Foreign language use is associated with weaker emotional reactions: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/foreign-language-improve-decisions/

I don't speak English natively, and haven't ever lived somewhere where English is the dominant language, and I've been wondering about the same thing. It seems to be easy to notice and get annoyed if someone's Finnish sounds stilted or off, and I'm pretty sure I have much less of a sense of textual voices in English. I think it comes down to having basically zero exposure to real-life face-to-face socialization and status play using spoken English, so the various subtle cues aren't internalized and need to be inferred.

I also can't tell non-native speakers apart from native ones based on writing style on a message board like LW. Can native English speakers do that?

Is it harder for you to read English than to read German? I've noticed that I don't get irritated as easily by what I read when I'm doing something else at the same time, even when it's something that you wouldn't think would take a lot of brainpower--brushing a cat, for example, or eating. Multitasking, even if it's really trivial multitasking, short-circuits the indignation feedback loop and I just read something else instead of getting pissed off.

Either way, it doesn't sound like a problem so much as a life hack. Be proud: you've discovered yet another benefit to learning a foreign language :)

though I am willing to accept an argument on statistical distributions and number of trials.

I would expect english media to just be better on average, due to the larger, more competitive market. Is this what you mean? (I imagine the foreign language/emotional reaction effect is the dominant thing going on though)

I live in London. I am not a teacher. Some thoughts:

• London is a special case. Teacher salaries in London are higher than outside of London to reflect the higher cost of living. I don't know if your research has factored this in. I am not personally very knowledgeable on the subject of teacher salaries, but know a few. Teachers themselves are, for obvious reasons, highly knowledgeable about teacher salaries.

• "London" covers a large area. All of it is relatively expensive compared to the rest of the UK (and the world), but £26,000 would get you a lot further in, say, Croydon than one of the more central boroughs. Also a lot of places get called "London" by faraway folk when they're not. If your job is in Basildon or Reading or some other orbital town, those places aren't London, either culturally or expense-wise, and you'd want to adjust your queries accordingly.

• £24,000-£26,000 does seem startlingly low to me (a software developer in his thirties who solves problems by throwing money at them), but by way of comparison, a starting police officer earns ~£22,000, so it's presumably not an utterly ludicrous amount.

• We have different rates and brackets of income tax to the US. £26,000 translates to £20,634.72 take-home pay. Your first £10,000 is untaxed, 20% thereafter until you hit the mid-thirties.

• The biggest expense of London by at least one order of magnitude is rent. The second is transport. Minimising these expenses is an obvious way of stretching your budget, but there are sharp trade-offs in terms of location and travel costs. Public transport in London is expensive but a lot cheaper than running a car, and actually very good compared to every other town and city I've lived in (sample size 5, all British). We have a lot of cyclists, but it's not really a city optimised for cycling.

If you were to join the Less Wrong London group, we have a pretty good track record of advising people considering moving to the city.

24k to 26k is low for London. If you're poor already then your standard of living might not change much.

Try using various cost of living calculators to figure out where and how far your money will have to go - I don't know where exactly in the South you come from, but I picked the two Southern states tied for median cost of living (the Carolinas) and stuck some random towns and cities into the calculator. Rent in particular is often 250% higher or more, and your local purchasing power will be in the region of 20-40% lower.

Taxes: The USA has generally lower taxes than the UK, but for the most easily comparable tax - income tax - you'll probably pay roughly the same at the 24-26k level. From what I can tell, National Insurance (UK version of Social Security) is higher UK. VAT (sales tax) is 20% on everything except life necessities (food, insurance, healthcare, childcare goods), which is over double the highest total sales tax rate (Tennessee, 9.44%). VAT is calculated into the display price of the product unlike in some US jurisdictions. These are probably all factored into the cost of living calculator above, but it's worth keeping in mind. All in all, you'll be taking home less of your salary whatever your income level. Healthcare costs are included in the above taxes though, and you'll be entitled to the same treatment as a British citizen in almost all cases.

Since you're (presumably) not a citizen of any EEA country nor a refugee, you can't claim housing benefit upon arrival. You can only get it once you have "habitual residence" status, which means you intend to stay here long-term and have been here for a (intentionally vaguely-defined) "appreciable period of time". So, upon arrival you can forget about any housing stipend unless your employer is generous - you'll have to look into shared accommodation or get really lucky. (Did that London LW house ever get started?)

For transport, your first port of call ought to be the bus network. There's a flat fare across the whole city and it's much cheaper than the tube. Annual fare for an adult is about £800. If for whatever reason you can't use the bus, the tube network is more expensive, and it will also depend on where exactly the school is in London, and where exactly you can get cheap rent. The annual fare will be in the range £1000 - £3000 for an adult, depending on the zones you're travelling to and from. Petrol prices are much higher in the UK than in the USA.

I tried doing a Fermi estimate with a bunch of different estimates of your requirements to figure out how much disposable income you'd have, but they ended up all over the map (negative £2000/year to £4000/year). You can survive, but depending on how much luxury you like to live in I can't say if you'll thrive.

What's the job market for teachers like in your home state, or the US as a whole? If prestigious British schools are willing to take you on, why not American ones?

The money is very low. What's the school, or at least, is it state or private?

Pbafvqre gur sbyybjvat eryngvba orgjrra vasvavgr frdhraprf bs pbybhef: "qvssrerag va bayl svavgryl znal cynprf". Guvf vf na rdhvinyrapr eryngvba, naq jura gur ungf ner cynprq, nyy cevfbaref xabj juvpu rdhvinyrapr pynff gurl ner va. Guvf pynff vf pbhagnoyr, naq gur cevfbaref unir nterrq orsberunaq, gunaxf gb gur nkvbz bs pubvpr, ba n cnegvphyne rahzrengvba sbe rnpu rdhvinyrapr pynff.

Sbe rnpu cevfbare, rknpgyl gjb zrzoref bs gur pynff ner pbafvfgrag jvgu jung ur frrf. Ur thrffrf juvpurire nygreangvir pbzrf svefg va gur rahzrengvba. Bayl svavgryl znal bs gurz pna or jebat, orpnhfr gur pbzcyrgr frdhraprf vzcyvrq ol gurve jebat nafjref ner nyy qvssrerag, naq gur gehr frdhrapr unf bayl svavgryl znal naprfgbef va gur rahzrengvba.

Gur fnzr cebbs nccyvrf gb nal pbhagnoyr ahzore bs pbybhef. Vg'f abg pyrne gb zr lrg ubj zhpu ynetre gur ahzore bs cevfbaref naq gur ahzore bs pbybhef pna or. V fhfcrpg gung Bfpne_Phaavatunz wrfgf nobhg rkgraqvat gb erny-inyhrq pbybhef.

I suspect an April Fool:

Cevfbare a+1 gnxrf gur ung sebz cevfbare a naq chgf vg ba uvf bja urnq. Gura nyy cevfbaref (ncneg sebz cevfbare 1) thrff gur pbybe pbeerpgyl!

The warden places on the head of each prisoner a red hat or a black hat.

Heh. This is the easy version of the puzzle then. Hard version: The hats have arbitrary colours (suppose they are specified by infinite precision RGB values).

I think it still works if the infinity is uncountable.

Is this a case where you can prove a solution exists but you can't say what it is? (Because you have to invoke the Axiom of Choice or some such?)

The participants have to base their decision on a non-measurable "events", right? The guessing procedure ends up as contorted as the slices in Tarski and Banach's sphere?

Do the prisoners all have to guess simultaneously? If they guess one by one, and hear their predecessors' guesses, is it in the order 1, 2, 3..., or can guessing order be a part of their prearranged strategy?

Is the sequence of hats pbzchgnoyr? I don't see how to do this if it's not.

Vf guvf cbffvoyr jvgubhg gur nkvbz bs pubvpr?

Do the prisoners guess all at the same time, or in order (and thus after hearing finitely many other guesses)? If the second, is the guessing order known beforehand, or will it be at the whim of the guards?

Either this problem is not completely stated, there are important things left out, or the answers are gibberish. In any case, I have no idea what is going on even after reading the answers. I can collude with prisoners ahead of time but I can't communicate with them. This presumably means I can't smile or wink or grab or stare meaningfully or longingly at them. I can't tell them what my guess is.

So I find myself in a room full of people, some with red hats and some with black hats, in what is essentially a still picture, for all intents and purposes equivalent to freezing the room full of other people with their red and black hats and I can then examine this fixed scene. How does this even conceivably impact what I would guess the color is of the hat on my head?

Fix!

I have a nightly home exercise I'm pretty content with, consisting of push ups, crunches, sit ups, leg lifts, lunges, and squats. When I'm at work, though, I have a short "break" routine. Every thirty minutes that I'm seated at the desk, I get up, go outside so that I'm in the sun, and do a series of full body stretches. Neck, shoulders, arms, wrists, hands, chest/back, spine, obliques, stomach, hips, thighs, knees, legs, ankles (listing those off, I just realized I need to start stretching my feet as well). Then, I do a set of ten squats and return to my desk where I do ten push ups using my chair's armrests, raising myself off the seat with my feet on the floor. In all, it takes about five minutes.

The only thing I can't really work on at the office is my core. Legs and arms I can get but nothing for core muscles. Any suggestions for something simple I can do around the office to keep my core as energized as the rest of me? Besides getting down on the dirty floor for a set of crunches.

I'm interested - I'm not very happy with my current workout routine, it takes too much time.

I would like to exercise at home every morning less than 15 minutes; I don't have any equipment beyond a rowing machine. I mostly exercise for thealth and energy benefits, but wouldn't mind gaining a bit of strength and muscle mass in my normal state I'm a skinny bag of bones).

Are there other cases where someone might do a deliberately bad job at convincing people of a falsehood, in order to filter for the most gullible or susceptible marks?

Cults!

It is also not unknown for someone with something genuine to teach to actively filter out those not capable of learning it.

There's a rhetorical technique called "dubitatio" - where you deliberately act unsure, less skilled or less intelligent in order to make yourself sound more credible. E.g. "Although I'm just a simple man unused to public speaking I think...." Obviously it depends on the audience you're appealing to, it works best with people who mistrust skilled orators

(George W Bush did this a lot, his famous 'Bushisms' were almost all deliberate, and playe to a base who distrusted 'elites' and made him sound more honest and down to earth.)

If that's true, than I would propose a strategy against spammers.

Build a computer that automatically replies to every mail and tries to drag out the conversation as long as possible. Perfect enviroment for turing tests.

There's a style of scamming that involves seeming incompetent, such that a clever but insufficiently clever target decides that they can scam you back. This obviously backfires.

Academia? A lot of scientific writing has the feeling of being dliberately written to be hard to understand.

One of my pieces of evidence that I'm not schizophrenic and hallucinating my whole life is that from what I can tell from anecdotes, being schizophrenic involves a lot more getting yelled at, pushed around, and generally denied agency than I experience.

I've spent a cursory couple of minutes hunting for the original, but I can't find it.

Belief one is the President of the United States is a common delusion of grandeur. Anyone waking up in the morning believing they're the President of the United States is probably wrong about this fact, but I still want the President of the United States to do his job.

This isn't about Jesus Christ, and it isn't about schizophrenia. It isn't even about religion. It's about the Simulation Argument.

If we have good reason to believe that we will be reliably simulated many times in the future, than we can trivially conclude that we are almost certainly inone of the simulations.

(did you forget to include a link?)

Yep! In Applied Behavior Analysis this is called Thinning.

(Note: This is posted from the community anonymous account. I am a different individual than the above poster.)

Numbers, you say? Those are hard to find, by the very nature of the thing. I'll give my personal calculus, but churning the probabilities is hard, and I cannot guarantee I am perfectly accurate. (Although I will brag that I get very high scores on The Credence Game, so perhaps you can trust my numbers more than most.)

I, personally, would estimate a 10%-40% chance of surviving a hard takeoff, given that MIRI is semi-successful, and continues on it's current course.

This is actually pretty good. I estimate a <1% chance of surviving one without anyone working on it. I also estimate a ~80% chance of hard takeoff rather than soft. (Given a soft takeoff, we have maybe a ~20% chance without MIRI, and probably a 40%-50% chance with.)

Given these numbers, MIRI seems to be doing a lot of good. The two questions that remain are: 1) Is MIRI better than other organizations doing something similar? 2) How much good does the marginal MIRI dollar do?

The answer to 1) is not so straightforward. When I mentioned MIRI in the above probability estimates, I really meant the whole mindspace of organizations that are working in this field. That is to say, MIRI, FHI, and the new CSER. There is a reasonable chance that donating to one of the others gives you more bang for your buck. I urge you to do more research on this.

The answer to 2) is easier. MIRI (and the others) are still rather small. The marginal dollar has a quite significant impact to them, and they get most of their money from small-time donors donating maybe ~$100 each. This imply MIRI has a relatively large room to grow, and will benefit quite the bit on the margin.

You asked for numbers, and I gave you what numbers I could. Even if you disagree with those exact numbers, I hope you agree that the risk is quite significant. I said that there is <1% chance of surviving a hard takeoff without anyone working on the problem, and that is the issue here. As such, I feel I can confidently assert that unFriendly AI is by far the largest X-risk we are facing. There are other x-risks, true, but this one looms the most dangerous, and we won't suceed unless we work on it very hard indeed.

Luckily, there are people working on it. There are obvious paths to tread to help avert this disaster, so all we need is people to step down them. That is why I support MIRI, at least.

I don't have numbers but MIRI seems to be addressing x-risk in a way that's more amenable to donation than other means. The most salient theoretically preventable x-risks in my mind are asteroid impact, engineered pandemic, nuclear war, and AI. Of these, I can donate to MIRI where marginal dollars help pay for marginal researchers, but I'm not sure what effect donating to physicians for the prevention of nuclear war would have, and there are already giant agencies searching for asteroids and dedicated to fighting pandemics.

depends on what you mean by good reason. If you have plenty of money the cost isn't an issue, but if you've already got a sleep study schedules it's possible being on cpap before that will disrupt the study in some way, hiding a non sleep-apnea problem?

Hidden Order by David Friedman is a popular book, but is semi-technical enough that it could serve as a textbook for an intro microeconomics course.

Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan, is a good all-rounder. It's America-centric, but still generally applicable.

The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford is a good popular micro/market/margins introduction.

The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg is the granddaddy of popular economics books. It's very much "here's how economists think". Unfortunately it doesn't do the profession many favours, because Steven Landsburg is kind of obnoxious.

I generally recommend one of these three to friends who show an interest. The first is the default. The second is for slightly nerdier clientèle, and the third is for people who won't be put off by kind-of-obnoxious writers. If you can forego the "popular" bit of your requirements, Cowen and Tabarrok's Modern Principles textbooks are highly readable and quite entertaining.

Naked Economics is an accessible, well-written book that sparked my interest in the subject.

Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money" provides a good background for understanding what money happens to be historically if your interest is more generally and not specifically in understand what the economics professors preach.

Youtube + "econstories". :) (Preferably not just that, but it's good and if you haven't seen it you should.)

Actually, the wikipedia articles are great. Start at economics and follow subtopics as they pique your interest.

I've been meaning to get into econ for a while, and after searching LW and other areas, the first six on my goodreads list all look good. I've not read any of them myself.

As a counterpoint to most of the other recommendations you are about to get:

Debunking Economics by Steve Keen. Thesis is basically that many of the assumptions of economics (especially macroeconomics) are at odds with reality enough that it doesn't actually work that well. Gets into some interesting modelling that the author has done as well using a different basis.

John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

That will probably do more to increase your understanding of economics than any other single book you could pick, Keynes being ridiculously.. better.. than the typical economist, and is in any case a highly recommended prelude to any further readings. - among other things because lying about what Keynes says has become a very popular sport, so familiarity with the original is very useful for detecting later horseshit.

By denying that having barely enough resources to live implies that life need be barely worth living. See Poor Folks do Smile for details.

I reject utilitarianism, so the repugnant conclusion doesn't apply to my ethics. But one can accept a form of utilitarianism that rejects the repugnant conclusion, for example, average preference utilitarianism.

I have seen it suggested that what people think of when they hear "a life barely worth living" is a live on the edge of suicide, which is well past not worth living. As such, it's not surprising that you wouldn't want a world full of people like that.

If the lives are worth living, then it seems to me intuitively obvious that sufficiently many can be arbitrarily valuable.

Any given example is fine but a meta rule against this sort of thing is probably more stable.

I'm not a utilitarian, but according to standard utilitarianism (as opposed to LW usage, which usually just means "consequentalism"), if it benefits people to a greater degree than it hurts them, then it is a good action.

Well, in dath ilan, people do still die, even though they're routinely cryonically frozen. I suspect with an intelligence explosion death becomes very rare (or horrifically common, like, extinction).

There are two main differences I can see.

First, superintelligence can create a better utopia. After astronomical amounts of time, dath ilan may have the technology necessary, but I suspect that they would lack the understanding of their own utility function that FAI would have. They are also not immune to politics, and will act suboptimally because of that.

Second, there's a not insignificant chance of dath ilan being wiped out by some kind of existential risk before they're advanced enough to prevent it.

dath ilan seems to have a specific kind of political correctness when it comes to not talking about specific issues that different from out one's and I don't think an intelligence explosion is simply going to change this. .

In preferences there are options to hide posts that you have liked or disliked.

Has it ever been on LessWrong? I only ever saw it on Facebook...

Given what EY wrote,maybe he doesn't want that to many people read what he wrote outside of the April Fool context for fear of people taking the writing seriously.

I'm writing this on April 1st because it's the day when nobody in this world will take it seriously, no matter how much about me it explains.

But theory 2 predicts that Bob will probably vanish!

I don't think it does. The probability current is locally conserved. So |u'> has to give a high probability to some world very close to Bob's, i.e. one with a continuous evolution of him in it.

This is mostly a semantical question, as different compatibilist philosophers might use the words "having a will" to mean different things. (They are not words with a fixed technical meaning in philosophy). Some may think "having a will" is synonymous with "having free will", while others might think that e.g. if you a mind-controlled without knowing it you might "have a will" (a subjective sense of willing to do things) while not satisfying the conditions for compatibilist free will.

I took the opportunity to create a new masterlist, based on Ozymandias's.

done: http://rationalistmasterlist.tumblr.com/

EXTREMELY helpful in getting me to remember and go to events is putting my calendar on my lockscreen (or whatever the equivalent is on your smartphone). This means that I'm reminded of what I have coming up in the next few days literally every time I pick up my phone.

I often find myself underestimating the time it takes to accomplish certain tasks. E.g. I think "ok, I'll send a couple of emails in 0.5 hours and move on to the bulk of the work" and it turns out it takes more like 5 hours, and not because I'm procrastinating; it actually takes me that much time to do it.

What about time-management? As far as I understand, GTD, while often described as time-management system, actually doesn't help you manage time. As far as I understand Allen (I have one chapter left, and after that I plan to read the notes I downloaded in lieu of re-reading, because I still don't understand what my GTD should consist of) his position can be described as

When you will have an external system containing all your projects and next tasks, you will be able to make decisions so efficient, that you won't need to manage time"

1. Do I understand it right?

2. Do you feel you need a separate time management system in addition to GTD?

I use Nozbe which provides an in-browser app, iOS, Android, Mac and Windows apps. No Linux app but you're covered with the in-browser app. I find it to be extremely robust in terms of syncing and in general having a smooth, fast, error-free "task capture," which is like 90% of what I need out of a GTD product. From that point you can organize tasks by either project or context. It also has really nice syncing with Evernote and with Google Calender which I use extensively, and also integration with Twitter and all kinds of other things which I don't use.

In terms of what doesn't work, I've written elsewhere about how Emacs org-mode is superficially the Best Thing Evar but is actually an infinite timesink that will actually just eat all your tasks. You think you want total customizability but what you actually want is structure and the freedom from having to think.

Todoist for all my GTDish lists. Works on every platform, fast, and beautiful.

Active Inbox with Gmail and Google Calendar, synced with phone's calendar and mail app. Definitely more useful if a large number of your tasks originate as emails, but its easy to log a task with a button they add to send yourself an email.

You can mark emails as "Action" or "Waiting On" (very helpful to keep track of things your'e waiting on others to get back to you for) and also set dates by which you're supposed to take the action or by when you need to receive a response. Keeps you from cluttering your calendar with non-time-specific actions as well.

It adds a feature to log noes and subtasks on each email which falls in line with GTD's next-action list. Allows you to easily create "Project" folders to associate emails with when they're part of a project.

It's designed to be a Gmail implementation of GTD and it's very effective for me.

Definitely. I am one (a wannabe, that is, not actual).

First, the most reliable solution is to save the page manually, yourself, to a local hard drive of your preference, provided you keep good file hygiene and backups and so on. If there are multiple-page articles, you have to save each page of the article, though. You also can run into some issues with the more "interactive" websites and articles, particularly if they use flash or java apps (which means the html you save will only contain a link to some flash or java file elsewhere on their server, which means you're back to square one). You can also get all kinds of gibberish from broken links anyway if the pictures suffer link rot or the page refers to an external style sheet or any other of some large number of possible other problems.

I think the only way to avoid this in an efficient, one-click manner is to use a pre-processor that detects the relevant content and saves only that for you. I use Readability to do this for slightly different goals and purposes.

Pocket is a more popular choice usually, but I've had many negative experiences with it not syncing to the android app, not working well with certain browsers, not processing articles properly, not processing the whole article, or sometimes not processing articles at all and keeping only the link (which helps you diddly-squat since that's the whole problem you're having).

Fair warning: Readability does a complete pre-processing of the article for, well, readability. It will remove ads, sidebars, top-bars, often comments to articles, and once in a while it'll remove too much. It usually successfully detects multiple-page articles, but not always.

Plenty of browser addons can do the job, you can clip it with evernote or use one of the countless extensions that will save the page on your drive.

You can do what I do: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs

High startup cost, but on the plus side, you don't need to do anything once it's running and it'll catch most of what you read.

I use the Evernote browser clipper plugin.

I think that Pinboard.in's archival feature might fit your needs, if you're willing to pay $25 anually. (More details in their FAQ)

What do you mean by applying Kelly to the LMSR?

Since relying on Kelly is equivalent to maximizing log utility of wealth, I'd initially guess there is some equivalence between a group of risk-neutral agents trading via the LMSR and a group of Kelly agents with equal wealth trading directly. I haven't seen anything around in the literature though.

"Learning Performance of Prediction Markets with Kelly Bettors" looks at the performance of double auction markets with Kelly agents, but doesn't make any reference to Hanson even though I know Pennock is aware of the LMSR.

"The Parimutuel Kelly Probability Scoring Rule" might point to some connection.

Honest question: If you're working as lukeprog's assistant, why don't you get lukeprog to do it?

Sorry, but I don't really have the disposable income to purchase this sort of computer.

We should refer to standard sources compiled by people who have thought a lot about this problem already, rather than attempting to formulate answers from first principles.

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has some lists for emergency supplies. The Mormon Church makes emergency preparedness a point of their practice. The Burning Man organization has a recommended list of survival gear for their regularly-scheduled natural disaster.

This is the top-rated first-aid kit on Amazon.

Community-building is kind of essential. Knowing that you have neighbors you can trust is a big deal — you can share the burdens of an emergency and help each other out. Does anyone in your social circle do amateur (ham) radio? Any trained EMTs or paramedics? You can get EMT training in a lot of places.

Oh, and keep a few gallon jugs of clean drinking water handy. No sense dying of dysentery.

I have a draft of a post relating to Emergency Preparedness. I can probably fish it out and post it.

Articles about medical emergencies and disaster preparedness.

I'm pretty sure it's the case here as elsewhere.