Stupid Questions December 2016

First, the temperature will be uneven throughout any given building. In order to ensure that the outskirts of a large building are adequately cooled, the interior may end up frigid. This effect is more pronounced with larger buildings. Please complain to your nearest HVAC contractor, not to us poor Texans.

Second, people who are just coming in from 115 F outdoor temperatures actually tend to want it to be nice and cold inside. Believe me.

Third, the outdoor temperature varies over the course of a day. A thermostat setting that resulting in an acceptable actual indoor temperature at noon might be causing very cold indoor temperatures at 6 PM, even though nobody touched the thermostat.

Fourth, colder air is drier, which causes sweat to evaporate faster. So there's a sweat-evaporating benefit along with the rapid cooling benefit, which is very beneficial and widely appreciated when every single person entering a building is drenched in sweat.

The best way to learn these lessons is to simply live in Texas and observe your own behavior vis-a-vis air conditioning preferences.

Some form of signalling?

Air-conditioning is higher status than no air-conditioning. Higher-status people are more likely to live with air-conditioning; lower-status people are more likely to live without it. Lower-status people will feel more inconvenienced by too much air-conditioning, because it is a greater shock for them. Complaining about too much air-conditioning is an evidence of lower status. People who want to seem higher-status will avoid complaining about air-conditioning (and maybe just dress warmer). If all high-status people agree that the air-conditioning is okay as it is, it will remain as it is, because higher-status people make the decisions.

I think you get more of that in Texas and the southeast. It (by my observation - very much a stereotype) correlates with driving big trucks, eating big meals, liking steak dinners and soda and big desserts, obesity, not caring about the environment, and taking strong unwavering opinions on things. And with conservatism, but not exclusively.

I distinctly remember driving in my high school band director's car once, maybe a decade ago, and he was blasting the AC at max when it maybe needed to be on the lowest setting, tops -- it seemed to reflect a mindset that "I want to get cold NOW" when it's hot, to the point of overreaction. Maybe a mindset that - if the sun is bright and on my face, I need a lot of cold air, even if the rest of me doesn't need it? Or maybe, 'it feels hot in the world so I want a lot of cold air'. Certainly there was no realization that it was excessive, and he didn't seem bothered by the unnecessary use of resources. I've noticed this same mindset a lot ever since, and I still don't understand it.

Cooling down less than to the optimally comfortable temperature would make some economical and ecological sense .... Cooling down more seems patently absurd.

There is no "optimally-comfortable temperature" - different folks want different temps! The optimum choice is in fact to have two rooms/environments, one of which cools down a bit more, the other less (or not at all). If you feel cold, just spend some time in the warmer room.

Yeah, this is a thing, and I hear plenty of Americans make baffled complaints about it as well.

I don't know the answer, but this is my guess. A while back, there was a flurry of news sites talking about air conditioning being "sexist". The short version is that standards for climate control were all written when offices were full of men in suits. Times have changed, in terms of who's wearing what in which buildings, but things like building codes and temperature guidelines haven't caught up.

I think you're better off raising your topics in open threads, and see whether people tell you a topic's already been covered.

No, there's no index. The rationalist community is a disapora of people in which everyone keeps producing its own content. It's basically impossible to read everything and be on-par with everyone.
I suggest you select a couple of forum (the obvious choices are LW and SSC) and read a bunch of things from there (again, "AI to Zombie" strikes me as the obvious choice).

I don't think there's any standardization. People just make it up as they go. Scott often uses the phrase epistemic status at slatestarcodex, I think that's where it come from.

It all seems to me that it is just a nice, civilised conversation with awareness of biases and the need to keep emotion on hold, as well as, examine assumptions.

That might not seem to amount to much, but it's an extremely high bar, compared to the average discussion even in rationality hub like SSC.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/o6p/double_crux_a_strategy_for_resolving_disagreement/ is a well specific methodology.

It varies a lot from culture to culture. That's part of what a culture is, what is thought of as default or background knowledge, or something people will know. So...who is your audience? What cultures or sub-cultures are they from? It's not going to be the same from country to country, or different regions within a country, or rural vs. urban, or age group or educational background.

When authors write books about a culture they are unfamiliar with, sometimes they hire someone from that culture to read over the book, and give feedback about what they could do better. For example Mary Robinette Kowal did this for her novel Of Noble Family. http://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/im-spending-today-swapping-dialect-novel/

I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all answer for a "general audience" that would apply to all people around the world. It might be helpful to be more specific about what you think a general audience means. People of a certain educational background within a particular region of a particular country who speak a specific language? There are few events aimed at a world audience - the Olympics, some United Nations events, so you could study some of those and see what they assume of people.

For specific words, a rough approach might be to google that word and look at the number of results, and see the relative popularity of them. For example "onion" has 148 million results, "carrot" has 90 million results, "artichoke" has 20 million results, so that might be an indication of how popular those vegetables are, relative to each other.

In theory, one of the goals of general education is to define what is supposed to be common knowledge, and to make it so. But clearly people forget many things they learned at school, and learn many things from media or internet.

Maybe there are some standardized exams where you could look at the results, if they are published in details, to see what students actually learned.

But I suspect that whatever method you use, at the end there will be a scale... some things generally known by 99% of your target population, some known by 90%, 80%, 50%, 20%, 10%, 1%, 0.1% etc.

This kinda feels like a problem that writers have to solve all the time.

I guess a typical solution is to have your text read by a few people, and hope they are a representative sample. Or just hope that you are lucky and got it right.

The alt-right homophobic sumo wrestlers are invading via multiple lanes.

The question is analogous to the Grim Reaper Paradox, described by Chalmers here:

A slightly better example of prima facie without ideal positive conceivability may be the Grim Reaper paradox (Benardete 1964; Hawthorne 2000). There are countably many grim reapers, one for every positive integer. Grim reaper 1 is disposed to kill you with a scythe at 1pm, if and only if you are still alive then (otherwise his scythe remains immobile throughout), taking 30 minutes about it. Grim reaper 2 is disposed to kill you with a scythe at 12:30 pm, if and only if you are still alive then, taking 15 minutes about it. Grim reaper 3 is disposed to kill you with a scythe at 12:15 pm, and so on. You are still alive just before 12pm, you can only die through the motion of a grim reaper's scythe, and once dead you stay dead. On the face of it, this situation seems conceivable — each reaper seems conceivable individually and intrinsically, and it seems reasonable to combine distinct individuals with distinct intrinsic properties into one situation. But a little reflection reveals that the situation as described is contradictory. I cannot survive to any moment past 12pm (a grim reaper would get me first), but I cannot be killed (for grim reaper n to kill me, I must have survived grim reaper n+1, which is impossible). So the description D of the situation is prima facie positively conceivable but not ideally positively conceivable.

As you point out later in the thread the light can never touch any given sphere, since no matter which one you pick there will always be another sphere in front of it to block the light. At the same time the light beam must eventually hit something because the centre sphere is in its way. So your light beam must both eventually hit a sphere and never hit a sphere so your system is contradictory and thus ill defined.

You could make the question answerable by instead asking for the limit of the light beam as number of steps of packing done goes to infinity in which case the light reflects back at 180°, since it does that in every step of the packing. Alternately you could ask what happens to the light beam if it is reflected of a shape which is the limit of the packing you described, in which case it will split in three since the shape produced is a cube (since it will have no empty spaces). (Edit:no it doesn't the answer to this question is again undefined via the argument in the first paragraph, since the matter it bounced of of had to belong to some sphere)

Maybe think about the problem this way:

Suppose there was some small ball inside of your super-packed structure that isn't filled. Then we can fill this ball, and so the structure isn't super-packed. It follows that the volume of the empty space inside of your structure has to be 0.

Now, what does your super-packed structure look like, given that it's a empty cube that's been filled?

EDIT: Nevermind, just saw that Villiam gave a similar answer.

The answer "cubes with no empty space are filled cubes" was perfectly decent, as was the verbal argument about limits that Viliam provided. But in case those weren't satisfying, I've written a more explicit version of the proof* that the ray travels zero distance between reaching the cube and reaching a sphere. It utilizes the solution to the geometric sum, which is proved using limits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_series

The proof (derivation?) is here: http://imgur.com/vSfABHk

I think you can just argue by symmetry that the ray must retro-reflect.

*At least, it looks like a proof to a physicist. It may not meet the standards of a proof to a mathematician.

My intuition says the ray should bounce back immediately. The reason is how the spheres are packed in the cube: if you look along the main diagonal, there is the largest one in the center, and then there is a sequence of smaller spheres which are all aligned along the main diagonal. The ray shot into the cube along that diagonal would thus be aimed at the center of the corner-most sphere and so should just reflect at 180 degrees.

this is your transparent cube, packed with distinct reflective spheres of different sizes. There is no room for another sphere inside, no matter how small it would be.

Taken literally, this means there is an infinite amount of spheres, some of them (actually, the vast majority of them) smaller than the size of an atom. What are they made of?

Now you beam a ray in the direction of one of the cubes main diagonals – from outside toward the center.

The machine that simulates our universe will crash with an "out of memory" error, because this would require the simulator to spawn infinitely many small spheres at the corner of the cube when trying to determine which sphere will the photons hit first.

If the ray is supposed to be just an infinitely small line, the question is somewhat similar to asking "how much is zero divided by zero?" -- there are multiple different answers that can be defended by approaching the problem from a different point of view. In general, the answer is undefined because the question is... wrong.

With real photons, there is the additional question of how they would interact with the hypothetical objects of extremely small size. Maybe they would just skip the first few "too small" spheres, and only interact with the first one larger than Plack size? I give up here, because I am not sufficiently familiar with physics to answer this.

This depends a lot on where you draw the line between "simulation" and "universe". We definitely seem to be in a mathematically-describable finite (or finitely-perceivable) system. If it could be simulated so completely that we can't tell, then it may as well be simulated.

I would like to know what do you think it is the probability that we are living in a simulation.

That question is in our yearly census. http://lesswrong.com/r/lesswrong/lw/nkw/2016_lesswrong_diaspora_survey_results/ brings you to the latest census.

This is related to the (unsolved) question of what consciousness is. Briefly the currently conceived possibilities:

• [A] Consciousness is an algorithm.
• [B] Consciousness is a fundamental property of nature that emerges from certain structures of integrated information.
• [C] Consciousness is a fundamental property of nature.
• [D] Consciousness does not exist. We do not have an internal experience of anything.

About [A]:

Neuroscientists are trying to find the locus of consciousness in the brain but they haven’t managed yet. Even more important, there is a conceptual gap about the possibility of information encoding subjective experience. The very influential Chinese room thought experiment of John Searle is an extremely strong argument against the possibility of filling the information/meaning gap.

About [B]:

This is an interesting theory. It is not the same as [A]. I recommend Tononi's book Phi if you want to learn more about it. It is not easy to digest but a really fascinating possibility. He proposes (and has a mathematical model for it), that certain configurations of matters with certain properties give rise to consciousness depending on their integration of information. It has not been experimentally proven or strongly indicated. It implies Panpsychism (see [C]).

About [C]:

In philosophy this is labelled as Panpsychism. It is a view that seems to be implied in the writings of all the major mystical traditions.

About [D]:

This is Daniel Dennett’s position. The proposition that our internal experience. The one we are having right now. Does not exist.

To my understanding, the simulation hypothesis is only valid if [A] or [D] is true.

Every day. Do it every day. This is the number one piece of advice for writers, artists. Every day. (An hour every day, less if you can't handle that, and maybe start smaller like 5mins).

Every day. There will be days when your grandma dies, days when it's been raining for 3 days straight, Days where you might have to tie yourself to the desk, days when people are literally dragging you away. Things will happen, you will go on holidays, WRITE EVERY DAY. Every day. Every day. Every day.

Feel uncreative? Do it anyway. You can still produce great work by generating what you think creativity would look like. Every day! Every day. Cannot emphasise enough - every day. (And yes this works for me)

Other than that - have a workspace (future article of mine one day) - a setup that is designed to enable you to work. If this means a bottle of water nearby - that. If it means headphones, extra lighting, 16 pencils all lined up square. A pentagram with candles at the corners. Whatever it is; work out what's stopping you from working, and remove those things. Then work out what's enabling you to work and increase them until you have the most fruitful workspace possible. I can't tell you all the answers to how to make a perfect workspace, but if you sit down with a pen and paper and work through whatever you can think of this should take you well on your way.

Once you are on your way, notice things that distract you and later come back and remove them. Keep tab-closing habits, phone on the other side of the room habits, cup-of-tea-making habits, whatever it takes. Make a good system and a good workspace, then repeat.

And write every day. (probably in the morning is better, probably first thing is better)

This has hugely impacted my whole life https://vimeo.com/89936101