All of Rachel Shu's Comments + Replies

You correctly imply something worth restating clearly: despite their initial framing, impact markets are not a way to achieve public goods per se, they are a way to efficiently achieve funder goals in contexts where the path to that goal is uncertain, there are many plausible options, and there is lots of information that can be potentially priced into the market about those options.

With some impact market designs decentralized self interest can in fact come into play, perhaps in the form of bounty pools pledged into escrow by some subset of the people who... (read more)

Even granting that there are grabby aliens in your cosmic neighborhood (click here to chat with them*), I find the case for SETI-risk entirely unpersuasive (as in, trillionths of a percent plausible, or indistinguishable from cosmic background uncertainty), and will summarize some of the arguments others have already made against it and some of my own. I think it is so implausible that I don't see any need to urge SETI to change their policy. [Throwing in a bunch of completely spitballed, mostly-meaningless felt-sense order-of-magnitude probability estima... (read more)

Composer Christopher Tin has set JFK's "We Choose to go to the Moon" speech to music, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBITb9Zz0rY . Solsticegoers may recognize the opening leitmotif as shared with Sogno Di Volare, another movement from the same work, an oratorio on the theme of flight, To Shiver the Sky.

I've recently gained a better appreciation for how astonishingly good this work is at linear perspective, which had only come about in European art in the prior century. Many things about this painting are good (and some bad to my eye, like the messy color scheme) but those hexagonal details on the curved arches in perspective is 100% Raphael showing off.

An aside, but linear perspective is the most rational part of art, in the older philosophical sense of rational; it's pretty much the only major part of classical art which descends from first principles rather than having an empirical basis.

Okay, this guy sold me as soon as I saw he had an episode on Doc Ing Hay's general store in rural Oregon. I stumbled upon this place once just passing through, at a convenient time to get a guided tour of the little museum they'd made out of it. There's not even a Wikipedia article on it yet; which gives me the impression that this podcaster is committed to both a broad and deep history of the chinese experience

Ah you've got my directionality confused, the bias preventing me from judging History of China podcast dispassionately is in his inability to pronounce Chinese fluently. I'm in the weird position of being fluent enough in Chinese to be a little intolerant of English speakers with bad Chinese pronunciation but not fluent enough to understand the Chinese-language content. I will say though that China History Podcast seems a little better on this very particular axis and I think it would be unreasonable to expect much better. They definitely seem to have a lot of content, and much of it relevant to the modern era!

Latest update: I did not complete the documentary and have no plans to continue working on it in the near future. The 90 hours of footage that I shot is all archived for possible later use, and is partially available to the community upon request.

Thanks! I won't add these to the top list but I hope people will scroll down to see the comments. I should mention that there are a whole bunch of Mike Duncan - inspired "History of X" which are of varying quality. I wanted to get into the History of China dude, but I couldn't give him more than a few episodes due to wincing at his accent, didn't even get to judge his content. Unfortunately my Chinese isn't actually good enough to listen to podcasts in Chinese about Chinese history. History of Byzantium is supposedly also good.

Zvi, thank you for writing this. I’ve been working through Baudrillard too and coming to the same conclusion - he is far more insight porn than philosophy, compared to famous scholars with similar metaphysics such as Foucault and Zizek. I’ve got a long post in the pipeline on this as well. 
 

It’s really frustrating that this community has been spinning up an elaborate schema which is a misinterpretation of a sophist, where the original conversants both admitted they had by that point only read the Wikipedia summary of the book. This feels like the... (read more)

Added AskHistorians podcast! Mentioning Coursera inline.

Added!

I’ve tried to provide a legitimate alternative to every piratical source I’ve mentioned - if others concur with you I’ll reduce the discussion of piracy sites to just a brief gloss of sci-hub. 

Thanks! I can’t build that out all myself, since I am obviously US based, but I will work on reducing US-centric claims and I would love it if others could point out what’s available globally or not.

Thanks! In the same vein,

• The inscrutably-organized, subversive, and spasmodic https://the-eye.eu
• Faded Page (works that are public domain and legal to upload in Canada but not necessarily elsewhere): https://www.fadedpage.com/index.php
• Internet Archive also has https://openlibrary.org/

I should roll some of this back into the main article.

This is incredible. I'd never heard of it; adding it to the research section.

On the bus from NYC to Boston for EAGxBoston 2019 I chanced to sit next to a topology professor. I don't have any higher math background, but mentioning that I'd recently read the first few books of the Elements opened the door to a long and interesting conversation. I was amazed that something written two thousand years prior compared so favorably with my own 8th grade geometry experience, which despite having a cool teacher managed to teach me only the rudiments of geometry, and nothing substantial about proofs or theorems.) Minus the annoying long s, I'd gift Byrne's illustrated Elements to any smart kid in a heartbeat - it's surprisingly cheap on Amazon.

Do you use a separate word for the subjective experience of thought and perception?

Another way to succinctly say this is that two distributions may be cleanly separable via a single immeasurable variable, but overlap when measured on any given measurable variable, such that a representation of the separation achieved by a single immeasurable variable is only achievable through multiple measurable variables.

I think that there are a few plausible theories of the rationalist community and how they relate to the mission:

[0] Null hypothesis: no connection. This is obviously implausible if you've spent 3 seconds around the community or its mission.

1. The community and the mission are the same. Even the less immediately relevant activities create an intellectual and social milieu which is conducive to progress. The ability to engage with other intellectuals at low cost to oneself means that insights are shared between key individuals at faster rate. The commun... (read more)

I generally agree with the call to action. I have a historical critique.

I think you are mistaken about the nature of villages being automatically bound together; I think this error is survivorship bias. Most settlements that have ever existed did so ephemerally: existing primarily for the extraction of a single resource (mining towns), or for a single goal (military garrisons). What you see as natural cultural bonds and communities are a mark of stability, a historical example of a group that has solved (at least for a little time) the problem that the rat... (read more)

From recent releases, I really like Tillie Walden's ultrasoft scifi On a Sunbeam, (2015-2017), and Kieron Gillen's The Wicked + The Divine (2014-ongoing), which has a lot of similarity to American Gods.

For something rationalist-adjacent, I'd recommend Blue Delliquanti's O Human Star (2012-ongoing), which deals with LGBTQ issues in the context of FAI and transhumanism.

Would love to have you in attendance!

Hi, I'm helping to organize this year's NYC Solstice, as raemon has moved to the Bay Area. I've been reading LW, SSC, and rationalist Tumblr since about January and going to NYC meetups semiregularly since April, but haven't yet posted on here, so I thought I'd make a quick introduction.

My name is Rachel, I'm an undergrad senior at NYU completing a communications major. I'm originally from the Bay Area. On the MBTI, I'm an INTJ. Besides rationality, my passions are graphic novels and cooking. My intellectual interests tend towards things that have a taxonomic character, like biology and linguistics. (I'm also a fan of the way that these subjects keep evading a perfect taxonomy.)

I occasionally wear sandals.