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ChrisHibbert
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Which things were you surprised to learn are not metaphors?
ChrisHibbert8mo114

Weight lifters feeling "pumped" is similarly literal. I get this from rock climbing more often than lifting, but after a particularly strenuous climb, your arm muscles feel inflated--they're engorged with blood. It can take a minute for it to subside.

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Decision Theory in Space
ChrisHibbert11mo11

Vader is clearly homicidal and irrational. Leia's superior rationality won't slow him down. Leia recognizes that immediately, but she should also have realized that revealing the base's location wouldn't prevent him from destroying the planet.

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We’re not as 3-Dimensional as We Think
ChrisHibbert1y10

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-happens-in-a-mind-that-cant-see-mental-images-20240801/

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We’re not as 3-Dimensional as We Think
ChrisHibbert1y186

I think there's a lot of research that shows we're fairly bad at predicting how other people see the world, and how much detail there is in their heads. I've read quite a few books that talk about how some people presume that other people are speaking metaphorically when they talk about imagining scenes in color or in 3-d, or how they can "hear" a musical piece in their mind. Those who can assume that others just aren't trying. Face-blindness wasn't recognized for quite a while.

Some people are much better at doing mental rotations of 3-d objects than others. I can do a decent mental image of the inside of an orange, an apple, a persimmon, or a pear, but perhaps I've spent more time cutting up fruit than others. My mental image of the internal shape of the branches in our persimmon tree is pretty detailed, since I've been climbing inside to pick fruit and trim for 35 years. 

google.com/images?q=mental+rotation+three-dimensional+objects

There was a time when I was working on n-dimensional data structures that I could cleanly think in 4 or 5 dimensional "images". They weren't quite visual, since vision is so 2-d, but I could independently manipulate features of the various dimensions separately. 

When looking at full-color stereograms, you have to have a mental model of the image depth to make sense of it, even if the rendering is all of surfaces.

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Examples of Highly Counterfactual Discoveries?
ChrisHibbert1y60

The Iowa Election Markets were roughly contemporaneous with Hanson's work. They are often co-credited.

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Funny Anecdote of Eliezer From His Sister
ChrisHibbert1y30

Proofreading comment: 

Please change "folks" to "focus"

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How to make real-money prediction markets on arbitrary topics (Outdated)
ChrisHibbert2y10

I don't see a place for listing book orders, so does this use an automated Market Maker? What's the algorithm? (e.g. Hanson's LMSR?)  Where can we find the code?

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Will the growing deer prion epidemic spread to humans? Why not?
ChrisHibbert2y42

Cooking tainted meat doesn't denature prions.  (They aren't "alive", so they can't be "killed".)  Neither do most biological processes, as you might expect in the normal case of digestion. As the article above mentions, they can persist in the environment for years. 

It can take temperatures of several hundred degrees to denature them. 

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Will the growing deer prion epidemic spread to humans? Why not?
ChrisHibbert2y00

Prion diseases are slow to develop (up to decades), incurable, and always fatal.

I think the "always fatal" part of this sentence is vacuous. Unless the meaning is something akin to "kills within X years of contracting the disease", it can only mean "kills the victim if they don't die of something else first." (In fact, the article later says "Humans infected with BSE, meanwhile, can harbor it for up to decades post-exposure, and live an average of over a year after showing symptoms.")

There are two known infectious prion diseases in people. ... Kuru ... vCJD

 

Wikipedia lists fatal familial insomnia, and two others.

But it doesn’t seem to infect people. Is it ever going to? If a newly-emerged virus were sweeping across the US and killing deer, which could be spread through consuming infected meat, I would think “oh NO.” I’d need to see very good evidence to stop sounding the alarm.

Scrapie, in sheep, has been known since at least 1732, and isn't thought to spread to humans.

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Put Dirty Dishes in the Dishwasher
ChrisHibbert3y30

I think a thing that most people neglect is that dishwashers are designed for approximately a family of four preparing and eating two meals a day together, which leads to a certain accumulation of dishes, and the dishwasher needing to be run at least every other day. That means a certain amount of time for the detritus to dry on the dishes. If you have a smaller dishwasher, or more people eating, the dishwasher will be run more often, and it'll be more effective at cleaning dirtier dishes. If you run the dishwasher daily, #4 or #5 might work well for you. If there are only two eating, or you're eating more take-out (fewer pots and pans) and you only do a load every 4 or 5 days, then the dishes need to be cleaner going into the dishwasher.

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23Long-chain correlation: lead paint and crime
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