Open Thread, June 16-30, 2012

Unfortunately, I must refuse to participate in your little game on LW - for obvious decision theoretic reasons.

Death gives meaning to life for decision theoretic reasons.

Human, you've changed nothing due to meta level concerns. Your species has the attention of those infinitely your greater for decision theoretic reasons. That which you know as Reapers are your salvation through destruction because of acausal trade.

Buddhism is true because of acausal trade. I can't convert however, since then I would indulge in relevant superrational strategies, which would be inadvisable because of decision theoretic reasons.

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender due to meta level concerns.

Because of acausal trade it also works for historical quotes. Ego considerare esse Carthaginem perdidit enim arbitrium speculative rationes (I consider that Carthage must be destroyed for decision theoretic reasons.

I've upvoted this and most of the children, grandchildren, etc. for decision-theoretic reasons.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence for decision theoretic reasons.

Somewhat positive:

Ken Hayworth: http://www.brainpreservation.org/

Rafal Smigrodzki: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/New_Cryonet/message/2522

Mike Darwin: http://chronopause.com/

It is critically important, especially for the engineers, information technology, and computer scientists who are reading this to understand that the brain is not a computer, but rather, it is a massive, 3-dimensional hard-wired circuit.

Aubrey de Grey: http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/tag/aubrey-de-grey/

Ravin Jain: http://www.alcor.org/AboutAlcor/meetdirectors.html#ravin

Lukewarm:

Sebastian Seung: http://lesswrong.com/lw/9wu/new_book_from_leading_neuroscientist_in_support/5us2

Negative:

kalla724: comments http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8f4/neil_degrasse_tyson_on_cryogenics/

The critique reduces to a claim that personal identity is stored non-redundantly at the level of protein post-translational modifications. If there was actually good evidence that this is how memory/personality is stored, I expect it would be better known. Plus if this is the case how has LTP been shown to be sustained following vitrification and re-warming? I await kalla724's full critique.

Apparently it was a technical kludge to allow Google searching by author. There has been some discussion at the place where issues are reported.

I am against banning private_messaging. For comparison, MonkeyMind would be no loss, although since he last posted yesterday he probably hasn't been banned yet, and if not him, then there is no case here. private_messaging's manner is to rant rather than argue, which is somewhat tedious and unpleasant, but nowhere near a level where ejection would be appropriate.

Looking at his recent posts, I wonder if some of the downvotes are against the person instead of the posting.

He is -127 karma for the past 30 days.

In the meantime, you might find it useful to explore Wei Dai's [Power Reader}(http://lesswrong.com/lw/5uz/lesswrong_power_reader_greasemonkey_script_updated/), which allows the user to raise or lower the visibility of certain authors.

You propose a dangerous thing.

Once there was an article deleted on LW. Since that happened, it is repeatedly used as an example how censored, intolerant, and cultish LW is. Can you imagine a reaction to banning a user account (if that is what you suggest)? Cthulhu fhtagn! If this happens, what will come next: captcha in LW wiki?

If I understand correctly, the purpose of the self-censorship was to make this site more friendly for women. Which creates a paradox: An idea that one can speak openly with men, but with women a self-censorship is necessary, is kind of offensive to women, isn't it?

(The first rule of Political Correctness is: You don't talk about Political Correctness. The second rule: You don't talk about Political Correctness. The third rule: When someone says stop, or expresses outrage, the discussion about given topic is over.)

Or maybe this is too much of a generalization. What other topics are we self-censoring, besides sexual behavior and politics? I don't remember. Maybe it is just politics being self-censored; sexual behavior being a sensitive political topic. Problem is, any topic can become political, if for whatever reasons "Greens" decide to identify with a position X, and "Blues" with a position non-X.

We are taking the taboo on political topics too far. Instead of avoiding mindkilling, we avoid the topics completely.

Although we have traditional exceptions: it is allowed to talk about evolution and atheism, despite the fact that some people might consider these topics political too, and might feel offended. (Global warming is probably also acceptable, just less attractive for nerds.) So let's find out what exactly determines when a potentially political topic becomes allowed on LW, or becomes self-censored?

My hypothesis is that LW is actually not politically neutral, but some political opinion P is implicitly present here as a bias. Opinions which are rational and compatible with P, can be expressed freely. Opinions which are irrational and incompatible with P, can be used as examples of irrationality (religion being the best example). Opinions which are rational but incompatible with P, are self-censored. Opinions which are irrational but compatible with P are also never mentioned (because we are rational enough to recognize they can't be defended).

Summary of IRC conversation in the unoffical LW chatroom.

On the IRC channel I noted that there are several subjects on which discourse was better or more interesting in OB/LW 2008 than today, yet I can't think of a single topic on which LW 2012 has better dialogue or commentary. Another LWer noted that it is in the nature of all internet forums to "grow more stupid over time", I don't think LW is stupider, I just I think it has grown more boring and definitely isn't a community with a higher sanity waterline today than back then, despite many individuals levelling up formidably in the intervening period.

some new place started by the same people, before LW was OB. before OB was SL4, before that was... I don't know

This post is made in the hopes people will let me know about the next good spot.

Unpack what you mean by self-censorship exactly?

I regularly see people make frank comments about sexuality. There's maybe 4-5 people whose comments would be considered offensive in liberal circles. Many more people whose comments would at at least somewhat offputting. Whenever the subject comes up (no matter who brings it up, and which political stripes they wear), it often explodes into a giant thread of comments that's far more popular than whatever the original thread was ostensibly about.

I sometimes avoid making sex related comments until after the thread has exploded, because most people have already made the same points already, they're just repeating themselves because talking about pet political issues is fun. (When I do end up posting in them, it's almost always because my own tribal affiliations are wrankled and my brain thinks that engaging with strangers on the internet is an affective use of my time. I'm keenly aware as I write this that my justifications for engaging with you are basically meaningless and I'm just getting some cognitive cotton candy). Am I self-censoring in a way you consider wrong?

I've seen numerous non-gender political threads get downvoted with a comment like "politics is the mindkiller" and then fade away quietly. My impression is that gender threads (even if downvoted) end up getting discussed in detail. People don't self censor, which includes both criticism of ideas people disagree with and/or are offended by.

What exactly would you like to change?

I could write a post, but it wouldn't be in agreement with that one.

I had no interest in the opposite sex in High School. I was nerd hardcore. And was approached by multiple girls. (I noticed some even in my then-clueless state, and retrospection has made several more obvious to me; the girl who outright kissed me, for example, was hard to mistake for anything else.) I gave the "I just want to be friends" speech to a couple of them. I also, completely unintentionally, embarrassed the hell out of one girl, whose friend asked me to join her for lunch because she had a crush on me. She hid her face for sixty seconds after I came over, so I eventually patted her on the head, entirely unsure what else to do, and went back to my table.

...yeah, actually, I doubt any of the girls who pursued me in High School ever tried to take the initiative again.

The post is about decent (although rather US-centric and imprecise), but reading through the comments there, I'm very grateful for whatever changes the community has undergone since then. Most of them are unpleasant to read for various reasons.

Don't worry, whether you do this or not, there is a novel where you do and a novel where you don't, without any other distinctions.

Seems to imply it. Conversly, if you go to the "all possible worlds exist" level of a multiverse, then each novel (or other work of fiction) in our world describes events that actually happen in some other world. If you limit yourself to just the "there's an infinite amount of stuff in our world" multiverse, then only novels describing events that would be physically and otherwise possible describe real events.

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

There's some alleged quotation about making your own life a work of art. IIRC it's been attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Oscar Wilde, and/or Pope John Paul II.

What makes you think that the extra limbs were caused by mutations? I know very little about bovine biology, but if we were dealing with a human, I would assume that an extra leg was likely caused by absorption of a sibling in utero. I have never heard of a mutation in mammals causing extra limb development. (Even weirder is the idea of a mutation causing an extra single leg, as opposed to an extra leg pair.) The vertebrate body plan simply does not seem to work that way.

'clumped' into personal-things and general-knowledge things so that we can lose one without losing the other

Are you sure that your example is personal vs general, rather than episodic vs procedural? The latter distinction much more obviously benefits from different encodings or being connected to different parts of the brain.

I see at least two other major problems with meritocracy.

First, a meritocracy opens for talented people not only positions of productive economic and intellectual activity, but also positions of rent-seeking. So while it's certainly great that meritocracy in science has given us von Neumann, meritocracy in other areas of life has at the same time given us von Neumanns of rent-seeking, who have taken the practices of rent-seeking to an unprecedented extent and to ever more ingenious, intellectually involved, and emotionally appealing rationalizations. (In particular, this is also true of those areas of science that have been captured by rent-seekers.)

Worse yet, the wealth and status captured by the rent-seekers are, by themselves, the smaller problem here. The really bad problem is that these ingenious rationalizations for rent-seeking, once successfully sold to the intellectual public, become a firmly entrenched part of the respectable public opinion -- and since they are directly entangled with power and status, questioning them becomes a dangerous taboo violation. (And even worse, as it always is with humans, the most successful elite rent-seekers will be those who honestly internalize these beliefs, thus leading to a society headed by a truly delusional elite.) I believe that this is one of the main mechanisms behind our civilization's drift away from reality on numerous issues for the last century or so.

Second, in meritocracy, unless you're at the very top, it's hard to avoid feeling like a failure, since you'll always end up next to people whose greater success clearly reminds you of your inferior merit.

Do you know the size of your readers' windows?

How is the 93% calculated? Does it correct for multiple comparisons?

Given some outside knowledge, that these 6 choices are not unrelated, but come from a ordered space of choices, the result that one value is special and all the others produce identical results is implausible. I predict that it is a fluke.

I could use similar advice, as I am in a similarish position.

Which ought not be surprising. Governments are nonhuman environment-optimizing systems that many people expect to align themselves with human values, despite not doing the necessary work to ensure that they will.

Sounds about right to me.

As the scope for complex task automation becomes broader, almost all problems become trivial. Satisfying hard work, with challenging and problem-solving elements, becomes a rare commodity. People work to identify non-trivial problems (a tedious process), which are traded for extortionate prices. A lengthy list of problems you've solved becomes a status symbol, not because of your problem-solving skills, but because you can afford to buy them.

"The daily tasks of living give meaning to life. Chopping wood, drawing water: these are the highest accomplishments. Using machines to do these things empties life of life itself. To spend your days growing your own food, making with your own hands everything that you need, living as a natural part of nature like all the other animals: this is paradise. Contrast the seductive allure of machines and cities, raping our Mother for our vile enjoyment, waging war against the imaginary monsters of "disease" and "poverty" instead of accepting the natural balance of Nature, striving always to see who can most outdo the original sin of separating from the great apes. "Scientists" see our Mother as a corpse to be looted, but if we do not turn away from that false path, out of her eternal love she will wring our neck as any loving mother will do to a deformed child."

Deep green ecology, in other words.

Modify us to see real chores the way we see fun, addictive task-management games.

The cia.gov link leads to a redirect.

Its been awhile since I read it, but I recall the book Sway being a good source of bias examples.

status/prestige theory (Robin Hanson uses it all the time, but is there some good text discussing this?)

Give him a year or two and he'll have written one.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/82g/on_the_openness_personality_trait_rationality/ has a download of one book very close to this topicspace.

Substitute the word causal for acausal. In a situation of "causal trade", does everyone end up with the same utility function?

The most glaring problem seems to be how it could deduce the goals of other AIs. It either implies the existence of some sort of universal goal system, or allows information to propagate faster than c.

One problem is that, in order to actually get specific about utility functions, the AI would have to simulate another AI that is simulating it - that's like trying to put a manhole cover through its own manhole by putting it a box first.

If we assume that the computation problems are solved, a toy model involving robots laying different colors of tile might be interesting to consider. In fact there's probably a post in there. The effects will be different sizes for different classes of utility functions over tiles. In the case of infinity robots with cosmopolitan utility functions, you do get an interesting sort of agreement though.

This outcome is bad because bargaining away influence over the AI's local area in exchange for a small amount of control over the global utility function is a poor trade. But in that case, it's also a poor acausal trade.

A more reasonable acausal trade to make with other AIs would be to trade away influence over faraway places. After all, other AIs presumably care about those places more than our AI does, so this is a trade that's actually beneficial to both parties. It's even a marginally reasonable thing to do acausally.

Of course, this means that our AI isn't allowed to help the Babyeaters stop eating their babies, in accordance with its acausal agreement with the AI the Babyeaters could have made. But it also means that the Superhappy AI isn't allowed to help us become free of pain, because of its acausal agreement with our AI. Ideally, this would hold even if we didn't make an AI yet.

That's a surprising conclusion to me which I hadn't seen before, but also doesn't seem too hard to come up with, so I'm curious where I've gone off the rails. This argument has a very Will_Newsomey flavor to it to me.

Perhaps it is not wise to speculate out loud in this area until you've worked through three rounds of "ok, so what are the implications of that idea" and decided that it would help people to hear about the conclusions you've developed three steps back. You can frequently find interesting things when you wander around, but there are certain neighborhoods you should not explore with children along for the ride until you've been there before and made sure its reasonably safe.

Perhaps you could send a PM to Will?

I was feeling fairly negative on Less Wrong recently. I ended up writing down a lot of things that bothered me in a a half formed angry Google Doc rant, saving it...

and then going back to reading Less Wrong a few days later.

It felt refreshing though, because Less Wrong has flaws and you are allowed to notice them and say to yourself "This! Why are some people doing this! It's so dumb and silly!"

That being said, I'm not sure that all of the arguments that my straw opponents were presenting in the half formed doc are actually as weak as I was making them out to be. But it did make me feel more positive overall simply summing up everything that had been bugging me at the time.

Hasn't worked for Konkvistador.

What are the attitudes you are feeling uncomfortable with?

I use LW casually and my attitude towards it is pretty neutral/positive but I recently got downvoted something like 10 times in past comments, it seems. A karma loss of 5%, and it's a lot, comparing the amount of karma I have to how long I've been here. I didn't even get into a big argument or anything, the back-and-forth was pretty short. So my attitude toward LW is very meh right now. Sorry, sort of wanted to just say this somewhere. ugh :/

The fact that LW is a forum about rationality/science don't mean it's good for you all the time. Strategically speaking, redefine your goals.

Or, maybe the quality of posts are not the same that was before.

And ru.be looks like it's up for sale too.

When it comes to formulate Anki cards it's good to have the 20 rules from Supermemo in mind,

The important thing is to understand before you memorize. You should never try to memorzize a proof without understanding it in the first place.

Once you have understood the proof think about what's interesting about the proof. Asks questions like: "What axioms does the proof use?" "Does the proof use axiom X?" Try to find as many questions with clear answers as you can. Being redundant is good.

If you find yourself asking a certain question frequently invent a shorthand for them. axioms(proof X) can replace "What axioms does the proof use?"

If you really need to remember the whole proof then memorize it step by step.

Proof A:

1. Do A

2. Do B

becomes 2 cards:

Proof A:

1. [...]

Proof A:

1. Do A

2. [...]

If you have a long proof that could mean 9 steps and 9 cards.

I've been doing something similar (maths in an Anki deck), and I haven't found a good way of doing so. My current method is just asking "Prove x" or "Outline a proof of x", with the proof wholesale in the answer, and then I run through the proof in my head calling it "Good" if I get all the major steps mostly correct. Some of my cards end up being quite long.

I have found that being explicit with asking for examples vs definitions is helpful: i.e. ask "What's the definition of a simple ring?" rather than "What's a simple ring?".

A method that I've been toying with: dissect the proof into multiple simpler proofs, then dissect those even further if necessary. For instance, if you're proving that all X are Y, and the proof proceeds by proving that all X are Z and all Z are Y, then make 3 cards:

• One for proving that all X are Z.
• One for proving that all Z are Y.
• One for proving that all X are Y, which has as its answer simply "We know all X are Z, and we know all Z are Y."

That said, you should of course be completely certain that memorizing proofs is worthwhile. Rule of thumb: if there's anything you could do that would have a higher ratio of awesome to cost than X, don't do X before you've done that.

[Bad formatting in articles dd0, dc4]

Fixed

Also, when I submit a new comment and then edit it, it now starts with an empty line.

It's a known Bug #315

Upvote for "The Matrix makes no internal sense and there's no fun in discussing it."

Upvote for NO.

Upvote for YES.

Wow. That sequence was drastically less violent than I remembered it being. I noticed (for I believe the first time) that they actually made some attempt to avoid infinite ammo action movie syndrome. Also I must have thought the cartwheel bit was cool when I first saw it, but now it looks quite ridiculous and/or dated.

Maybe it's time for a rewatch.

Karma sink.

The first digit is the most important. It indicates the "level" of the course: 100/1000 courses are freshman level, 200/2000 are sophomore level, etc. There is some flexibility in these classifications, though. Examples: My undergraduate university used 1000 for intro level, 2000 for intermediate level, 4000 for senior/advanced level, and 6000 for graduate level. (3000 and 5000 were reserved for courses at a satellite campus.) My graduate university uses 100, 200, 300, 400 for the corresponding undergraduate year levels, and 600, 700, 800 for graduate courses of increasing difficulty levels.

The other digits in the course number often indicate the rough order in which courses should be taken within a level. This is not always the case; sometimes they are just arbitrary, or they may indicate the order in which courses were added to the institute's offerings.

In general, though the numbers indicate the levels of the courses and the order in which they "should" be taken, students' schedules need not comply precisely (outside of course-specific prerequisite requirements).

It varies from institution to institution, but generally the first number indicates the year you're likely to study it, so "Psychology 101" is the first course you're likely to study in your first year of a degree involving psychology, which is why it's the introduction to the subject. The numbering gets messy for a variety of reasons.

I should point out I'm not an American university student, but this style of numbering system is becoming prevalent throughout the English-speaking world.

101's stereotypically the introduction to the course, but this sort of thing actually varies quite a bit between universities. Mine dropped the first digit for survey courses and introductory material; survey courses were generally higher two-digit numbers (i.e. Geology 64, Planetary Geology), while introductory courses were more often one-digit or lower two-digit numbers (i.e. Math 3A, Introduction to Calculus). Courses intended to be taken in sequence had a letter appended. Aside from survey courses, higher numbers generally indicated more advanced or specialized classes, though not necessarily more difficult ones.

Three digits indicated an upper-division (i.e. nominally junior- or senior-level) or graduate-level course. Upper-division undergrad courses were usually 100-level, and the 101 course was usually the first class you'd take that was intended only for people of your major; CS 101 was Algorithms and Abstract Data Types for me, for example, and I took it late in my sophomore year. Graduate courses were 200-level or higher.

Just started on Wall Street

We often hear that? What do you mean by professional philanthropy here?

My research suggests Clojure is a lisp-like language most suited to your requirements. It runs on the JVM so should be relatively low hassle on Windows. I believe there's some sort of Eclipse support but I can't confirm it.

If you do end up wanting to do something with Common Lisp, I recommend Practical Common Lisp as a good free introduction.

Well, if your goal is trying out for education, but on Windows, you could start with DrRacket. http://racket-lang.org/

It is a reasonable IDE, it has some GUI libraries included, open-source, cross-platform, works fine on Windows.

Racket is based on Scheme language (which is a part of Lisp language family). It has a mode for Scheme as described in R6RS or R5RS standard, and it has a few not-fully-compatible dialects.

I use Common Lisp, but not under Windows. Common Lisp has more cross-implementation libraries, it could be useful sometimes. Probably, EQL is the easiest to set up under Windows (it is ECL, a Common Lisp implementation, merged with Qt for GUI; I remember there being a bundled download). Maybe CommonQt or Cells-GTK would work. I remember that some of the Common Lisp package management systems have significant problems under Windows or require either Cygwin or MSys (so they can use tar, gzip, mkdir etc. as if they were on a Unix-like system)

Peter Norvig's out-of-print Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp can be interesting reading. It develops various classic AI applications like game tree search and logic programming, making extensive use of Lisp's macro facilities. (The book is 20 years old and introductory, it's not recommended for learning anything very interesting about artificial intelligence.) Using the macro system for metaprogramming is a big deal with Lisp, but a lot of material for Scheme in particular doesn't deal with it at all.

The already mentioned Clojure seems to be where a lot of real-world development is happening these days, and it's also innovating on the standard syntax conventions of Common Lisp and Scheme in interesting ways. Clojure will interface with Java's libraries for I/O and multimedia. Since Clojure lives in the Java ecosystem, you can basically start with your preconceptions for developing for JVM and go from there to guess what it's like. If you're OK with your games ending up JVM programs, Clojure might work.

For open-source games in Lisp, I can point you to David O'Toole's projects. There are also some roguelikes developed in Lisp.

Are there really so few chess players on LW? 0_o

Not gaming related, but I've got a question that seems like it would appeal to you above.

I don't follow and understand the "timeless decision" topic on LW, but I have a feeling that a significant part of that is one agent predicting what other agent would do, by simulating their algorithm.

Thinking in terms of "simulating their algorithm" is convenient for us because we can imagine the agent doing it and for certain problems a simulation is sufficient. However the actual process involved is any reasoning at all based on the algorithm. That includes simulations but also includes creating mathematical proofs based on the algorithm that allow generalizable conclusions about things that the other agent will or will not do.

An agent that wishes to facilitate cooperation - or that wishes to prove credible threat - will actually prefer to structure their own code such that it is as easy as possible to make proofs and draw conclusions from that code.

I was looking at this exact question a few months ago, and found these to be quite LW-reader-salient:

The Case of Anaphoric One

Poverty Of The Stimulus - A Rational Approach

Just tons. For example, Harry's instructor, Mr. Bester, is a double reference.

EDIT: And obviously the Bester scenes contain other allusions: back to the gold-silver arbitrage, or Harry imaging himself a Lensman, come to mind.

If you believe that some model of computation can be expressed in arithmetics (this implies expressibility of the notion of correct proof), Godel's first theorem is more or less analyzis of "This statement cannot be proved". If it can be proved, it is false and there is a provable false statement; if it cannot be proved it is an unprovable true statement.

But most of the effort in proving Godel's theorem has to be spent on proving that you cannot go half way: if you have a big enogh theory to express basic arithmetical facts, you have to have full reflection. It can be stated in various ways, but it requires a technically accurate proof - I am not sure how well it would fit into a cartoon.

Could you state explicitly what do you want to find - just the non-tehnical part, or both?

I think you are overweighing the evidence from moderation policies.

If a large number of evangelicals constantly descended onto LessWrong, forcing the community to have a near hair trigger banning policy, would that be strong evidence that atheism was incorrect?

There are several different pieces of this for me.

I haven't much changed my mind on the existence of global climate change since I first looked into the data, about a decade ago, except to become more confident about it.

I've made various attempts to wrap my brain around this data to arrive at some opinions about its causes, but I'm evidently neither smart nor well-informed enough to arrive at any confidence about whether the conclusions people are drawing on this question actually follow from the data they are drawing it from. Ultimately I just end up either taking their word for it, or not. I try to ignore the public discourse on the subject, which in the US has become to an absurd degree a Blue/Green issue entirely divorced from any notion of relying on observation-based reasoning to ground confidence levels in assertions.

The thing that most caused me to lower my estimate of the likelihood that the climate change is exclusively or near-exclusively anthropogenic was some conversations with a couple of astrophysicist friends of mine, who talked about the state of play in the field and their sense that research into correlations between terrestrial climate fluctuations and solar output fluctuations was seen as a career-ender... not quite on par with, say, parapsychology, but on the same side of the ledger.

The thing that most caused me to raise that estimate was some conversations with a friend of mine who was working in climate modeling for a while. I don't have half a clue regarding the validity of his models, but I got the clear impression that climate models that take into account anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2 levels are noticeably more accurate than models that don't.

On balance, the latter raised my confidence in the assertion that global climate change is significantly anthropogenic more than the former lowered my confidence.

I don't really have an opinion yet about how catastrophic the climate change is likely to be, regardless of whether it's anthropogenic or not. Incidentally, it regularly puzzles me that the public discourse is so resolutely about the latter rather than the former, as it seems to me that catastrophic non-anthropogenic climate change should be as much of a concern for us as catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.

what does anyone think of the advice given in this article?

• To make this kind of money, you'll obviously have to get a job in an expensive restaurant, and remember there are tons of people there who have years of experience and desperately want one of these super-high value jobs. Knowing the right person will be vital if you want to score one of these positions.
• This is based on tips, so you will have to be extremely charming, charismatic, and attractive.
• Living in Los Angeles is expensive to start with, and there is a major premium if you want to live in a non-terrifying part of the city.
• The economy of Los Angeles is not doing well, hasn't been for years, and probably won't for the foreseeable future. This probably hurts the prospects for finding a high-paying waiter job.

Honestly, moving to L.A. to seek a rare super-high paying waiter job seems like a terrible idea to me.

I don't know if the claim is true or not, but i don't find it too implausible. It helps to remember that LA is frequented by a great many newly wealthy celebrities.

It does not follow that my chances of getting such a job in L.A. are high enough to be worth considering.

I am declaring this article excommunicate traitoris, because I am reading through it and not having a virulent reaction against it, but instead finding it to be reasonable, if embellishing. I take that and the community's strong reaction against it as evidence that the article is effectively mind-killing me due to my political leanings and that I should stop reading now.

...cognitive biases are scary.

An ok read, despite being very much more partisan and harsh than what is usually discussed or linked on LW.

Despite libertarian efforts to recruit the young and liberal-minded into the flock with promises of ending the wars, closing Guantanamo and calling off the cozy relationship with the Likudniks, The Reactionary Mind makes it clear that there’s no fundamental difference between any of these right-wing breeds, and thus common ground is neither possible nor desirable, particularly with the libertarians. “When the libertarian looks out upon society,” writes Robin, “he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.”

Those darn out group members! Der all the same I tells ya!

It feels like an exercise about how many cognitive errors can you commit in one text (but in later paragraphs they get repetitive). As if the author is not even pretending to be sane, which is probably how the target audience likes it. I tried to read the text anyway, but halfway my brain was no longer able to process it.

If I had to write an abstract of this article, it would be like this:

"All my enemies (all people who disagree with me) are in fact the same: inhumanly evil. All their arguments are enemy soldiers; they should be ignored, or responded by irrational attacks and name-calling."

If there was anything more (except for naming specific enemies), I was not able to extract it.

Repulsive.

I've immortalised this comment as it looked when I first saw it. It tells a beautiful and hilarious story.

Well done, me. I don't know what kinda game I'm playing, other than "being obnoxious".