January 2012 Media Thread

What exactly does this have to do with refining the art of human rationality? I'm averse to noise.

(from chat with Alicorn)

I want Lukeprog to coauthor a long, carefully annotated article about the science behind friendship and human social behavior, so that I can respond with "I used to wonder what friendship could be/until you all shared its science with me"

There's a humorous blog called Philosophy Bro which takes philosophy texts and interprets them into "bro-speak". The earlier posts are generally better, because I think the author either started running out of texts to discuss, or out of time to write humorous synopses. (So if you want to read some, don't work backwards, instead look up "top posts")

Here is a link to his summary of Plato's Allegory of the Cave

And here's an excerpt from his summary of Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus (Warning: Foul Language):

Look, so, nothing matters, right? Shit's fucking weird. We all want to know how the universe ultimately works or who's running the show or whatever, and it turns out - TRICK. FUCKING. QUESTION. No one's running the show, and the world is unreasonable. Ever had some shit happen to you that made you go, "Why the fuck did that happen? There's no reason for that." Turns out, you were right. So our attempts to impose reason on the world will fail. Death and taxes, my friend. Death and motherfucking taxes.

So what do we do? What's the point? Should we just end it if nothing matters? No, says Camus, thats the pussy way out. Instead, we should embrace the fact that nothing makes sense. Don Juan, the fuckaholic that started it all, he embraced the absurd. Life has no meaning, so he. fucked. everything. He didn't try to impose meaning or find meaning or make his own meaning - that shit is useless, and Camus says there's no hope for that, so cut it the fuck out.

This piece suits Less Wrong so well - both the sound itself and the thematic background behind its name (I won't spoil the latter for you if you haven't played the game yet). The whole of Bastion's soundtrack is just amazing, and the game itself is a real gem, even if (like me) you don't care for the JRPGs it draws influences from.

EDIT: holy hell, Youtube is tracking back links from LW! And at the moment it's not leaving a high-status impression of us...

In my eyes, Yoko Kanno (www.last.fm/music/Yoko+Kanno) is the most kickass and amazing composer now alive. I so wish I could get to a concert of hers.

(what the hell, using markup with this url just makes it disappear)

[Works for me.](http://www.last.fm/music/Yoko+Kanno)

If you have a few hours to spend on humorous entertainment, you might want to check out Prequel. It's a MSPaint Adventure set in Oblivion, a bit before the game starts, following a Khajiit trying to get her life back on the right track (but horrible things happen). There are a bunch of Oblivion in-jokes, but it should still be enjoyable enough without having played the game.

It starts out only moderately funny, but has the best setup-punchline I've seen in quite some time, and so I recommend sticking it out until you get to that point (June 16th, probably ~2 hours in), but not starting it unless you're willing to make it that far.

Electronic music good for work, reading or browsing

Me, I like Solar Fields and Carbon Based Lifeforms for that. List your preferences.

Is nate silver a witch?

Which one of you did this?

Fat Cock Bias (NSWF)

Here's a great soundtrack for when you're feeling introspective and moody.

So, based on the predictions thread, I surmise that I'm not the only Homestuck fan on this site?

I just watched "The Edge" for the first time tonight; an older movie from 1997 starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin.

The basic conceit of the movie is that Anthony Hopkins is a very smart and capable fellow, and when disaster strikes he manages to get through it because of that.

There are a number of silly and stupid parts, but the central theme that knowledge makes you succeed, when you apply it with the right attitude, is very powerful and relevant to rationalists. It's not without tragedy, but I felt like it was a good work of rational!fiction.

A fun movie I've watched last year that involves Omega, boxes, $1.000.000, choice under uncertainty, overstepping ethical injunctions and some common problems with utilitarianism.

It's more concerned with leaving the viewer hooked and mystified than with preserving even a shred of coherency, but hey.

Oh, and it's by the director of Donnie Darko. Haven't seen that one, but sure heard a lot about it.

One of the best movies I've seen in a long time was 50/50. It's about a 20-something year old guy who gets cancer and all of the stress it puts on him, his girlfriend, etc. It may be because my girlfriend went through something very similar and I was able to relate, but I thought it was fantastic.

Moneyball wasn't amazing, but I like that there was a well-done mainstream movie about the triumph of Bayesianism. It's the feel-good sports drama of last year.

Mars, while not being very deep, was a fun and warm sci-fi flick shot in a rather unusual style. Here is a clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DASBmOnuCI It's streaming free on Netflix in US at least. (IMDB ratings are way lower than mine, so caveat emptor).

In general it seems to me there is an omission in the movie spectrum - I think a lot more good movies can be produced in anime style based on high-quality niche sci-fi (I'm thinking of things like MOPI or Watts' Blindsight). There is too much anime with good production values that I just can't watch because it's silly. Hi-quality Anime episodes run about 200K, I imagine you can put together a movie for around 1M.

I thought Sucker Punch was the most powerful movie I've seen in a long time.

It was a powerful answer to religion. Religions provide narratives and characters within them that people find moving and empowering. (Or disempowering, as the case may be.) The power of such narratives are real, even if the characters are fictional. Why not harness that power with narratives of your own choosing, narratives that are more affirming of your values and empowering to you?

I tend to like layered, highly symbolic fiction in the first place, and found Sucker Punch an exceptionally well crafted example of the type. It reminded me of a painting I saw once, where the perspective and attention of one of the characters drew me into the painting, and drew me to see what they saw in it.

This should be an offspring of the Meta Thread.

Khaleesi, I'm halfway through A game of thrones. I didn't like the beginning much because there were no likeable characters so I decided to shrug and root for the Lannisters as the closest thing to magnificient bastards. But by now there are loads of awesome characters (you, Arya Stark, Jon Snow) and the book is delicious, though not nearly horrible enough yet (maybe something about that hound and that mountain...). I like the grey and black morality, the psychological realism, the varied cultures, the "toss the reader in and wait 200 pages to mention variable-length seasons" style, the descriptions (seriously, that guy describes food and clothes and it doesn't bore me). It sticks very closely to the conventions of fantasy for no discernable reason (I'd do away with the prologue and slip the plot-relevant bits elsewhere), but that didn't bother me past the beginning. Most people should read it.

I recommend The Magicians by Lev Grossman. It's a a short-ish fantasy novel that takes a more realistic look at it's own thinly disguised versions of (first) Harry Potter and (second) the Chronicles of Narnia, a bit like a more cynical flip-side to HPMoR. It's a great read if you don't mind something leaning a bit more pessimistic, but it's not without hope. It's also quite funny if you like dark, sometimes subtle humour.

I'm reading

• "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter, (beautilfully written and it's nice to see what I grokked and what I didn't grok from GEB described much more matter-of-factly)

• "The Better Angels of our Nature" by Steven Pinker, (I'm impressed by the thorough research, but I don't have a head for recalling stats, and this book is much more stats and matter-of-factish, as opposed to theoretical and narrative than his previous books. Less entertaining than his previous books so far, but the message seems important and his argument so far convincing.)

• "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift (so far very fun; I'm only a few chapters in)

• "Elbow Room" by Daniel Dennett (the first chapter is exciting, but I feel confident enough with my own understanding of the solution to the subject already. Dennett uses rhetoric and his "intuition pumps" very beautifully and effectively, though; I'm interested in observing his method and hoping to learn a bit from it.)

Having listed these books all out here, though, I notice that the theme currently very narrow. The three nonfiction authors I just listed are excellent, but highly, highly in agreement with each-other on most things.

I love the works of Lois Bujold. She's great at portraying the inner lives of people who want to win, and showing the emotional struggles they have. (Especially Mirror Dance, but that book is not a good entry point into the Vorkosigan universe because it assumes a lot of the background from the earlier books). Many of the Vorkosigan books are available online.

Curse of Chalion is also great, and includes an interesting portrayal of what religious institutions might look like if gods were real and intervened to improve human life, but were not omnipotent. (i.e. the institutions would suck a lot less).

Ah, I love reading, and have found a lot of good suggestions from earlier discussion on LW. Looking forward to what comes up here. Having said that, some of my current reading:

• Thinking slow and Fast by Kahneman - excellent book; I've read a lot of the pop-psy stuff like Dan Ariely's, The Invisible Gorilla etc., which are also well worth reading, but Kahneman takes it a step further, and, while still very accessible, is going further in trying to explain things.
• The Portable Atheist and Hitch-22 by the late Christopher Hitchens; the books were on my list for a while, but Hitchens' death compelled me to actually start reading them. The former is a kind of reader into various (semi-)atheists of the last few centuries. Nothing like God is not great, but a bit more intellectual. Not really a light read, but interesting nevertheless. Currently reading his memoir, Hitch-22, which is interesting in its own right - I learnt a lot about the British far left in 60s/70s and his life as a school boy...
• REAMDE - Stephenson. (finished this mid-Dec 2011) I very much like Neal Stephenson's book, and I did like this one, around MMOGs and a kind of John-le-Carre story. However, I found there were a couple of things in the story line I did not find very convincing - and the Jihadist terrorists are described as sort-of 'generic' terrorists with a thin vereer of some Jihad cliches
• Then, reading The Checklist Manifesto, for my periodical reading of a productivity-book. The book's on the power of having (and following) checklists for any complicated process, So far, pretty good. It's a quick read anyway.

All the Christopher Hitchens I can get my hands on. Even as a political journalist and literary critic - someone who dealt entirely in words, not numbers, and had no understanding of science, despite being a deeply appreciative fan of it - he sincerely did his best to think and write clearly and to pass this value on. It's also reminding me to put care into the shape of every sentence. Pity he appeared never to have heard of Bayes ...