“No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time which I remember mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through some inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance. I daresay I was not very well at that time. I tottered about the streets—there were various affairs to settle—grinning bitterly at perfectly respectable persons. I admit my behaviour was inexcusable ....
Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"
I think that the vast majority of people, including you, are catastrophically underestimating the seriousness of the culture war and overestimating the significance of Trump. There is a common historical pattern that could be called Short War Bias, where people mistakenly believe that a conflict can and will be won with a few decisive victories. Winning in 2028 will simply mean that you face an even more energized and radicalized conservative / MAGA base in 2032.
I see a close analogy between the culture war and the wars of religion in old Europe. Those wars lasted for centuries and involved millions of casualties (as many as the 20th century wars when normalizing for population size).
If you really want to improve the world, I would recommend a two-pronged strategy:
- Use the Pareto principle to limit the damage done by Trump in the next couple of years. Focus only on the 20% of battles that cause 80% of the damage, let him win the rest
- Try to create a political framework where the two tribes (Woke left and MAGA right) can live together without murdering each other
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1First, I appreciate the work people have done to make LW 2 happen. Here are my notes:
- Strong feeling - the links and descriptions of the Sequences, the Codex, and HPMOR (while good) should not be at the top of the page. The top should be the newest material.
- Please please please include a "hide subthread" option to collapse a comment and all its responses. That is a dealbreaker for me, if a site doesn't have that feature, I won't read the comments.
- Current LW has a really nice alternating color scheme for comment/reply. One comment will have a grey background, the comment below it will have a beige background. That is a key feature for visually parsing a comment thread.
- I liked the concept of having a main section and a discussion section, where the bar for posting in the latter is lower. For whatever reason, people seem to get angry if you post something that they feel is low quality or not relevant.
- I can't put my finger on it exactly, but somehow I don't quite like the default font. It may be that I like a different font for reading on dead tree paper vs on a computer screen?
- It may be slightly evil, but the karma display on the right side of the screen makes the site more addictive, because people love to see if they get upvotes or comment replies.
- It seems weird to allow people to upvote/downvote an article right from the home page, do you really want people to vote for an article without reading it?
Why do people see Mars as a better target for human colonization than the Moon? Most comments on lunar colonization seem to refer to two facts:
- the Moon has quite low gravity, so it cannot maintain an atmosphere for a long period of time.
- the Moon has no magnetic field, so it will not protect us from solar radiation.
In my mind, both of these problems can be solved by a ceiling or dome structure. The ceiling both retains the atmosphere and also blocks harmful radiation. Note that a failure in the ceiling won't be catastrophic: the atmosphere won't drain rapidly, and the amount of radiation exposure per unit time isn't disastrously high even without the ceiling.
Very nice, thanks. Ahh... Haskell really is quite pretty.
Good analysis, thanks. I buy the first two points. I'd be shocked to see an implementation that actually makes use of the lower metadata requirements. Are there languages that provide a boolean primitive that uses a single bit of memory instead of a full byte? Also I don't understand what you mean by persistence.
-1, this is pointlessly negative. There's a disclaimer at the top (so it's not like he's claiming false authority), the title is appropriate (so it's not like you were tricked into clicking on the article), and it's reasonably on-topic because LW people are in the software/AI/entrepreneurship space. Sure, maybe most of the proposals are far-fetched, but if one of the ideas sparks an idea that sparks an idea, the net value could be very positive.
Has anyone studied the Red Black Tree algorithms recently? I've been trying to implement them using my Finite State technique that enables automatic generation of flow diagrams. This has been working well for several other algorithms.
But the Red Black tree rebalancing algorithms seem ridiculously complicated. Here is an image of the deletion process (extracted from this Java code) - it's far more complicated than an algorithm like MergeSort or HeapSort, and that only shows the deletion procedure!
I'm weighing two hypotheses:
- Keeping a binary tree balanced in N log N time is an intrinsically complex task.
- There is some much simpler method to efficiently maintain balance in a binary tree, but nobody bothered looking for it after the RB tree algorithms and analysis were published.
I'm leaning toward the latter theory. It seems to me that most of the other "elementary" algorithms of computer science are comparatively simple, so the weird overcomplexity of the tool we use for binary tree balancing is some kind of oversight. Here is the Wiki page on RB trees - notice how the description of the algorithm is extremely hard to understand.
Can anyone offer a linguistic explanation for the following phenomenon related to pronoun case and partial determiners:
- None of us want to go to school tomorrow.
- None of we want to go to school tomorrow (**).
- We want to go to school tomorrow.
- Us want to go to school tomorrow (**).
Do you find it similarly hard to empathize with people who support the following regimes:
- Chinese Communist Party
- Iranian theocracy (now perhaps endangered)
- Russia / Putin (at least historically, Putin had very high approval ratings)
- Pre-2025 Maduro / Chavez government of Venezuela
- Islamic fundamentalist / monarchist government of Saudi Arabia
Similarly, is it hard to empathize with citizens of friendly countries like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, who are incomparably more xenophobic than the average Republican?