LessWrong 2.0 Reader

In my opinion, a class action filed by all employees allegedly prejudiced (I say allegedly here, reserving the right to change 'prejudiced' in the event that new information arises) by the NDAs and gag orders would be very effective.

Were they to seek termination of these agreements on the basis of public interest in an arbitral tribunal, rather than a court or internal bargaining [LW · GW], the ex-employees are far more likely to get compensation. The litigation costs of legal practitioners there also tend to be far less.

See Trump's NDA termination.

When considering that my thinking was that I'd expect the last day to be slightly after, but the announcement can be slightly before since that doesn't need to be quite on the last day but can and often would be a little before - e.g. be on the first day of his last week.

Do you happen to have a copy of it that you can share?

The first two reasons that come to my mind are (1) other instruments have much more career incentive to do so (in that there are many more jobs for classical violinists or violin ensembles than for classical guitarists), and (2) it’s possible to have a much more successful career as a guitarist knowing only chord positions and not having a more detailed understanding of the fretboard, than it is with other instruments where a knowledge of how to play complicated melodies is required.

I have also seen the culture of pianists being used to playing reams and reams of new music, and this being a signal of proficiency more so than amongst other instrumentalists (e.g. violinists or flautists). I think it is probably because the majority of a pianist’s career is spent in accompaniment rather than as a soloist or in an equal ensemble (there are ~no serious piano quartets), and so the quantity of music quickly consumable is a much more competitive asset. When I was at music school, there were professional accompanists and everyone was assigned one, pianists employed simply to go around and accompany all of the students in their performances, so they needed to be able to play a great deal of complicated music very quickly or on-sight.

Personally, my primary goal with sheet music is to get off of it as soon as possible (i.e. learn the piece from memory). It is a qualitative reduction in the number of things my attention is on, and gives me much more cognitive space to focus on how to play the piece rather than what I’m playing next.

I do want to +1 that there is a lot of variation in right-hand-position space. For fingerpicking, my training has always been to pluck from the knuckles, which are the strongest and biggest joints in the finger, and never from the joints nearer the fingertips, which are much weaker and tire faster; nor to hook one’s fingers under the string but to simply push past the string. (In case thats helpful.) Might take some time to adjust to any new playing pattern.

As with exercising any part of your body, there’s a difference between tiring your hands out (which is healthy) and hurting them (which is painful and damaging). There should be no sharp pain.

Thank you for your thoughts.

I often reflect that, in my attempts to model life on this planet from all that I have observed, experienced, read, and reflected on, it seems like there is a persistent "force" that is supporting life at ever greater levels of organization and complexity. The fields, circumstances, and conditions of this planet seem to give chances to any strategy for organizing on top of what has already been organized. Trillions of chances over billions of years, with almost as many failures. Almost.

I'm not the most science-y, but it seems that conditions for this planet, its moon, its carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, it's temperature ranges, putting together single-celled organisms, then multi-cellular ones, then plants, dinosaurs, whales, sharks, etc. etc. etc. social species, hominids, hominids with the ability to join mind together psychoactively through shared language...

This is the prime or ultimate divine for me in the field of our earth. Why does life keep organizing itself here with more and more complexity?

Now, for human consciousness, society, culture, and mind to exist, there are definitely god-forms, spirits, and egregores that are symbiotic with human groups and populations. Or at least, this is the best story I can tell about the phenomenology I experience and observe as a complex human social primate, having been shaped by my genes, memes, and culture, and now co-creating, co-manifesting, and co-weaving this clusterfuck of meaning-driven, desire-driven, spirit-driven activities we are all doing and telling and living with each other across arcs of history and time and geography....

I appreciate this space where I can say these things without feeling insane or too paranoid. We can not dissect or even observe our gods casually or lightly without putting our own minds and sanities at risk.

Let's use words, thoughts, and concepts like the magic they are. These are the tools and the bricks we shape our world from and with, across far greater arcs than our brief individual lives.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god. Now we have word in compute. Dear God what have we done. Have we not domesticated ourselves into what will evolve on top of us as its host and platform?

Dear God.

We don't have a live count, but we have a one-time analysis from late 2023: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WYqixmisE6dQjHPT8/2022-and-all-time-posts-by-pingback-count [LW · GW] 

My guess is not much has changed since then, so I think that's basically the answer.

That’s an important point I neglected. I mean something like “the top LW post on the list would have the most links from other LW posts”

For example, I’d expect “More Dakka” would be high up on the list. Since it is mentioned in LW posts quite often.