User Profile
star1
description0
message14
Recent Posts
Curated Posts
starCurated - Recent, high quality posts selected
by the LessWrong moderation team.
rss_feed Create an RSS Feed
Frontpage Posts
Posts meeting our frontpage guidelines:
• interesting, insightful, useful
• aim to explain, not to persuade
• avoid meta discussion
• relevant to people whether or not they
are involved with the LessWrong community.
(includes curated content and frontpage posts)
rss_feed Create an RSS Feed
All Posts
personIncludes personal and meta blogposts
(as well as curated and frontpage).
rss_feed Create an RSS Feed
No posts to display.
I agree that there isn't a general pressure towards truth-telling. Just getting somewhat more truth in some limited but fraught areas has been remarkably difficult.
Mysteries are an extremely popular pro-truth art form, but they have the limits of being fiction, and are generally not about finding out anything really surprising or painful. Offhand, I can't think of any mysteries with much about the social or psychological consequences of finding out that someon...(read more)
Are there people who say they're depressed because life is meaningless? I'm not an expert on the subject, but I've never heard of any.
There've been several mentions of obesity as a primary cause of depression. I haven't heard of fat people tending to be more depressed than non-fat, but maybe I've ...(read more)
Vision may be the strongest tool for getting past abstraction for most people, but I recommend putting the other parts of sensory experience on the list, too.
Is there a well-defined difference between the shape of one's mental machinery and its limited computing power?
"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be". I've seen this attributed to P.C. Hodgell, but without enough detail to check on it.
"Mathematics is beautiful" + "Reality is not like mathematics" doesn't add up to "Reality is ugly".
If people are that much more trusting when they're distracted, then it's important not to multi-task if you need to evaluate what you're looking at. Maybe it's just important to not multi-task.
It's my impression that men and women are permitted somewhat different sets of emotions--men are freer to show anger, women are freer to show sadness. And that showing emotion is more permitted now than it was a few decades ago.
As far as I can tell, it's possible to be emotional (or at least fairl...(read more)
Part of why the future looks absurd is that people want novelty--not absolute novelty and not all the time, but a lot of smart and weird people are working on making changes, some of which will catch on. A futurist isn't going to be smart and weird enough to predict all the possible changes being of...(read more)