Happens in Safari, not in Firefox.

Previous discussion in the last open thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jv4/open_thread_1117_march_2014/apgw

Yes, this happens to me in Windows, but not Ubuntu (both Chrome).

Am experiencing this with chrome on my phone, but did not notice earlier on my PC, even though that also uses chrome.

Yes, very annoying.

I used Chrome and it happened, when I use Firefox it doesn't.

Yep.

This study seems to go quite a ways towards answering your question:

Among both U.S. white and black men, physicians were, on average, older when they died, (73.0 years for white and 68.7 for black) than were lawyers (72.3 and 62.0), all examined professionals (70.9 and 65.3), and all men (70.3 and 63.6). The top ten causes of death for white male physicians were essentially the same as those of the general population, although they were more likely to die from cerebrovascular disease, accidents, and suicide, and less likely to die from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia/influenza, or liver disease than were other professional white men...

These findings should help to erase the myth of the unhealthy doctor. At least for men, mortality outcomes suggest that physicians make healthy personal choices.

-- Frank, Erica, Holly Biola, and Carol A. Burnett. "Mortality rates and causes among US physicians." American journal of preventive medicine 19.3 (2000): 155-159.

You may also find this worth checking into:

The doctors had a lower mortality rate than the general population for all causes of death except suicide. The mortality rate ratios for other graduates and human service occupations were 0.7-0.8 compared with the general population. However, doctors have a higher mortality than other graduates. The lowest estimates of mortality for doctors were for endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases, diseases in the urogenital tract or genitalia, digestive diseases and sudden death, for which the numbers were nearly half of those for the general population. The differences in mortality between doctors and the general population increased during the periods.

-- Aasland, Olaf G., et al. "Mortality among Norwegian doctors 1960-2000." BMC public health 11.1 (2011): 173.

EDIT: I added a second study and cleaned up the citations.

Somewhat related, I remember reading an article claiming that Doctors are more likely to opt out of life-prolonging treatment. Not really well-cited, but seemed like an interesting claim. That end-of-life hospital care is so bad that they would choose not to do it.

Link

Both sides are totally opposed, yet see the same fact as proving they are right.

If redheads are 10 times more likely to be in jail for violent crimes, it is evidence for both "redheads are violent" and "judges hate redheads" - and both might be true!

And "redheads are violent" and "judges hate redheads" are not totally opposed, they only look that way in a context where they are taken as arguments in support of broader ideologies who, them, are totally opposed (or rather, compete with each other so oppose each other).

More generally, many facts can be interpreted different ways, and if one interpretation is more favorable to one ideological side, that side will use that interpretation as an argument. Seen like that, facts looking like they support "opposite sides" seems almost inevitable.

Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics

Confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.[Note 1][1] People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).

Also more specifically attitude polarization:

Attitude polarization, also known as belief polarization, is a phenomenon in which a disagreement becomes more extreme as the different parties consider evidence on the issue. It is one of the effects of confirmation bias: the tendency of people to search for and interpret evidence selectively, to reinforce their current beliefs or attitudes.[1] When people encounter ambiguous evidence, this bias can potentially result in each of them interpreting it as in support of their existing attitudes, widening rather than narrowing the disagreement between them.[2]

Apologies for the nitpick, but didn't you mean ethnic group?

You know what they say: one man’s Modus Ponens is another man’s Modus Tollens

One mistake is overestimating the probability that the other person will act on their ideology.

People compartmentalize. For example, in theory, religious people should kill me for being unbeliever, but in real life I don't expect this from my neighbors. They will find an excuse not to act according to logical consequences of their faith; and most likely they will not even realize they did this.

(And it's probably safest if I stop trying to teach them to decompartmentalize. Ethics first, effectiveness can wait. I don't really need semi-rational Bible maximizers in my universe.)

I don't think the problem with such argument are so much that they are wrong on a factual basis, but they prevent the discussion of some important ideas.

A feminist can argue that ze can measure with a implicit bias test how biased people are and that the argument that you are making is going to make the average reader more biased. Ze might be completely right, but that doesn't mean that your argument is wrong on a factual level.

Once you move to political consideration that certain things are not allowed to be said because they support harmful memes, you are in danger of getting mind killed and be left with a world view that doesn't allow you to make good predictions about reality.

My heart sinks whenever I see these sorts of discussions on LessWrong.

My heart sinks whenever I see these sorts of discussions on LessWrong. Could we analyze sometime we expect to be verifiable?

My hosting company got annoyed because something was taking up too many resources. I did what the nice person on the telephone suggested (installed some WordPress plugins, uninstalled others) and it's back online now. If the problem recurs I might have to restrict commenting for a while until I can figure out a more permanent solution, but for now everything's fine.

I checked the site, and got a 403. Is that what you're talking about? When did you first notice it? The latest Google cache is from Mar 18, 2014 17:37:21 GMT.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://slatestarcodex.com/#

Slate Star Codex

Peripherally associated with the Gwernosphere What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Scott Alexander Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.

And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.

etc.

I state the truth: "I tend to get too attached to my opinion in live debates and want to think about your arguments in peace."

The people that get offended by this tend to be not the kind of people I want to associate with anyway.

"Good point. I'll think about that when I have the chance."

"I'm not really convinced by your argument, but I need to learn more about this issue before I can speak coherently on it"

I think our conversation raised a lot of interesting points, I think all the interesting stuff has been said. How about we switch topics?

Maybe it's not a problem with explaining the concept per se, it's just that its consequences are unpleasant. Feels like you are telling people that heroic responsibility is one of the possible choices, a one that they didn't make, but could have made, and perhaps even should have made. -- There probably are good reasons why most people don't take heroic responsibility, but these are difficult to explain. So it's easier to pretend that the whole concept does not make sense to you.

Also, it's not my responsibility to understand the concept of heroic responsibility. :D

EDIT: It may be related to the status-regulation emotion that apparently some people feel very strongly, and some people don't even know. The problem with "heroic responsibility" might simply be the emotional reaction of: "Who do you think you are that you even consider taking more responsibility than other people around you?! That is a task worth of a king; and you obviously aren't one. And you try to explain it to me, but I am also not a king; I don't even pretend to be, so... this whole stuff doesn't make any sense. You must be insane."

This seems completely incompatible with the actual concept, but certainly more palatable.

The problem with the concept as a whole is that it imposes an impossible requirement -> I will be maximally guilty whatever I do -> why even bother doing anything. Humans (with rare exceptions) just aren't built such that heroic responsibility works for them. If I'm only responsible for close relatives and friends plus some limited charity, I can actually fulfill my responsibilities so there's a reason to try, and so unheroic responsibility is a better model to live by unless you want to impress LWers.

The way I would put it: Doing the right thing is hard. It doesn't mean one should give up without trying. Also, something can be done better even if it's not done perfectly.

In what contexts do you try to convince other people of heroic responsibility? Why do you want to frame it that way?

I think the concept comes on LW from HPMOR. Specifically from:

"You could call it heroic responsibility, maybe," Harry Potter said. "Not like the usual sort. It means that whatever happens, no matter what, it's always your fault. Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she's not responsible for what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn't an excuse, someone else being in charge isn't an excuse, even trying your best isn't an excuse. There just aren't any excuses, you've got to get the job done no matter what."

Most people reject that kind of responsibility. It's no accident that the person who wrote those lines is on a quest to safe the world.

It also in some sense quite telling that the character who speaks those lines is a child who hasn't learned the rules about what is and what isn't his business. Taking responsibility for the life on another is invasive and if you look at the story than Hermoine isn't that happy that Harry tries to be the prime hero.

Half a year ago I sat in a café and had a conversation about personal development. As "collateral damage" the words I spoke brought up a deep personal issue in a stranger next to me and the person sort of angrily started an interaction with me. I went into a direct 10 minute NLP intervention.

Hopefully it helped but I didn't gave the person afterwards my contact details to prolong the interaction with him but just told him to seek help elsewhere. That particular interaction burned my out and it was okay because the other person started it.

If I'm however sitting in public transportation and the person sitting next to me is crying after ending a telephone conversation I don't take it as my responsibility to fix the issue.

There are days were I might do a bit on a nonverbal level but I wouldn't impose myself into the situation by speaking words. I could try to play the role of a hero, but I often chose against it and that's fine.

When it comes to psychological help for friends, then I think it's good to offer it. It's good to explain to someone which choices are available to them. On the other hand everybody has a right to feel bad and if a friend wants to feel bad and/or not be helped by myself, then it's not my business to break through and make him feel well.

That also means that if people around you don't want to take responsibility, don't force it on them. It often much better to lead by example. Tell others stories about how you feel great because you made a difficult decision to practice heroic responsibility. Bonus points for picking stories that are not out of reach for your audience ;)

The need for glasses is a binary variable -- either you need them or you don't.

Someone with presbyopia always needs glasses because he can't focus both near and far. It doesn't matter whether that person started with good eyesight, or with myopia, or had myopia corrected by Lasik -- he will need glasses.

You seem to think that presbyopia "corrects" myopia, that is not so. In geometric terms myopia "translates", shifts your zone of focus closer to you so that it doesn't include infinity any more. But presbyopia narrows your zone of focus, contracts it. You don't get far vision back by overlaying myopia with presbyopia.

Please keep us updated on your findings and decisions.

I'm also looking at a cost-benefit of LASIK and watching the reports on early adopters. High chance of an improved quality of life versus a small chance of significantly reduced quality of life. So this is how risk aversion feels like from the inside.

Consider helminthic therapy. Hookworm infection down-regulates bowel inflammation and my parasitology professor thinks it is a very promising approach. NPR has a reasonably good popularization. Depending on the species chosen, one treatment can control symptoms for up to 5 years at a time. It is commercially available despite lack of regulatory approval. Not quite a magic bullet, but an active area of research with good preliminary results.

There is no known "cure all solution not entirely endorsed by the FDA that will solve all of your motivational and health problems in one fell swoop." A lot of people with Crohn's seem to get some benefit from changing their diet. But the conclusions they draw always seem to contradict each other and in general the improvements are temporary. What it looks like to me (and at least on person with her own experience of the problem) is that radically changing your diet every few years is what you need to do.

Neil Gaiman himself, sort of. In his take on the Marvel Universe, the genius scientist character has figured out the world runs on storytelling logic instead of mechanical science and that he won't ever be able to permanently change his friend turned into a superhuman rock monster back into a human since "guy permanently turned into superhuman rock monster" makes a better story element than "guy who was a superhuman rock monster but is all better now".

For the current fic writers, I don't see it working. Rationalist fiction writers range from middling to terrible in skill compared to traditional fiction writers at the top of their game like Gaiman, and trying to do this would basically be trying to one-up Gaiman in his own game at his home field. Not to mention that his world-building is a lot more self-aware already than the perennial nerd culture favorite soft targets like Star Wars or Harry Potter, like the Marvel 1602 example shows, so you wouldn't have the nice obvious stuff to work with.

Joining the Habit RPG party.

While the local meetup every month has been amazing every time I went, it didn't have that much impact on my everyday life. Joining Habit RPG definitely has.

Last Friday I joined the tinychat study hall for the first time, and I recommend it very much.

It's easy enough to try priming abstract, rational, far thinking with cool blue colours, Mozart, and by surrounding oneself with books..

I wouldn't use the word rational in that place. Taking action instead of spending a lot of energy in mental analysis is often rational.

but is there any data on scents that nudge peoples' modes of thinking in similar directions? Failing that, is there anecdata?

I would guess that the smell of a library with a lot of books might be able to have an effect for people who spent a lot of time in libraries.

I know it's not FOSS or Python, but Google docs has exactly this feature built in to its spreadsheet application.

Looks like this might be like what you want.

R is free & open source, and widely used for stats, data manipulation, analysis and plots. You can get geographical boundary data from GADM in RData format, and use R packages such as sp to produce charts easily.

Or at least, as easily as you can do anything in R. I hesitate to suggest it to people who already do data work in Python (it's less ... clean) but in this sort of domain it can do many things easily that are much harder or less commonly done in Python. My impression is the really whizzy, clever stats/graphics stuff is still all about R. (See e.g. this geographic example.) There are many tutorials, some of them very good in parts, but it's famously slippery to get to grips with.

More on spatial data in R. You can also get a long way with the maps and mapdata packages.

You might want to look at basemap for matplotlib.

Disclaimer: I haven't used this, (though I might start), but skimming over the synopses it looks like it will do what you want it to.

You're assuming some sort of pattern theory of identity when you consider uploads a potential form of survival. If you go all-out pattern theory of identity and assume we're in a big world, is there a reason why the subjectively subsequent moments of awareness need to actually take place at increasing time points on the universe's timeline? A state of matter that corresponds to your pattern's subjective t + 1 might have occurred at the universe's t - 10000 at some distant light cone. If your mind stays at any finite size, it'll eventually just end up going over the same states again, so you could just get an unbound subjective experience timeline inside a fixed timeslice of a spatially infinite, temporally finite universe.

.

As Max Tegmark mentioned on this Rationally Speaking podcast quantum immortality might only work if the universe is infinite.

Quantum immortality is a poor atheist's immortal soul.

Just make multiple comments.

if I really understand a concept

What does that phrase mean?

Here

Think about how will you earn your living. Who will pay you money, for what, and how much? In particular, consider that under the assumption that you will NOT be able to get a tenured position in academia.

They asked everyone what blogs they wanted on the side panel when they redesigned the site. I don't think the list has been changed after they put it up.

Have you considered posting to the NYC LW mailing list? I don't think most of them are regularly here these days

I frequent reddit, that is bad enough.

RationalWiki.

Russian LiveJournal. With the whole Crimea business going on, the shitstorm there is really powerful as of now...

4chan

Whenever I need a cheap laugh, I browse Conservapedia.

Any feelings of your mind being killed while doing so?

This is like saying, what sort of shit do you look for when you want to smell something really horrible?

You have to remember that you are not the customer for Facebook... you are the product.

Giving you more control over your timeline and the posts you see is good for you, but makes Facebook's ability to charge for access to you through "promoted posts" substantially less inviting.

On the other hand, something like graph search allows the opportunity to compete with Google and LinkedIn.

Just now I had the experience of having Facebook helpfully place directly on my newsfeed a post by somebody who is not on my friends list, who happens to trigger the hell out of me and who I actively avoid reading about on Facebook as much as possible. Thanks Facebook, great algorithms you've got there.

The topic "Is LW a cult?" has been discussed so much here and elsewhere that it is probably worth creating a LWiki page about it. Including the discussion of the term cult and when applying it constitutes a non-central fallacy.

Polyphasic sleep, five times a day. An acceptable alternative is polyamorous sex, five times a day.

Can you mix and match? I don't think I could keep up with either of those by themselves.

Polyphasic sleep, five times a day. An acceptable alternative is polyamorous sex, five times a day.

As far as I know there Uberman with 6 times and Everyman with 4 I don't know a shedule to which people successfully adapted with takes 5 times.

Diet. Any unusual diet will do - paleo, four spoons of sugar in the morning, strict vegan, whatever; but it must be strictly adhered to between sunrise and sunset.

I don't think we care about the timeframe of runrise to sunset. It has to be the whole day but there might be one cheat day per week.

"There is no God except the one we're going to build, and the sage Yudkowsky is Its prophet."

And this is why people mistake us for a cult.