Use alarms and don't ignore them, ever. Set the alarms to go off at the time when you want to start setting up for the next part of your day; e.g. getting ready for bed instead of lights-out time, setting up your workspace for the day instead of time to be fully productive, checking if you're hungry instead of lunchtime, &c. You can set as many labeled alarms as you like on your phone and many watches, and you can schedule them to repeat regularly. If you don't want to disturb people around you, set the alarm to vibrate and keep the device on your pers...
I generally agree with this argument, and I endorse and encourage further exploration with the eventual goal of being able to predict the meaning of a ritual from its form and vice versa. The definition of ritual presented in the conclusions and further discussion in 4.1 strike me as a very good start toward that goal.
My biggest concern with the argument as presented is a slightly waffling attitude between the extremely strong (too strong?) statement of immutable motivation presented in track 2.3 and repeated in 3.5 and Conclusions, and the weaker treatmen...
... you don't know how it changes your life and relationships to win - it's probably quite positive ...
I seem to remember reading that the overall impact to an individual of winning a large lottery is very frequently overwhelmingly negative; that nearly everybody winning those prizes ends up worse off five or ten years down the road than they were when they started.
... a 5-minute check of the easiest-to-find articles on the subject provides mixed opinions, so grain of salt and all that. But I didn't see any anybody claiming that winning a lottery is all...
Depends on what I'm doing. My baseline is verbal/auditory, and that is the mode my short-term memory loop utilizes most effectively. Reading printed text is primarily an auditory experience for me.
I don't seem to have an autobiographical narrator as such, but I do a good deal of processing in the verbal mode, increasingly when I am less familiar with a task or process. If I am trying to learn a new task or process, that processing often escapes as a literal verbal output that sometimes makes my kid ask if I'm "talking to YouTube". I guess this is a stronge...
Somewhere along the line, somebody will have to deal with fewer irate passengers who just missed their trains because the signs were too small and verbose. I would agree that it is unlikely for anybody who can do something about the problem to connect the unfortunate signage with the irate passengers, though.
The text could be further condensed to something like:
Red Line to Ashmont
Arriving
Everybody knows they are passengers and that they are here for the train so that information is redundant on the sign.
GPT-4 will probably be insane.
Could we drill down on what exactly you mean here?
claim that consequences are unforeseeABLE is bold. That would require "weather is beyond our ken, forever."
Maniac Extreme type argument on a minor semantic point.
We can make some pretty good guesses, but right now we have no effective means to fully and accurately predict the long-term and long-distance meteorological, geological, and hydrological side effects of a project that results in a moderate-to-major change in the annual rainfall of a region. There will be consequences that we are unABLE to forsee. Some of those consequences could be large, some could be negative. Some could be both, maybe we don't get either.
My read suggests that OP is probably less interested in increasing evaporation overall (though it would increase) than controlling where the water enters the atmosphere. There are places that are dry only because there happens to be a mountain in between them and the ocean, for example. Moving the water a long way is something we already know how to do (think oil pipelines, but containing salt water instead of hydrocarbon slurry). If it scales, this could make a substantial difference to such places.
Downside is that weather is the output of an insanely com...
How easy is it to change the sheets? I've heard speculation that loft beds are often difficult that way and I'd like to update on a 1st-hand account.
The statue made a rising whine as the lights began to pulse rhythmically. The legs stretched out, probing a bit in random directions for an instant before one found the surface of the floor and the rest immediately followed, each with its own sharp little click. When the machine appeared sure of its footing, it began to slowly push itself up while the weapon on its back glowed a dull red and swiveled around sharply. It was so beautiful! And a bit terrifying. I took a step back, and the statue seemed to notice! I can't say how I knew, but I was sure it look...
I'll agree with that, and I'd add that you need to be sure the index won't change while you're not looking so you can know that each position has been visited. Think of a cop checking parking meters, for a relatively low-stakes example. If they get distracted - say, by some irate motorist a few meters away complaining about a ticket from long ago - it would be easy for them to forget if they had processed the closest meter. If they walk/ride toward the motorist to be heard better, they might easily lose their place entirely. In this example, the cop's phys...
A recently learned, broadly applicable pattern:
For tasks that look like traversing a list, a durable form of memory is required to assure the entire list is touched.
Imagine a rope extending from the start of your life to its end through time. This part of the universe being dense with entities, your rope will inevitably meet others. Sometimes they will pass near one another; they may cross; they may crash together and both change direction; they might even twine together and form part of a cable; but eventually your rope and the other will diverge, or one or both will come to its inevitable frayed end. As you move inexorably along through time, you may find that you like having your rope near some other rope or cable,...
This rhymes with my experiences and thoughts. To say it another (slightly more general) way, it's often the reactions of adults that are traumatizing well beyond anything else that happens to children (and other adults). It isn't always the case that measured response produces a trauma-free experience, and some events tend to leave terrible scars. But where I see people bringing their own feelings into someone else's situation is also where I see far more of lasting psychological trauma.
Parents really need to realize - or be taught - that they are exocortices for their children, one of whose primary roles is to process things that the child cannot and be a sink for big emotions, NOT a source of them. When parents push their own emotions onto a child, that invariably is traumatizing - as in the case of parentification or "emotional incest", or narcissistic abuse, etc. This is another example of that. Arguably, telling a child they ought to feel worse about something that has happened to them is itself a form of abuse.
I don't know that I've seen the original bet anywhere, but Eliezer's specific claim is that the world will end by 2030 Jan 01. Here's what I could find quickly on the topic:
Proposed heuristic: Any time you hear "don't talk about that", update toward the hypothesis "there is an oppressive regime here"
I know of a blog you might find interesting: "Small Gods" is a series of portraits of contemporary deities (the author made up) with short explanations of their domains. There are plenty of puns, and also some surprising seriousness. Maybe you'll find it inspiring to explore some other work in the genre?
Belatedly, it occurs to me that all that is for highway driving. Local driving requires a whole different model. Though many of the inputs come from the same places, the processing is often entirely different.
It may be critical to note that tracking estimates of the internal states of other entities often feels like just having a clue about what's going on. If someone asks us how we came to our intuitions, without careful introspection, we might answer with "I just know" or "I pay attention is how!" or similar.
To unpack a mundane example, here's a somewhat rambly account of some of what I'm tracking in my head while I operate a motor vehicle:
When I'm driving, I don't actively scan through all the sounds and smells and tactile events and compare them with past e...
I appreciate the attempt. I agree that discussing sex more openly, especially with and around children, is likely to be broadly of benefit. I am, however, left with some concerns. Please accept my attempt at a thoughtful critique.
I acknowledge the "draft" status of this story but I don't think this narrative line is very promising, and it notice it falls into at least a few of the cultural potholes I think we'd do well to avoid. The "make love not war" message is fine (if a little abstract) but I don't think it helps support an "easier and lighter tone" or...
To restate my argument simply: the more closely a term captures its intended definition, the less work the community will need to do to guard the intended definition of that term. The less interesting a term sounds, the less likely it is to be co-opted for some other purpose. This should be acted on intentionally and documented publicly by those wishing to protect a term. People bringing the term into the conversation should be prepared to point at that documentation.
I hear your frustration
Going forward, when setting up new language, it might be beneficial to consider choosing terminology that doesn't strongly evoke the feeling that its frequent use in discussion could threaten the integrity of its definition in the first place. Now, the deed is already done here, but I would suggest for the future making sure that terms needing guarded definitions are more descriptive. At a first pass, the procedure might look like:
That's how mine looks
My partner and I call this heuristic "Don't ask a question with a wrong answer".
There needs to be a reason why nobody else has thought of doing it. A reason why it's not in any of the library books.
These are not necessarily the same.
Real example: When Bell Telephones was split up, the child companies kept the Bell moniker and added the name of a region to differentiate themselves (e.g. Bell Atlantic) for this exact reason.
The awful math poetry's fun But you don't really know if your done If these limericks you find Rattling round in your mind Only then will you know if you've won
✋High five for the best kind of bad poetry! (Or, whatever celebratory gesture we're using these days.)
In this video, Matt Parker and Hannah Fry perform a thought experiment from Bayes's original notes that uses no math at all. After that, they overlay a probability distribution on the experiment and show the certainty increasing, all without worrying about the math. Finally, they show the equation briefly near the end of the video. (Turns out Bayes didn't actually work out the math himself, anyway; Laplace did that work.) They don't really go into the math at all, but rather discuss the idea of updating beliefs based on new information.
The whole video is a...
So, I'm hearing that you like looking at others but touching by yourself. Sounds ace to me. ;) I think mad has the right of it: seems likely you'd find benefit by exploring the asexual scene and see just how much variation is to be had in what many think of as a tiny slice of sexuality. Even if you eventually decide that label just isn't for you, you'll likely learn a lot and get a better idea how to continue your journey of self discovery (excuse the cliche, but it applies).
It might be helpful to think about sexuality as a set of sliders or volume knobs. Sounds like your desire for partner sex is set pretty low, but your romantic desire is set higher. The two don't necessarily correlate the way the culture tends to suggest [1]. Those settings would fall into the asexual part of the variable space, but not the aromantic part. Likewise, it sounds like you have non-negative feelings toward sex in general, so you probably aren't "sex repulsed" like some asexuals.
Regarding the power fantasies, remember that fantasies are tricky th...
A couple of years ago, I learned that NYC building code requires that many buildings have heating systems capable of keeping up if all the windows are open. At the time, I thought that was exceedingly wasteful. I'll agree with whoever points out that it usually is, but our climate control systems are much more flexible now than they were when large amounts of NYC were being built. Maybe this is something we should consider establishing capability for going forward.
I hear your concern for our future engineers! They should have the best educational opportunities we can offer them, and I'm not it! Fortunately, I have no plans to go into teaching. Rather, I thought that the context of the discussion up to that point was sufficient to make clear what I meant by "sin^2x + cos^2x = 1", and not imply anything "= 0" that doesn't. Unfortunately, I've noticed the conversation drifting from the point I was trying to make (which I was making an effort to support). I meant to be addressing...
The car does have a speed module that happens to be a good analog for a hypothetical free-will module in humans. The speedometer produces an output based on the internal workings of the vehicle. It is also an excellent example of how maps can give outputs that are not necessarily grounded in the state of the territory.
How many conditions can you think of where a driver should ignore the report of the speedometer?
It sounds like you put a higher weight of probability on "meditators can turn off or ignore a brain module that let's them sense their free will" than "meditators can learn to turn off or ignore a brain module that applies a narrative of free will to a deterministic process".
Is that correct? If so, why?
When performing first aid, you must never leave a patient until you have passed them off to someone more qualified than yourself.
How did I get almost 40 years into my life before encountering these words?! Seems like they should be engraved on the box of every first aid kit ever. I spent a few years with the freaking Boy Scouts, for crying out loud, and nobody ever explicitly taught this!
(I notice I am confused) ... (and a little angry)
Absent the preferred evidence, we have to work with what we've got. Dentists keep detailed records on their clients, including notes related to their medical situation so that they know e.g. "Alice has [condition] and should get this kind of care but not that.". Look at the state of evidence regarding flossing and gum health: I remember reading that the statement "flossing is good for your gums" is supported by exactly one study that's over 50 years old and followed a dozen people for two weeks, then had them self-report their flossing habits over that tim...
To address your clarifications:
Nobody seems to do proper studies on dentistry, so we don't have any gold standard evidence that I've ever seen. But, discounting institutional knowledge out of hand is foolhardy. I'd call the story the dentists tell about this "moderately strong" evidence for a causal connection, but (all together now!) more research is (obviously) needed.
I know a guy who had thyroid cancer. They took the gland out and he has to take a daily pill to replicate the function, but from about two weeks after the surgery I haven't heard him complain in the years since. So, seems manageable from a quality of life angle.
From https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/thyro.html, new thyroid cancer cases occur at a rate of ~15 cases per 100k people per year, and the disease has a 98+% 5-year survival rate.
Compare that with whatever risk results from needing more invasive repair when your dentist can't detect the cavities as soon, and you can see if there's a net benefit. I'm not seeing any numbers on this in my 5 minutes of searching, but that doesn't mean they're not out there. But I suspect the connection between dental infections and heart disease (that any dentist will tell you all about if you ask) easily exceeds the increased risk from regular x-rays.
- More logical still would be to have two periods, one marking the end of the quoted sentence and the other the end of the top-level sentence. But that would be redundant and also look ugly.
This style feels much better when the embedded sentence requires a different punctuation type than the parent sentence, such as "Don't you think?". I expect it only looks "ugly" because we don't typically see things done this way.
Big thanks for doing this for large magnitudes!
At a first pass, an improved wording might sound something like this:
If the box contains a diamond,
It is optimal to believe that the box contains a diamond;
If the box does not contain a diamond,
It is optimal to believe that the box does not contain a diamond;
Let me not become identified with beliefs that may not serve well.
The Litany as written does point to something very important. Still, it's possible that it could point more precisely.
Being able to represent accents accurately is definitely a benefit! I'd love to pick up a book and be able to gather information about the writer's cultural background by the way they pronounce words (and without the "mangled" spellings that implies under the current system).
Likewise, I'd like to have the option to write in a neutral voice in order to avoid privileging one group of speakers in the canonical spellings (think, those used in government documents and the like). British and American English both have accents that imply socioeconomic status, and...
Sure could! That strategy works just fine for recording language exactly as it's heard, and even for mapping phonetic representations with traditional spellings in a many-to-one relationship, but it lacks the ability to encode words with dialectically neutral vowels. That is, IPA forces you to choose an exact vowel; there is no provision I know of to indicate "some vowel in this range", which is needed to neutralize the spellings of most words. Though, it certainly wouldn't be hard to extend the IPA to include that feature if that's the character set you wanted to start with.
To do an English spelling reform you would need to decide which dialect of English is the correct one to map and which dialects are wrong.
Disagree: a new writing system can be chosen to accommodate certain dialectical variations (the pen/pin and father/bother issues, for example) and simply represent others. (The name John is pronounced Jawn in some regions of the USA. It would be very easy to spell it with that vowel if we expected spelling to match the sounds.) And it can all be done without applying right/wrong labels to anybody's dialect. It's just ...
I live near a town with what I think is a similar intersection. The law here is that it is always the pedestrian's "turn" if they choose to enter a crosswalk and there is no traffic light specifically telling them otherwise. In more detail: if the pedestrian wishes to cross at an intersection with a traffic light, they have "right of way" (the legal term that corresponds to your use of "turn") when the light is green for the lane of travel parallel to their crosswalk; if there is no light, the pedestrian always has "right of way". For intersections with no...
I have not seen any increase in spam quality or quantity and I have not spoken to anybody who told me that they have.
I am aware of the fear that the current generation of LLMs could make social engineering attacks much cheaper and more effective, but so far have not encountered so much as a proof of concept.