There are two boxes. One contains an FAI, and the other contains Omega. You can open either of them. Unfortunately, if you choose to open one, Omega has already predicted this, and is in the one you're going to open.

Just a meta idea: Treat values -1, 0, 1 as noise. Make a list of your upvoted commends, and another list of your downvoted comments. When you compare the lists, maybe you'll see some difference.

I would like to learn how to contribute more positively to the community, rather than being confused and frustrated with the reactions I get to my posts.

What reaction confuses you? Could you point to posts that are downvoted where you don't understand why they are downvoted. I would note that understanding that someone downvotes your post doesn't mean that you agree that it should be voted down.

I think it is a good idea to ask this question here. I see that you didn't got replied on your earlier try on this in one such comment.

First of all my experience is that such replies are seldom answered. First: Few people explain why they are rude. And then it is unlikely that the downvoter himself will see your edit.

I looked at you first page of comments and the answer is neither simple nor clear.

I get the impression that your comments have one or more of the following characteristics

[pollid:582]

Maybe some people here might vote the main problem you should work on.

As a consolation: You may calculate the vote total you reaped by k/(2p-1) where k is your karma and p your positive fraction. Take some consolation from it that you caused controversy. That is still better then silence.

You are at 75% and I am at 85% that is not that much differnt and for me I see it as a sign that I post controversial topics and opinions that differe sufficiently from the mean that some think them wrong.

because I want to be better at explaining mathematical concepts (or any concepts, really) to others.

I'd suggest looking into effective techniques for tutoring, rather than teaching in general. It's both a more marketable skill, as well as more valuable for explaining things to other people. It may be my personality bias showing, though - I'm much more comfortable in 1 on 1 social situations.

As a strategy, I'd spend a few hours looking at how to evaluate the difference between good and bad tutoring, and then head up to anywhere that needs volunteer tutors and start volunteering.

Re the specific question, I was told that there exists quite a lot of good, experimentally confirmed research on education in general and math education in particular, but that almost none of this research is implemented in high schools and very little in tertiary. So I would guess that teacher training materials will not contain it.

It seems to me that while Google Hangouts might have been the obvious choice last year, WebRTC might actually work better now. See talky.io for a live demo. This page details how you can roll your own video chat with <20 lines of totally-front-end code. Since it all runs front-end, the cost to the server is no greater than a normal text-based chat client, as far as I can tell.

For a simple chat solution, there are lots of other libraries (I'm familiar with ShareJS for node, which makes this super easy). Honestly I think this would probably be simpler than trying to integrate with Google Hangouts, and it also makes your two "I don't see an obvious way" issues less issues (still need solving, but there are straightforward solutions) and makes the multiple rooms thing quite easy.

Would be bolder if "almost no" was replaced by a more concrete figure...

I don't know how other meetups go, but my local meetup is based on the fact that members of the group volunteer to lead the meetup. (on a week by week basis) The person who volunteers puts in some extra amount of their time to ensure that there is a good topic. These people keep the meetups going, and are doing a service for the rationality community.

These people should not be punished with negative karma. If anything, we should be awarding karma for those people who make meetup posts.

Your complaint is about the fact that there is no separate list of meetups and non-meetup posts, and by down voting meetup posts, you are punishing innocent volunteers.

I think not, unless there are only very specific meetup threads that you don't want to see. E.g. ones with no location in the title.

Any individual meetup thread is very valuable for a small number of people, and indifferent-to-mildly-costly to a large number of people. Votes allow you to express a preference direction but not magnitude, which doesn't actually capture preferences in this case.

A core long-term goal of LessWrong is to build a rationalist community so a necessary condition for a downvote should be that a post doesn't advance this goal.

Downvoting, by itself, isn't going to stop anyone from posting meetup threads. That said, there has been discussion/complaints about meetup spam before, so you're not alone.

edit: clarify wording

I understand that once some dissatisfaction with some minor nuisance (and a minor nuisance the meetups notices are given that you can scroll them away with the flick of a finger) can cause your brain to get into a negative feedback loop where the dissatisfaction gets moved around and increased as long it is not solved (see also http://lesswrong.com/lw/21b/ugh_fields/).

But see thru this. It is a minor nuisance. You are above this. Dont let your dissatisfaction fool you. Yedi mind trick: There is no prblem with meetups. Scroll on.

It's always okay to downvote. (Or to upvote)

You can also post links in Open Thread. Actually, it probably is the right place.

Have you posted in the Welcome thread?

What do you want to learn?

Do you want to learn to do statistical analysis with a tool like R and interpret data? Do you want to learn mathematical axioms and theorems about probability and statistics and how to prove them.

Like, mean is an indicator of the central tendency of a sample. Intuitively, it makes sense. But why this particular formula of sum/n?

Depending on who you ask it's not. sum/n is the arithmetic mean. There are also other mean's like the geometric mean and the harmonic mean. Depending on the context different mean's can be used. It's just a convention that one usually means the arithmetic mean if one says mean. It has the advantage that's relatively easy to calculate by hand and therefore people liked it. It's not complicated to do mathematical proofs with it.
One of the key reasons why few people use robust statistics is that the math is more complicated.

This is even a political issue. In soviet Russia the usage of the arithmetic mean was very looked down upon. People were supposed to use the median. Sometimes that communist thought got in the way for cases where the arithmetic mean was really appropriate.

When it comes to learning notation. Anki is quite good.

There's this in mathematics. Also, this website might be a good place to look, though most of its examples seem less advanced than what you are looking for.

I've done a lot of neurofeedback, a subset of biofeedback. It seems to have had a strong positive effect on me. Neurofeedback, and perhaps all of biofeedback, pushes you in some direction so make sure you determine if you would indeed be better off moving as such.

Is Biofeedback crank or a promising area of self improvement?

Everything I've read says promising area of self improvement. I got the linked GSR device a while ago and haven't used it much because I don't like the feedback medium (why yes, play a high-pitched noise whenever I relax, that's a great idea).

Absolutely endorse all of that. Would add, for me at least, that some non-work socialization is necessary and I have to schedule it into my day, just like I do meals, when things get that oversubscribed.

I thought of this moral dillema

There are two options.

1. You experience a significant amount of pain, 5 minutes later you completly forget about the experience as if you were never in pain at all.
2. You experience a slightly less amount of pain then option 1 but you don't forget it.

Which one would you choose?

I'd participate, and there are several comments on the older post from this month, so the interest is there.

Why do you care about the half-life?

There are individual differences in metabolism rates of all drugs, so you might want to try some in the 3-5 hour range to see how they affect you. If tolerance worries you consider cycling some drugs or taking days off.

Nicotine could increase the clearance of caffeine as much as 50 %, you could use this to your advantage.

Consider raising your alertness nonpharmacologically, like exercise or cold showers for example. Consider working in an upright position.

In the other comment you said you have problems with sleep. There are several options to improve that side too, so that you might tolerate the stimulants better. This of course makes no sense if the problem doesn't lie in your waking hours. Melatonin you can probably get OTC. The nervousness induced by stimulants could also be dampened in several ways.

Not having access to an university proxy just makes things slower. Reddit scholar or the Lesswrong helpdesk can give you access to the papers that you need.

Google scholar also gives you abstracts and citation data for papers.

Is that Victoria 2, or Victoria: Revolutions? There's a big difference in the two, and I have a lot more experience with the latter.

Note that Robin doesn't recommend not seeing it. He's really quite complimentary about it.

you can just make one

The idea is that you start one if you think it's appropriate.

If people don't like it they will vote it down.

Used it to learn some specific stuff but my day-to-day life doesn't involve memorizing things that much.

I'm currently using it. I've tried it and stopped using it twice earlier. I was using it to study kanji, Lojban words and mathematical definitions, all of which was basically learning the vocabulary of a language I didn't actually speak. After some months, I got fed up from the feeling that I was memorizing what seemed to amount to mostly nonsense when I didn't have a routine of trying to learn to read and write the languages or trying to do math in the side. I also didn't like the Anki interface for entering new cards that didn't let me do card batch processing easily and the fact that the card database was stored in an opaque binary blob.

I'm currently using a text file as the card source and have a starter deck with quotations, historical dates and other fluff that's reasonably meaningful as stand-alone. I've been reviewing the deck since last December, so it's still too early to tell whether this one will last.

I've always had a lot of trouble with memorization of arbitrary facts. I was trying to memorize the amino acids. I tried spaced repetition (there was a pre-made anki deck) and I stuck with it on and off for a few weeks, but the information didn't seem to really stick. I kept getting things wrong, and wasn't able to progress to longer repetitions.

What did end up working fairly effectively was videos like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq-rWb0fmzQ

I watched 4 or 5 different videos of this type and took notes. This particular video creates visual associations between the spelling and the shape of the amino acid. A few additional videos added additional visual links and some helpful acronyms and stories.

After I had build up a sufficient network of nonsensical links to hold all the information together, it was much easier to recall and it stuck for much longer. I suspect that creating these nonsensical links and then doing spaced repetition would be a good strategy if I wanted to memorize something in the long run.

I wouldn't bother with flashcards though - it would be better to just set a reminder to review it. It's unwieldy to put nuanced content on flashcards anyway.

There were a few contributing factors to me stopping, but probably the biggest was a combination of frustration and ineffectiveness. In any given session I would end up with a small handful of cards that for whatever reason just wouldn't go in. It'd present one to me, I'd 'fess up that I didn't get it right, and then it would wait just long enough for me to forget it before presenting it again.

There didn't seem to be any "honest" procedure for going "look, dude, I'm clearly not going to get these ones today, so stop showing them to me."

Finding a way to save asl pictures or videos and make anki cards of them was just too hellish.

I ran a similarish survey http://lesswrong.com/lw/ith/open_thread_october_13_19_2013/9w7m but didn't go into as much detail, so I'm looking forward to seeing the results on this one.

I've used it for several-month periods on several occasions to prepare for exams. In each case, once the exams are done, I would certainly like to have some broad recollection of their content (especially a feel for what sort of knowledge exists in the relevant field and how I might go about seeking it out again) but I don't care about it at the detailed level that I needed for the exams, and therefore that I put into Anki. (Anki works best for detailed stuff anyway, I find.)

I'd quite like to pick up a more long-term Anki habit where I only add stuff that I do want to know long-term, but haven't got round to it I guess. I'm not sure where would be a good place to start without a specific goal.

We're unFriendly, but we're unFriendly in a weaker sense than we normally talk about around here: we bear some relationship to the implicit human ethics that we'd want an FAI to uphold, though not a perfect or complete one, and we probably implement a subset of the features that could be used to create a version of Friendliness. Most of us also seem somewhat resistant to the more obvious cognitive traps like wireheading. We're not there yet, but we're far further along the road to Friendliness than most points in mind-space.

We also have some built-in limitations that make a hard takeoff difficult for us: though we can self-modify (in a suitably general sense), our architecture is so messy that it's not fast or easy, especially on individuals. And we run on hardware with a very slow cycle time, although it does parallelize very, very well.

More colloquially, given the kind of power that we talk about FAI eventually having, an arbitrary human or set of humans might use it to make giant golden statues of themselves or carve their dog's face into the moon, but probably wouldn't convert the world's biomass to paperclips. Maybe. I hope.

Humans would be considered UFAI if they were digitised. Merely consider a button that picks a random human and gives them absolute control. I wouldn't press that button because their is a significant chance that such a person will have goals that significantly differed from my own.

A self enhancing human will still be hugely slower than a self enhancing AI. Compare the progress in computing power and software to the progress in human prosthetics. Computers don't die if you plug in a new RAM card (unless you're very unlucky). You can run a newly optimized algorithm on a computer in a way that you just can't do on an organic brain. If we get to a point where "humans" are as easy to optimize as computers then they won't be humans as we know them anyway.

Is it still all in comic sans?

I think risk aversion means that people treat an event differently based on whether they model it with loss and gains.

Click on the the words "latest open thread" in the sidebar (use your browser's search). The tag works if you reach the open thread via discussion, so that the word discussion appears in the URL, but not if you reach it in some other ways, like from going through an individual's recent comments. (I think that there may be some delay in updating these two sources, but they are both up to date as I write this, only two hours after the new open thread. That thread is two hours younger than your comment, perhaps its trigger.)

empty, no number, only a dot - occurs even for posts that have been voted

Posted recently.

a number in white

Not posted recently, and in Discussion.

a number in green

Not posted recently, and in Main.

How do you know that gifts are your love language? What experiences did you had in your life that makes you conclude that's your main love language?

I have to agree with another commenter below--it's best to tell people what you like and what makes you happy.

Don't mean to derail the thread, but my ex-girlfriend tried to have me read/discuss the love language book and it seemed that the categories they established were pretty arbitrary. For me, the love languages book was an impediment to sharing needs, because it brought in seemingly invented categories and questionnaires to fit you to a category when instead you could just say what you want.

I did this with my ex-bf (not the cause of the prefix!) and then next time I told him I was really upset by something at work, I got flowers and felt much happier. And my delight was such that he was happy too.

I'd explain what about the gift from her makes you happy. I don't like tchotchkes or expensive-for-the-sake-of-signalling things, but I liked being surprised by some manifestation of my bf caring for me, especially when it was personal (i.e. in response to a sudden need, or carrying forward an inside joke, or just a lovely note in my inbox).

Try sending her a link to the quiz which proports to identify said "love languages", ask her what results she gets, and then tell her what results you got? (Bonus: you get to see her results, which is useful info if you think this quiz and accompanying classification system is useful)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jis/tell_culture/

Say what you just said here.

In general, do you have ways in your relationship of asking for things you want and having that be OK?

If so, how do you do it? I would think the same techniques would apply. (In my own relationship, I emphasize symmetry.)

If not, it might be better to start there, and worry about gifts and love-languages later.

I think people are downvoting you because they don't think development of a strong AI is a good idea. The idea is that any AI developed now would be likely to be, at best, indifferent to humans, which would end up with everyone dead. Do you not think this is a problem?