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Update: the cards have all been claimed now (at least for this round)

1WilliamKiely1y

How do you know the cards have been claimed for this round? Did you get a message saying as much when you tried signing up?

1WilliamKiely1y

Thank you! Looks like they lasted about ~7 hours.

Notes on Courage

athom2y2

Thanks for the post!

The Zach Weinersmith quote you mentioned goes further, in a direction that might also be relevant:

"...bravery is not cross contextual... Conversely, recklessness *is* cross contextual. Unsafe sex correlates to drug abuse."

I'm pretty reckless in some ways, but need to build courage in other areas.Fostering courage where I need it, turning my recklessness into courage where it's helping me, and minimising it where it isn't, all seem like worthwhile things to try.

Stupid Questions - September 2017

athom2y3

Best guess: because they've found the Haskell expertise they were after. That tweet is nearly two years old now, and I'm pretty sure Ed Kmett joined more recently than that.

[Link] "Where are all the successful rationalists?"

athom2y2

Is there any data on how people feel like rationality has changed their lives? Somewhat separate to what we're doing as a community / what some of the most successful rationalists are up to, it seems worth trying to work out how engaging more with rationality changes things for people. I'm pretty sure my engagement with rationality has helped me become stronger; if it turned out not to help most people that would definitely change how I presented things.

Thomas Kwa2y11

I'm planning to write a sequence on all positive and negative effects the practice of rationality has had on my life, and I already have one post on pitfalls. Future posts will probably be about things like

forming realistic expectations
reading LW in a way that's less reality-masking
a list of all the low-hanging fruit I've found
a list of interventions I've tried
weird effects from learning some rationality techniques but not others
the benefits of diversifying one's sources of knowledge
re-learning how to interact with non-rationalist society

These wi... (read more)

5Mary Chernyshenko2y

I kind of view this as a process of sequential self-sorting. Some people go on and become obviously successful and develop a culture with norms, I think almost fully described by the early-to-middle LW proclaimed ideals. I am not among them and can't say for certain; I am only certain they keep diversifying. Other people trickle off into the other branch which keeps branching. I am among them. I keep running into a need to express thoughts according to virtuous rules which overshadows other needs most starkly, but I don't feel inclined to make more things (including immaterial). Some thoughts have been nesting in me for years and I don't expect them to leave soon.

Babble challenge: 50 ways of hiding Einstein's pen for fifty years

Answer by athomOct 16, 202014

Ordered chronologically. In retrospect, I've assumed some pretty weak evil forces here, and mostly gone for variations on a needle-in-a-haystack type theme.

Surgically implant the pen in myself
Theseus-duplicate the pen, give one duplicate to the evil forces so they leave me alone
Make a second, cooler-looking pen, ‘accidentally’ lose it to evil forces
Cut a hole in a dictionary/similarly boringish book, put pen in there
bury the pen somewhere random
carve a hole in a tree, put pen in, wait for tree to regrow over it
bury the pen, in a construction site, so

Answer by athomOct 09, 20209

I'm glad they don't have to work....

1. Clothes might include a bobby pin in my hair, which I could use to pick the lock

2. Wait ten years to see if anyone opens the door

3. Get on the wifi, ask someone for help

4. Find other devices in the area, communicate with them (ask for help)

5. (coerce into opening)

6. Post video of myself in room on social media, create outrage campaign

7. (If door is electronically locked, and my phone's an android) hack the network (and open door)

8. (and hack a bunch of small devices, to ddos the building’s network)

9. (..., to ddos wha

... (read more)

2ryan_b2y

#34 is a reasonable argument for changing some of my personal carry habits.

Taking vitamin D3 with K2 in the morning

athom2y1

Nice post! I have one thing to add about timing. Because Vitamin D is fat-soluble, there's slightly better uptake if you take it with a relatively fatty meal or with milk. I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes though; taking it in the morning (with a not-fatty meal) is still enough to fix my deficiency.

2ChristianKl2y

It's unclear to me that uptake is a measure that has to be optimized for.

The Skill of Noticing Emotions

athom2y1

Weird question, but if your marker action is doing something with your hands, what do you do if you're holding something at the time?

2Neel Nanda2y

Huh. Somehow that has never come up before... My default reaction when holding my phone was to either put the phone down, or just to tap my fingers together

LESSWRONG
LW

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