Are you after interaction or information content?

As far as raw content goes: I strongly suggest a "Unified standard for print and Internet" rule. Judge content against whatever book or paper you could be reading instead. Often communities have separate incentives to promote and praise original content regardless of absolute quality. There's also a novelty bias, where mediocre content in new mediums (youtube videos, blogs) is held to a lower standard. Since I've implement this rule, I've noticed a lot of what I considered great content is really just "great for the internet" content. I read more books now.

Against this standard, I find the most raw information value comes from individuals who explicitly collate links or summarize information from other sources. Democratic collation can be great as well, but faces too many ways to die. Long-form community and blog content is almost always overrated, except for cases like niche ideologies or at the cutting edge of some technical or business topic.

Meta Warning: I think this applies to lesswrong. There are exceptions, but the long-form posts and related blogs are often either "good for the Internet" content or decision theory stuff I don't have the background to understand. I don't mean to gripe: I'm very happy with LW, and I regularly skim the discussion section and read the open threads. I just think that LW over-hypes it's own original content, like any other community.

The Oil Drum isn't updated anymore. It also never struck me as particularly good.

One reason for the myth about dehydration would be due to "drinking plenty of water" still being one of the most effective things to do: If it's about the liver breaking down alcohol into toxic Acetaldehyde, drinking lots of water to flush it out.

Understandable mistake to go from "more water fixes the problem" to "problem must've been not enough water (dehydration.)"

This was how it was discussed in my university chemistry class. Also mentioned: a similar breakdown (same enzymes or whatnot) happens with methanol, and the breakdown products (formaldehyde and then methanoic acid) are stronger / more toxic than those of ethanol (acetaldehyde / acetic acid.)

If you check out the linked study, it doesn't do such debunking. It found no association between hangover severity and vasopressin and it wasn't clear what other markers of dehydration it measured. Note that measuring dehydration accurately could be difficult and different people might experience different levels of dehydration differently.

It should be the default assumption that there are many mechanisms involved in hangover, because the effects of ethanol are very complex.

Interesting - I've had a plenty of nights of drink, including some where I felt unwell the next day, but never had either of those symptoms. I have, however, woken up recognizably dehydrated a couple of times.

I wonder whether some of the "myth" comes from the experiences of people like me, accurately reported but for some reason not defined as hangovers by the researchers behind the study cited.

That article rubs me the wrong way. I think it may be more a failure of science, rather than the author's personal failure though. Whenever people are curious about how to reduce hangovers, all the articles you find will talk about how abstinence is the only cure (gee, this doesn't echo any other memes), but the fact is that there is an effective treatment, even if there haven't been sufficient scientific studies done on it. A large social group that I am involved in, which has been known to drink heavily, has started taking N-acetyl-cysteine (500-1000mg) and Source Naturals Hangover Formula (which is primarily a C & B complex), and the effect it has on hangovers is not in any way subtle. Despite the existence of this, the article only says that the best prevention is to consume alcohol with food and lots of water. There is some scientific support for this combination (see the studies and explanation referenced here or here), but even though it is a question of significant practical importance to many people, no scientists have actually gone out and done a controlled study on humans on these nutrients.

There should really be full discussion post about this, since it keeps getting brought up.

EDIT: So I made one. If there isn't interest, well, at least it's spurred me to consolidate a bibliography

In addition to what I wrote in the other thread:

Luhrmann wrote a book, When God Talks Back, about her experiences with evangelicals, which might be useful. She also succeeded in inducing tulpa-like visions of Leland Stanford, jr. in experimental subjects.

The tulpa community also seems to have a fondness for amateur psychological research, although I imagine there'll be a lot of chaff and unfinished projects in there.

I don't know what questions you've already asked, but how about

What has your tulpa done that's surprised you? What does your tulpa do that you can't do when you're in your default state?

You may also be interested in the earlier LW discussion about tulpas. Like I mentioned in the thread, they seem like an intentionally developed version of a thing that many writers have naturally - my guess would be that they use the normal circuitry that we have for emulating and predicting the behavior of other people, only they're modelling a non-existent person and the outputs of that modeling get fed back in to be used as new input.

What is the position of science with regard to tulpas? Surely, if the phenomena exists, science must have encountered it an d have a stance wrt. it, right?

There no such thing as a position of science. Science is a process.

As far as Tuplas go, Tulpas are mainly about qualia. Qualia are by their nature but directly measureable. As a result a lot of scientists do shun research of qualia. Orthodox reductionists do try to explain qualia away whenever they can instead of trying to investigate them.

Western scientific education doesn't train it's scientists do be in control of their minds and that means that most they can't run experiments that require mental control and good awareness of their own minds.

They can invite some buddhist monk and investigate how that monk does his thing, but that doesn't allow for easy controlled experiments.

In that area even the easy questions seem to have little scientific investigation. Take heat development during particular types of meditation.

Ten years ago a scientists would have looked strangly at you for suggesting for heat development without movement but now we do know that the body can in principle do this in brown fat tissue.

There some small experiments that illustrate that a specific Tibetian technique can consistently produce heat but there no general science based theory that predicts when you would expect someone who meditate develops heat. It's even not clear whether it's really produced in brown fat tissue because adults have little of it.

Present thinking in medicine is rather: "How can we develop a drug that stimulates brown fat tissue to be active to help people lose weight?"

Tulpa need around 6 months of hard focused mental practice of 1 hours per day. That not something that you usually study in scientific studies.

If you look at another recent controversy on Lesswrong we even disagree whether mainstream science knows what losing weight is about. There a lot more scientific effort going into that question but it still isn't conclusively answered.

If you are looking at far out mental phenomena there no reason to expect that they are well investigated by scientists.

google will be responsible.

...I'd love to know what that means, and who in google makes the decision of what it means.

Why does it need to be a hidden random timer? Reward yourself if you stayed on task for the past 30 minutes. (Hmm, I think we've just reinvented the Pomodoro Technique.)

Incidentally, have you (or others who use schemes like this) considered using intermittent reinforcement? Like, instead of just rewarding yourself upon meeting the victory condition, you flip a coin to see if you get the reward. It seems the obvious thing to do if you're going for the whole inner pigeon thing.

I can't really offer anything more than a personal anecdotes, but here is what I usually do for when I try to grab attention of a group of my peers:

• If you are talking to several people gathered in circle, and it is my turn to say something important, I make a small step forward so that I physically place myself in the center of the group.
• When I am speaking, I try to mantain eye contact with all people gathered around, If I focus too much only on the person I am speaking to, everyone else turns their attention towards them as well.
• I rarely do it myself, as I suppose it is a technique more tailored for public speeches, but conservative use of hand gestures to signify what you are talking about, probably won't hurt.
• I probably sound like a self absorbed jerk writing this, but if I want the attention to focus on myself, and not my interlocutor I often use "me" language. Compare and contrast ["What you say about vegans is true, but you may conisder..." - now everybody looks at the person who said something about vegans] ["I think that I agree with what was said about vegans, but I also think..." - now everybody looks at me as I explain my position].

But those are all just little little tricks, when the surest way of attracting attention of the audience is simply to have something important and interesting to say.

You're really not giving enough specific information. There are countless reasons why that might happen so any advice you take here could lead to erratic behavior.

In addition to what other people said, this sounds like you might be too verbose or bad at gauging which topics interest other people and to what extent. They might look at the other person because they wish them to interrupt you and move on.

If you start talking loudly, perhaps a little louder than you think you should be talking, attention will usually shift to you. If you say something relatively short and relatively interesting, you gain some credit, and then later people will be more likely to listen to you. This requires some timing - you have to start talking just as the previous speaker is finishing, or even a little before. Mistiming could make you look like (and be) a shouting idiot.

If two or more people use the same strategy (starting off loud), then you can use the opportunity to appear (and be) gracious by telling the other person to go ahead. This also subtly puts you in a position of control; they got to talk, but you decided who should talk.

(This is all based on personal experience, of course; YMMV.)

There are a variety of plausible explanation.

The first would be that it's just an issue of perception. There a plenty of people with low self esteem who hold inaccurate beliefs about how much attention other people pay to them.

A second would be generally proxies for low testosterone. If you have a louder and deeper voice people are more likely to listen to you. There are also body language changes and various other things that are hard to fake.

I think body language tends to be pretty relevant here; it's possible you are not noticing the other person's body language indicating that they're about to start speaking. (And of course, if you want to have it be your turn to speak, using body language to signal this is also relevant.)

I don't expect him to beat a professional (and a very successful) debater.

The word we'd need to better define is "beat".

Will WLC appear to win the debate? Likely. Will he appear to overwhelm his opponent? Likely. Will he succeed at framing the debate in a way that suits his position? Overwhelmingly likely.

The debate takes place in front of his home crowd (an Evangelical theological seminary). WLC will gallop his way to "victory" again, methinks.

If he follows Chris Hallquist's advice of insisting on speaking first and gives a talk as good as this one with edits to suit Lane Craig, I predict it would go down pretty well.

However, I assign a low probability to this happening.

Look into memrise.

It has an app, it has a lot of the bells and whistles that Anki lacks (like a scoring/gamification system) that could be helpful with the population you are teaching, and it is all around a solid SRS system. The only thing I think it lacks are those Easy/Good/Hard buttons that Anki has to differentiate between how well you know the answer, but that's something I can live without. I use both it and Anki on a day to day basis.

That leftmost of the five graphs, the one that shows in its shaded area the proportion of the hydra sample that still lives, confuses me. What could possibly cause a linear decrease in population? A constant probability of death given previous survival (podgps) would produce a decreasing exponential curve, but this requires a podgps for each individual that is exactly hyperbolically growing over time, for example through an internal candleclock that is at birth set to a uniformly distributed time between 0 and 1400 years.

(Yes, hyperbolically. As the time interval lengths during which we record whether the hydra died go to 0, the ratio of podgps between the last time segment and the, say, 3rd goes to infinity. The crux of the matter lies in "given previous survival" and if we leave that part out, the result would indeed be a constant line.)

Maybe the researchers found by experiment or hearsay that the hydra has a constant podgps, the graphmakers failed to record that last bit and simply took the negative integral of that absolute probability of death to generate that ridiculous population curve and then the authors found that that integral curve hits 0 at 1400 years and postulated that as their livespan.

(By the way, it's also troubling that they also left out the bit of the curve that would have indicated infant mortality.)

Is the Iron law of oligarchy essentially a Goodhart's Law applied to humans? Like: You want a group of humans to accomplish something useful, so you create a system to resolve conflicts, e.g. a democratic majority vote. Sooner or later people learn how to win the majority vote by optimizing for winning the majority vote, without accomplishing much of what you originally wanted them to do. -- And if you try to fix this by adding some safety mechanism X to the democratic vote, then people will simply optimize for the majority vote plus X. For example in addition to elected politicians known to optimize for popularity, you add unelected bureaucrats who are supposed to be the experts, but somehow those just entrench themselves in the bureaucratic system regardless of their level of expertise.

If so, then essentially there is no safe way to solve this. If we measure something, then Goodhart's Law attacks. If we don't measure something, then... well, just because you are not looking at something, it doesn't mean it's not there... in the absence of explicit rules, the implicit rules will decide; the most popular people will simply be the most popular people.

All we can do is to use are some heuristics, and remember the nameless virtue; i.e. to change or abandon the heuristics when they stop being reasonable. We must keep thinking and updating, and thinking and updating, again and again.

Specifically, I have already noticed the Goodhart's Law in action on StackExchange. Instead of helping other people it's more and more about getting more points than other contributors. For example, you start writing your answer before you even think about it completely, because posting the partial answer and editing it later is better than thinking about it, posting it, and finding that someone else posted their very similar answer 1 minute sooner. So it's "use google, post the first information found, use google more, edit your answer to include the additional information" cycle. And if the question cannot be solved by googling, nominate it for deleting, as off-topic or something. If no one can answer the question fully, then criticize the partial answers of other people as incomplete and downvote them; if you couldn't get points by using your strategy, they don't deserve them either.

Stackoverflow seems to succeed in growing despite the issues that Michael brings up. Yes it's not the place it was three years ago but it's okay that communities change.

If someone who reads Chinese could translate the line on the final page (rot13-ed), please do.

A low entropy microstate takes fewer bits to specify once you're given the macrostate to which it belongs, since low entropy macrostates are instantiated by fewer microstates than high entropy ones. But I don't see why that should be the relevant way to determine simplicity. The extra bits are just being smuggled into the macrostate description. If you're trying to simply specify the microstate without any prior information about the macrostate, then it seems to me that any microstate -- low or high entropy -- should take the same number of bits to specify, no?

A geometric pattern or construction. Maybe a golden spiral. Or something that looks like it's out of Da Vinci's notebooks.

A map, or a star map.

A perspective drawing with very obvious foreshortening.

Something based on the allegory of the cave or the divided line of Plato? The latter probably wouldn't stand without explanation, though.

A version of what you think: the title image from this blog post: http://www.studentguidewebdesign.com/be-rationale-why-creative-rationality-is-important/ , or maybe from this one: http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.ca/2012/08/the-community-of-reason-self-assessment.html

You can subscribe to a monthly newsletter at intelligence.org.

It's one short email a month. While not exactly a notification for a campaign, it should always inform you in time when the matching campaign is running.

Can you explain the concept of antifragility using only 1000 most common English words?

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already in use in Europe for some time

Not for infants.

All beliefs are probability estimates, although it can be hard to trace how a particular belief got to the degree of confidence it's at, and while it might be a nice norm to have in a perfect world I think it's unreasonable to demand that every time someone expresses how confident or unconfident they are in a belief, they should also clarify the entire precise history of that belief's presence in their mind.

If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics

Whenever I post a probability estimate, it is solely for the purpose of making my position more clear, not as something anyone should use to actually update their beliefs. You should always consider probability estimates as rough information about how the person who made the estimate thinks, not as a factual bit of information about the prediction itself.

People who post probability estimates of anything should explain in details how they arrived at them. Otherwise it should be called not probability estimate but pulling it out of your ass.

Probabilities are useful for being precise about the claims that you are making. There no reason why one shouldn't be precise about the claim one is making even when one doesn't use a formal method to arrive at them.

People who post probability estimates of anything should explain in details how they arrived at them.

I recommend operationalizing this by recommending that people ask "Why do you think so?" when they see a probability estimate.