"I would strongly suspect humor doesn't make you more rational/smarter/scientific, but is a fun grounds for playing around with strange ideas and patterns."
Most humor (aside from physical comedy or a silly persona) seems to require deep verbal concept formation. Pointing out unexpected similarities based on the structures of ideas isn't cognitively trivial; it means that the comedian is able to extract essential features across superficially different subjects.
The consequences of our beliefs about status and signalling. For example given how pervasive signaling is in our lives should we optimize our lives for the most status etc.
We know that we care about status. We know that we can't talk to people about that in real life. Should we then make status our motivating terminal value?
..his reverend or something like that told him (hypothetically). He beleives it the same way Obama beleives that a man can rise form the dead. He was told by people he trusted, but the opinion wasn't widespread. I doubt that he came up with the idea on his own. It seems to have some group of believers.
On that topic how you upvote? I've never been able to figure it out. I can't find any upvote button. Does anyone know where the button is?
Isn't teaching itself a skill? So what that she was a bad musician, she was obviously a first rate teacher (independent of the subject that she taught).
She gives a pattern of feedback that makes the students practice well? In the sense that she gives positive feedback she functions more as a motivator than as a teacher. Her skill is teaching, it's only happenstance that she teaches music; has she taught shoe polishing or finger painting she would have produced the best shoe polishers and the most skilled finger painters.
Perhaps she doesn't have many complex skills but has strong fundamentals (think Tim Duncan of the NBA Spurs). She might make her students practice the fundamentals which will allow them to do more complex work as they get older.
Finally, she might have knowledge more advanced than her skill. She might not have the hand eye coordination or the processing speed to play sophisticated music but she might know how it's done. Imagine a 5 foot tall jewish guy that loves basketball. He's not gonna make the NBA. It's simply not gonna happen. However, he might understand the game better than many NBA players. Likewise he might be the best basketball coach in the world even though his athleticism (and hence his basketball playing skills) is less than that of NBA players. Likewise the teacher might have had a strong theoretical understanding but not have had the ability to put her theoretical knowledge into practice.
I'm talking about in the case of the humans.
And where on the graph would you put yourself now?
Ya, that must be it. I've been on here for like 3 years (not with this account though) but only after the diaspora. Really excited that things are getting posted again. One major issue with such a system is that I now feel pressure to post popular content. A major feature of this community is that nothing is dismissed out of hand. You can propose anything you want so long as it's supported by a sophisticated argument. The problem with only giving voting privileges to >x karma accounts is that people, like myself, will feel a pressure to post things that are generally accepted.
Now to be clear I'm not opposed to such a filter. I've personally noticed that for example, slatestarcodex doesn't have the same consistently high quality comments as lesswrong. For example people will have comments like "what's falsification?"etc. So I acknowledge that such a filter might be useful. At the same time however I'm pointing out one potential flaw with such a filter, that it lends itself to creating an echo-chamber.