Stupid Questions November 2015

If you pay through PayPal, PayPal will do the currency conversion for you, but will charge a fee (I don't know what the fee for the conversion would be in your case, but it is based on the international interbank exchange rates). Since you pay the exchange fee, I don't think MIRI minds at all if you use the PayPal service. You might be able to get a better exchange rate through your local bank, but then you are still stuck on how to make the actual money transfer.

The Donate page recommends emailing contact@intelligence.org . If that doesn't get you a response in a week ask again and I'll put more effort into getting an answer for you.

For important decisions it makes sense to mix both.

Kind of reminds me of a discussion of making a utilitarian emblem on felicifia.org. We never really settled on anything, but I think the best one was Σ☺.

I saw this recently, and immediately thought it must have something to do with rationality:

http://phys.org/news/2009-08-uc-wont-lost-hospital.html

But it was actually the symbol for mental health services.

I don't know if this counts as nontraditional or not, but I do intermittent fasting (which, in my case, should promote longevity through the intermediate step of helping me keep off weight) and take CoQ10 daily.

Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity, as found on Life Advice Repository, as curiously not found on Repository repository.

Somatics training. In my particular case the Danis Bois Method / Perceptive Pedagogy.

Here, knock yourself out :-)

It started in X-Files fandom, which is way too late for it to be bang paths. This claims that it started as Action! Mulder, where the ! was specific to the particular modifier, but people don't have a source for that example.

Check with your doctor about the acid reflux and its effect on your teeth. I would guess that the reflux had a greater effect on your tooth decay than the cough drops. He might know enough to tell you whether or not your dentist is reacting to the problem effectively, and at the very least has a better grasp of the problem than any of us :-)

(Also, you should be seeing him anyway if reflux is a problem.)

I had 16 fillings done a month ago and my teeth mostly all still hurt

I had more than my fair share of tooth fillings, and they usually hurt for a day or two. Later only if I expose them to heat or cold, such as drinking hot tea, biting an ice cream, or inhaling cold air with my mouth. (Also if I touch the filling with an aluminum fork.)

What you describe feels wrong. The sucrose doesn't seem like a good explanation for the remaining pain-- cavities take time, new ones don't appear overnight. ChristianKl asked about X-rays because of two other options: either the dentist didn't clean the tooth correctly and there is still something under the filling, or maybe your tooth has two cavities: one visible which was fixed, and one invisible (under the gum) which wasn't. But this seems unlikely to happen under 16 teeth at the same time.

On the other hand, a tooth pain is sometimes hard to localize. I had an experience that my tooth hurt, and it felt like the whole jaw hurts; yet when one tooth was fixed, the pain was gone. (Not sure why: maybe the source of pain was too close to a common nerve for all teeth?) So, maybe you have a problem with one tooth, and it feels like all of them hurt.

In my experience different dentists care about very different things and to very different degrees. So if you changed dentists, I would not be surprised at all if the previous one said nothing needed to be done and a new one said you needed 16 fillings. But if it's the same dentist, that is a bit strange.

Ok, I went in today, and the dentist says that I'm probably just grinding my teeth at night. I'll have him fit me for a night guard soon. I believe that that's at least part of the problem, and time will tell if he's right that that's the whole problem. (He did an x-Ray a month ago, before I had any of my fillings done, but not one this time. Also, my bite wasn't high.)

After they finish doing the fillings, they file the new material down to fit your bite. You might recall them having you bite down on a piece of paper and then they'd sand away all the parts that were hitting. The more fillings that get done at once, the harder it is to get this done properly, I think. If certain parts of your filling or teeth are hitting before the other parts are when you bite down, or if they are otherwise not fitted well, it can cause pain throughout. (They are also more likely to fall out then)

Source: Personal experience with bad fillings.

Did the dentist do an X-ray?

The close button on your web browser window will allow you to ignore all posters, but otherwise no; LW has no filtering/blocking features.

I tend to say things like "I think most of our disagreement is about definitions of words rather than the actual facts" and try to express the underlying issue more explicitly.

I recall there being some altcoin that seeded itself with donations to charities, and Googling 'nonprofit altcoin' gives things like the Clean Water Coin. My guess is this idea sounds better than it is (note that the CWC has donated $2k, which I suspect is a low return on time so far).

We have a census that tells you the answer: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lhg/2014_survey_results/

In the last decade the cool thing for a smart kid was to be a New Atheist. EA is an ideological framework that can fit into that slot. That's a big deal and it allows a group of different organisations to come together and profit from each other.

If you look at GiveWell, the idea of actually finding out the evidence of the effect of a donation is new. What's new is the depth towards which GiveWell researched other organisations.

Concerns over wild animal suffering are surprising/new elements of EA but they aren't central to the movement.

The term you will want to use in your Google search is "Bayesian cognitive science". It's a huge field. But the short answer is, yes, the people in that field do assume that the brain does something that can be modelled as keeping and updating a probability distribution according to Bayes' rule. Much of it is computational-level modelling, i.e. rather removed from questions of implementation in the brain. A quick Google search did, however, find some papers on how to implement Bayesian inference in neural networks - though not necessarily linked to the brain. I'm sure some people do the latter sort of thing as well, though.