes about slowly coming to realize New Age is mostly bunk and that the skeptic community actually might have a good idea about keeping people from messing themselves up. Also about how hard it is to open a genuine dialogue with the New Age culture, which has set up pretty formidable defenses to perpetuate itself.

Can't decide? With the Universe Splitter iPhone app, you can do both! The app queries a random number generator in Switzerland which releases a single photon into a half-silvered mirror, meaning that according to MWI each outcome is seen in one branch of the forking Universe. I particularly love the chart of your forking decisions so far.

I'm looking for something that I hope exists:

Some kind of internet forum that caters to the same crowd as LW (scientifically literate, interested in technology, roughly atheist or rationalist) but is just a place to chat about a variety of topics. I like the crowd here but sometimes it would be nice to talk more casually about stuff other than the stated purpose of this blog.

Any options?

What fosters a sense of camaraderie or hatred for a machine? Or: How users learned to stop worrying and love Clippy

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703959704575453411132636080.html

I’m not sure whether the satanic ritual abuse and similar prosecutions of the 80s/90s have ever been discussed on LW in any detail (I couldn’t find anything with a few google searches), but some of the failures of rationality in those cases seem to fit into the subject matter here.

For those unfamiliar with these cases, a sort of panic swept through many parts of the United States (and later other countries) resulting in a number of prosecutions of alleged satanic ritual abuse or other extensive conspiracies involving sexual abuse, despite, in almost all cases, virtually no physical evidence that such abuse occurred. Lack of physical evidence, of course, does not always mean that a crime has not occurred, but given the particular types of allegations made, it was not credible in most cases that no physical evidence would exist. It is hard to choose the most outrageous example, but this one is pretty remarkable:

Gerald [Amirault], it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was doing, and then told him not to do it

Reasonable Doubt: Innocence Project Co-Founder Peter Neufeld on Being Wrong

The welcome thread is about to hit 500 comments, which means that the newer comments might start being hidden for new users. Would it be a good thing if I started a new welcome thread?

While I'm at it, I'd like to add some links to posts I think are especially good and interesting for new readers.

A couple of viewquakes at my end.

I was really pleased when the Soviet Union went down-- I thought people there would self-organize and things would get a lot better.

This didn't happen.

I'm still more libertarian than anything else, but I've come to believe that libertarianism doesn't include a sense of process. It's a theory of static conditions, and doesn't have enough about how people actually get to doing things.

The economic crisis of 2007 was another viewquake for me. I literally went around for a couple of months muttering about how I had no idea it (the economy) was so fragile. A real estate bust was predictable, but I had no idea a real estate bust could take so much with it. Of course, neither did a bunch of other people who were much better paid and educated to understand such things, but I don't find that entirely consoling.

This gets back to libertarianism and process, I think. Protections against fraud don't just happen. They need to be maintained, whether by government or otherwise.

I'm considering starting a Math QA Thread at the toplevel, due to recent discussions about the lack of widespread math understanding on LW. What do you say?

[Originally posted this in the first August 2010 Open Thread instead of this Part 2; oops]

I've been wanting to change my username for a while, and have heard from a few other people who do too, but I can see how this could be a bit confusing if someone with a well-established identity changes their username. (Furthermore, at LW meetups, when I've told people my username, a couple of people have said that they didn't remember specific things I've posted here, but had some generally positive affect associated with the name "ata". I would not want t... (read more)

I've been thinking more and more about web startups recently (I'm nearing the end of grad school and am contemplating whether a life in academia is for me). I'm no stranger to absurd 100 hour weeks, love technology, and most of all love solving problems, especially if it involves making a new tool. Academia and startups are both pretty good matches for those specs.

Searching the great wisdom of the web suggests that a good startup should be two people, and that the best candidate for a cofounder is someone you've known for a while. From my own perspective, ... (read more)

Quick question about time: Is a time difference the same thing as the minimal energy-weighted configuration-space distance?

IMO, the quality of comments on Overcoming Bias has diminished significantly since Less Wrong started up. This was true almost from the beginning, but the situation has really spiraled out of control more recently.

I gave up reading the comments regularly last year, but once a week or so, I peek at the comments and they are atrociously bad (and almost uniformly negative). The great majority seem unwilling to even engage with Robin Hanson's arguments and instead rely on shaming techniques.

So what gives? Why is the comment quality so much higher on LW than on... (read more)

Is there a post dealing with the conflict between the common LW belief that there are no moral absolutes, and that it's okay to make current values permanent; and the belief that we have made moral progress by giving up stoning adulterers, slavery, recreational torture, and so on?

I recently started taking piracetam, a safe and unregulated (in the US) nootropic drug that improves memory. The effect (at a dose of 1.5g/day) was much stronger than I anticipated; I expected the difference to be small enough to leave me wondering whether it was mere placebo effect, but it has actually made a very noticeable difference in the amount of detail that gets committed to my long-term memory.

It is also very cheap, especially if you buy it as a bulk powder. Note that when taking piracetam, you also need to take something with choline in it. I bo... (read more)

Jaron Laier is at it again: The First Church of Robotics

Besides piling up his usual fuzzy opinions about AI Jaron claims, and I cannot imagine that this was done out of sheer ignorance, that "This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined"; I cannot imagine that this ... (read more)

I bet a good way to improve your rationality is to attempt to learn from the writings of smart, highly articulate people, whom you consider morally evil, and who often use emotional language to mock people like yourself. So, for example, feminists could read Roissy and liberals could read Ann Coulter.

http://roissy.wordpress.com/ http://www.anncoulter.com/