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I suppose you could consider the 80,000 hours job board if not adjacent, at least adjacent-adjacent.
According to Wikipedia, the rough timeline is that there were several standards in use by military and civil aviation in the 1940s and earlier, including separate standards for Latin America and elsewhere, and these used Zebra in the US and UK. The International Air Transport Association presented a draft in1947 to the standards body International Civil Aviation Organization that was meant to rectify this, but it still contained Zebra. Apparently this alphabet wasn't good enough, because the ICAO hired a linguistics professor to create a revised alphabet, and it's this one that first contained Zulu, published in 1951.
There were several subsequent revisions following this, where the words were tested in university laboratories in the US and UK, before the final list was broadly adopted in 1956. Interestingly, according to this document written in 1959, the team that was revising the 1951 list attempted to replace Zulu with Zebra, but found that it didn't help the intelligibility of the alphabet, so Zulu was kept in the final standard.
As the next step in the modification, three more words were changed, FOOTBALL, UNIFORM, and ZEBRA were selected for insertion in the alphabet and a new series of tapes, training, and test sessions were instituted. As previously mentioned, the intelligibility of a word is seriously affected by the company it keeps, and it is therefore necessary to test a substitution in the context of the entire alphabet. Articulation scores for individual words should be used only as indicators of the word's performance in a given context.
A study of the comparative scores on the two modifications and the original ICAO alphabet showed that although the six-word modification [including three words + FOOTBALL, UNIFORM and ZEBRA] is superior to the original alphabet, it falls short in performance when compared with the first three-word modification [excluding FOOTBALL, UNIFORM, ZEBRA] -- more confusions were introduced than were removed by the second three-word modification, although these confusions cropped out in unexpected parts of the matrix. The problem is not unlike that of pushing a dent out of a child's celluloid ball -- even a successful push leaves a small dent in another place.
I do find this one generally better, since I think the overall discussion is not that novel and so doesn't need such long explanation. That said, it did lose a key justification from the other post, that Twitter's size makes it akin to the public square, which is why this kind of rule is necessary to contemplate.
I thought it would be about resigning from the responsibilities of your job that you dislike to work fewer hours on only the parts that interest you more.
I wonder whether there would be much pressure for an LLM with the current architecture to represent "truth" vs. "consistent with the worldview of the best generally accurate authors." If ground-level truth doesn't provide additional accuracy in predicting next tokens, I think it would be possible that we identify a feature that can be used to discriminate what "generally accurate authors" would say about a heretofore unknown question or phenomenon, but not one that can be used to identify inaccurate sacred cows.
I downvoted this post because I think this genre of "essay written by GPT" has quickly become tiresome. If someone wants to use GPT as a sort of code completion for essay writing, and thus stands behind all the points, edits it for coherency and to ensure that there are deeper thoughts being explained, it's no big deal. But just reading unedited GPT essays doesn't feel like a great use of anyone's time now that the novelty has worn off.
For language flashcards, you can have the front card be something like "Biblioteca" and the back card "Library [generated picture of a library]." This helps recall even though it's not part of the prompt-- it just seems to stick better in your memory.
The reason that the villagers didn't trust the boy that he didn't have a track record. One reason we don't trust people who are loudly proclaiming certain kinds of doom is that they don't have a track record of accurately predicting things (e.g. Heaven's Gate), and that's an inherently important aspect of the phenomenon this post is describing. If the child had accurately predicted wolves in the past, real world villagers would have paid attention to a 15% warning.
The post is suggesting that certain kinds of risks have low probability, and the predictors don't have a track record of success because it's impossible, but that they have other lines of evidence that can be used to justify their probability estimates. In the case of "nuclear war that hasn't happened despite the scares" the evidence is events like the Cuban missile crisis or Petrov Day. But in the parable, it isn't established that the child has good arguments to justify 5% or 15% wolf appearance rates.
It's very cool, especially as a side project. If I'd known it was created by someone here I would have been more careful about the tone of my comment.
I tried WriteHolo against an idea I had for a blog post and its recommendations were worse than useless. I think for non-fiction writing it's probably a non-starter. It couldn't even give me a concise summary of something readily available on Wikipedia (e.g. the availability heuristic), much less suggest creative connections that are at all coherent.
Yes, it is intended to be nonstandard, and underscores the misery of the world, as if to say they things have gotten so hopeless they can't even muster up the energy to add quotation marks.
Cormac McCarthy successfully published a fiction book with no capitalization (and some reduction in other punctuation), The Road, to critical acclaim. Of course, it didn't lead to a groundswell of novels without capitalization.
Being seen as impeding work and being in the way of money making is the quickest way out of the position where you can affect decision making. Erecting prohibitions would do that.
Disagree. A lot of times management would put someone in the position of writing policy as a matter of pure delegation, in which case they'd want a sensible policy that constrains the business in line with that business' unique risks. Writing too lax of a policy is worse than writing one that has some restrictions that make sense in the context of what they are actually building. Writing good policy will put you in a better position to write policy in the future.
That said, policy about general AI when the company isn't going to build general AI is not good. It's better to focus on realistic scenarios.
I didn't notice the author, nor the tags. My thought when the article asked for a prediction was that they grew up in a Jainist community of some kind, although I realized that Jainists may not have their own television shows, and the probability of someone from LessWrong having grown up in a Jainist community is probably less likely than that they grew up in a cult of some kind. But cults are even less likely to have their own television shows, I surmised, at which point I decided the point about television shows was probably rhetorical. That's when I decided the entire thing might be rhetorical, so it wasn't actually worth making a prediction.
I learned a similar trick from an old LW post. You focus on the static in your visual field. If it starts to resolve into random seeming images, that is the beginning of hypnogagia, and if it starts to resolve into even more concrete imagery you are very close to sleep. Try to keep focusing on it, eventually you will fall asleep. This generally works for me.
P.S.: sometimes children do parrot their parents to an alarming degree, e.g., about political positions they couldn't possibly have the context to truly understand.
It's much better for children to parrot the political positions of their parents than to select randomly from the total space of political opinions. The vast majority of possible-political-opinion-space is unaligned.
They could also easily just desire different things ("have different utility functions"). This is the basis for gains from trade, and, more germane to this example, political parties.
If Effective Evil thinks the most efficient way to do evil is assaulting people's eyeballs with dust specks, and I think the most effective way to do evil would be increasing torture, I can use the money they give me to engineer aeroplane dust distribution technology to reduce torture. If they think 1000 specks equals 1 minute of torture, but I think 10e9 specks equals 1 minute of torture, there is a wide latitude for us to make a trade where I reduce 10 minutes of torture in expectation, and they get more than 10,000 specks-in-eyes. Their conception of evil is maximized, and mine is minimized.
It's hard not to fight the hypothetical because these movements are determined by how committed the protesters are. If we assume infinite commitment of 100% of 12-17 year olds I think this would be very likely to succeed. If we assume realistic levels of commitment this would never happen. So it's very sensitive as a hypothetical to your assumptions.
Seems you are at least missing one if you think telling someone Bill dies at the end of a movie called “Kill Bill” is your last category.
To get overly analytical, you know it’s a possibility Bill dies. In Sixth Sense you may not even consider the possibility what’s-his-name is dead.
I think what you've described is most closely related to the Overton window. Often it is discussed in more neutral terms on LessWrong, meaning without the certitude of personal opinions from this post.
Searching for Overton window on LessWrong will turn up more references. If you find this concept interesting, you may also enjoy the Politics is the Mind-killer sequence, which is all about changing your mind on political issues, if you haven't read that.
Only tangentially related, but I found this recent comment thread on Hacker News very interesting. There are carbon scrubbers you can buy and attach to computer fans to completely eliminate odors without using air fresheners, much less incense or candles.
I've read this book and many other calisthenics and weightlifting focused fitness books. I like Convict Conditioning. It was pretty influential in the online fitness community when it came out, and remains so to some extent. That said, the information and programs in the book are somewhat out-of-date compared to more modern thinking.
I would recommend anyone interested in calisthenics to start with the reddit /r/bodyweightfitness FAQ. They have easy defaults (e.g. the Recommended Routine, or the Primer) which come with more battle-tested explanations and progression schemes. Additionally, having a community you can participate in for motivation or asking questions will make it more likely that you'll stick with a program.
Sticking to the program is by far the hardest part of any workout program, though, so the most important thing is to find something that you can fully commit to regularly, especially if it's something you find intrinsically fun or interesting.
I watched a few of the DHH, Eric Normand and Be a Better Dev videos. DHH's videos are very good, actually I was sucked into watching a couple, but he doesn't have very many. Also, your link points to his old channel, and now all those videos are https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9wALaIpe0Py6E_oHCgTrD6FvFETwJLlx, although he only did one more in that series. The couple Eric Normand videos were pretty good, I could imagine that there are really good ones somewhere in the feed. For Be a Better Dev, the videos seemed pretty low quality, very focused on learning AWS-specific technologies. It gave me the impression that he was just following traffic for what to talk about, the exact opposite of DHH. It's the equivalent of YouTube blogspam.
In the early stages of Quora, it was a legitimately awesome place to get unfiltered answers from people you were interested in. Eventually, the bleeding edge people got bored of it and left it to the vultures, the same people who had SEOed bullshit pages cluttering up google search results. I've never used Clubhouse, but this seems like a risk. Is there some structural reason this won't come to pass?
ScottAlexander had a very interesting response to this post on reddit
I second this. Most negotiation advice is geared toward formal "negotiation" settings, like when you are negotiating sales contracts or business transactions. For those purposes, having negotiation tools is really useful (my favorite is "Bargaining For Advantage" which I learned of from The Personal MBA). But for being a manager, you are almost never explicitly negotiating, and in fact trying to come into your work with that mindset is counterproductive. When you are working with your reports, it would be disastrous. When you are working with other internal teams, it's mostly about informal tit-for-tat kind of long-term favor trading or reputation building (or just getting to fundamental value for the business for both parties and moving forward based on that), not explicit negotiating. These aren't things that are taught under the term "negotiation."
I have used Anki to remember names and faces on multiple occasions. It works well, usually I've only used it at the beginning of being in the environment. For the names of famous people I don't think it passes the cost-benefits test. Gwern recommends only adding a card if it will save you 5 minutes over a lifetime, and so memorizing large corpuses where you may only need a handful of them ever is likely to be a bad tradeoff. The difference between these scenarios is that remembering faces and names is something you need to have instant access to, but misremembering famous people is either acceptable in the case of conversations, or can be referenced when it comes up in my writing or thinking.
My guess is head, painting photograph.
First (Head): Lacks the level of detail of the other two examples. A painting would also possibly be drawn from a reference, although I have no idea what even the style of painting you were referencing. The major distinction here is that the cheeks in the the second (painting) photo have mottling that suggests to me a better reference. The proportions also seem just a bit more exaggerated to me than the other two. The neck of the first one seems larger, and the shoulders have some asymmetry which is hard to interpret. It looks a bit as if her left shoulder is closer, but that doesn't exactly fit with the posture of her face.
Second (Painting): Basically by comparison with the others. It feels intermediate in realisticness.
Third (photograph): This seems like the photograph to me because it captures more detail than I would hold in my mind's eye, unlike the other two. In particular, crisp laugh lines and the detailed contrast of the eyes makes it feel like it had the most real-world reference. There is also the detail of the clothing, and I feel like most people wouldn't draw that if they were drawing a face from their imagination. (That's actually an argument for the first being painting and the second being head, though).
I have thought about a problem related to this very often. There was an Amazon shareholders letter written by Jeff Bezos that elaborates on their culture of high standards. In particular, it talks about the cost of high standards when writing Amazon's "six-page memos." The idea of having teams with high standards on their written memos resonated with me, but I have not been able to apply it that much in my professional career.
My standards are higher than those of the organization around me, and when it came down to spending the relationship capital to criticize people't documents to the level I felt would make them really high-quality, I just can't do it. Some documents achieve the standard already, so it's not unachievable in general. What it really is is that to provide criticism that feels specific and kind, it feels like I would have to understand the underlying issue at the depth that I want that person to explain to me.
Basically, to get to that level of quality, I have to put in a large fraction of the effort of drafting the document, which I don't have time to do. In some cases, I can point out areas that I feel could offer more elaboration, but sometimes the document feels inadequate and I can't explain why without several hours of concentrated effort.
I feel the same issue could come up here. You can tell a really high quality post because it offers insights that are brilliant but unexpected, or it uncovers primary source data that is neglected and unknown, or it's just a really compelling written explanation. But explaining how to create that out of an average post feels like it requires me to become the expert I want the author to be.
Why do you think people don't already do this?
They have to do it to some extent, otherwise replicability would be literally uncorrelated with publishability, which probably isn't the case. But because of the outcomes, we can see that people aren't doing it enough at the margin, so encouraging people to move as far in that direction as they can seems like a useful reminder.
There are two models here, one is that everyone is a homo economicus when citing papers, so no amount of persuasion is going to adjust people's citations. They are already making the optimal tradeoff based on their utility function of their personal interests vs. society's interests. The other is that people are subject to biases and blind spots, or just haven't even really considered whether they have the OPTION of not citing something that is questionable, in which case reminding them is a useful affordance.
I'm trying to be charitable to the author here, to recover useful advice. They didn't say things in the way I'm saying them. But they may have been pointing in a useful direction, and I'm trying to steelman that.
"the predators are running wild" does not mean "most people are acting in good faith, but are not competent enough for good faith to be a useful assumption".
Even upon careful rereading of that sentence, I disagree. But to parse this out based on this little sentence is too pointless for me. Like I said, I'm trying to focus on finding useful substance, not nitpicking the author, or you!
This problem seems to me to have the flavor of Moloch and/or inadequate equilibria. Your criticisms have two parts, the pre-edit part based on your personal experience, in which you state why the personal actions they recommend are actually not possible because of the inadequate equilibria (i.e. because of academic incentives), and the criticism of the author's proposed non-personal actions, which you say is just based on intuition.
I think the author would be unsurprised that the personal actions are not reasonable. They have already said this problem requires government intervention, basically to resolve the incentive problem. But maybe at the margin you can take some of the actions that the author refers to in the personal actions. If a paper is on the cusp of "needing to be cited" but you think it won't replicate, take that into account! Or if reviewing a paper, at least take into account the probability of replication in your decision.
I think you are maybe reading the author's claim to "stop assuming good faith" too literally. In the subsequent sentence they are basically refining that to the idea that most people are acting in good faith, but are not competent enough for good faith to be a useful assumption, which seems reasonable to me.
Typo: "Systemic reviews" should read "systematic reviews".
The article about this on Strengtheory has links to sources (not as footnotes, in the text). May be useful to check out.
When it comes to problems that are primarily related to motivation, the cost-benefit is so far weighted that the cost of implementing the plan probably doesn't seem relevant to consider, but this is a good point.
I like the idea of using Murphyjitsu for modeling shorter iterations, that's probably generally applicable.
That seems mostly about the emotional content of a particular plan, while I see Murphyjitsu as a tool for avoiding the planning fallacy, forcing yourself to fully think through the implications of a plan, or getting more realistic predictions from System 1. I haven't viewed it much as an emotional tool, but maybe other people do find it useful for that.
Whew, glad I didn't invest more time in this. Seems there is lurking complexity everywhere.
At this price point this seems potentially doable. Some ideas in the order I'd try them:
- There is a person that has Kickstarted similar projects and you could contact him to see if they are willing to do a custom one-off. They'd probably be willing to just give you advice if you asked, too. Given that their entire Kickstarter was only $7000, at your price point this seems pretty likely.
- You can download a 3D model online and find a local machine shop to CNC you one. For example, just googling "tungsten machine shop san francisco" turned up http://www.acmanufacturing.com/ which will probably mill tungsten from CAD.
- Same, but find a 3D printing company that can make one for you. There are a few online (https://www.wolfmet.com/ e.g.), and you'd have to request a quote, but it may be a better option if the feedstock for CNC ends up being cost prohibitive. I'm not sure if this kind of place will do individual retail orders.
This is a pretty fun format. Actually, I really like this gomboc idea and briefly considered doing a Kickstarter on it after reading your post. But then I realized that Kickstarter would only really make sense if everyone were willing to pay $800. The market is so niche, that it would have to be a passion project to be worth the hassle I think.
I admit there might be reasons to invest in meditation practice that are not based on scientifically proven benefits (e.g., curiosity, sense of novelty, sense of belonging to a community). At the same time, I hope that most LW readers attach very little weight to those non-evidence-based reasons to meditate, just like I do.
I suppose I should admit the main reason I started meditating a long time ago was curiosity. I read Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (reviewed on SSC here) and thought "well, this person sounds like they are explaining mental states that seem pretty unbelievable to me, I wonder if this is all BS." I was/am mentally healthy and emotionally stable more than the average person. I don't meditate that consistently anymore, only when things are more stressful than usual. Having it in the toolbox, like fitness, is enough for me. I did enough practice to know that what MCTB is pointing at is a real phenomenon, but that's it. I actually think that viewing it as a hobby is the healthiest way to approach the kind of serious practice needed for enlightenment.
Let's start with the easy to verify claims that I generalise as...
In my experience, these claims are false. I occasionally tried to use mindfulness to help me with dieting or exercising, since those are also things I do, and it never helped in a way I could discern.
Do you have some sources to back this up? I've heard many declared reasons why people begin their meditation practice, and it was quite a diverse set, none seemed dominant.
Thank you for challenging me on this, that was based only on personal observation, which as I admit above doesn't even square with my own experience! This survey has concrete data on why people meditate in Fig. 1. The top reason is "General wellness and general disease prevention." None of them are specifically happiness related, so maybe that's an overly specific claim.
I don't buy this at all. If the only observable benefit of me meditating is that I used to self-report average well-being of 5.17 out of 10, and now I self-report 7.39 on average
Based on my mental model of meditation, you probably would be dissatisfied with the results. In section IV of the post above, Scott Alexander summarizes thus:
Ingram dedicates himself hard to debunking a lot of the things people would use to fill the gap. Pages 261-328 discuss the various claims Buddhist schools have made about enlightenment, mostly to deny them all. He has nothing but contempt for the obviously silly ones, like how enlightened people can fly around and zap you with their third eyes. But he’s equally dismissive of things that sort of seem like the basics. He denies claims about how enlightened people can’t get angry, or effortlessly resist temptation, or feel universal unconditional love, or things like that. Some of this he supports with stories of enlightened leaders behaving badly; other times he cites himself as an enlightened person who frequently experiences anger, pain, and the like. Once he’s stripped everything else away, he says the only thing one can say about enlightenment is that it grants a powerful true experience of the non-dual nature of the world. [9eb1: I've excluded the possible counterargument here for brevity]
There are external benefits I think meditation has given me that feel like they are real, but the effect size is too small for studies to realistically find them. I can fall asleep reliably by using meditation as a tool. I can tactically break my own rumination thought cycles by meditating as a tool (or I can workout, but sometimes you've already worked out that day). I definitely feel like I am harder to surprise (lack of "jump"), but that's not a particularly practical superpower.
I've meditated for >300 hours (maybe 4 or 5). I don't regret my hours. It is a hobby, it satisfies my curiosity, it makes me happy when I need it. Lack of personal transformation is fine.
To be clear, my values with regard to self-rated wellness are different from yours. I am glad to improve my self-rated wellness even if it has no measurable outward impact on my behavior. My happiness is super important to me. If I move the needle on that, that's great even if I'm still an asshole. I have no interest in being a miserable saint.
There are several characteristics of nutrition and eating that make scientific scrutiny very difficult, and those characteristics are not shared with meditation
Those differences are subsumed in the "high short-term costs" side of my statement. The exact costs are different, that's all. You can tell people not to do all the things you mentioned during a diet study, but they won't follow your instruction.
I think it is right to be skeptical of the science around meditation. Meditation perfectly fits into the Bermuda triangle of phenomenon for which our current scientific institutions and practices are not well-prepared to study.
It shares with psychological studies the challenge that the thing under investigation is the internal mental state of the subject. When there are studies with objective endpoints, usually the objective endpoint isn't the thing we want to get out of it, it's just a more reliable metric so we know the subjects aren't fooling themselves. As Science-based Medicine says:
But the more concrete and physiological the outcome, the smaller the placebo effect. Survival from serious forms of cancer, for example, has no demonstrable placebo effect. There is a “clinical trial effect,” as described above – being a subject in a trial tends to improve care and compliance, but no placebo effect beyond that. There is no compelling evidence that mood or thought alone can help fight off cancer or any similar disease.
In the case of meditation, people usually begin the practice to have mental well-being or greater happiness, which is among the outcomes least amenable to reliable objective observation. If it happens to also do something that could be reliably measured with a medical instrument, that would be a bit outside the point.
Meditation shares with nutritional science (also a wrecked landscape of low-quality studies that fail to answer our real questions) that performing the study relies on the subjects to reliably do something with a huge, short-term cost and an uncertain, long-term benefit, which humans are bad at.
High-quality studies on nutritional interventions rarely answer the questions that normal fitness-minded folks want answered, because we want the answer to the question "assuming I perfectly adhere to diet X, what results would I obtain." Studies can only measure "assuming we take a random sampling of people with varying levels of conscientiousness and investment in their diet, and tell them to do X, what happens" which is too big a difference to be useful.
Similarly with meditation, what meditators want to know is "is it worth my time meditating if I do it approximately perfectly" not "is it worth someone 'intervening' to tell me about meditation taking into account the possibility that I'm too lazy to really follow through with it." The second has more clinical relevance, but less personal relevance for the kind of people on Less Wrong.
All of that is a long precursor to saying "Is there any scientific evidence for benefits of meditation?" and "Are there good reasons for a typical reader of LessWrong to invest their time and effort into meditation practice?" are subtly different questions, so it would be wrong to literally equate them. The second is the answer we really care about, the first is one input which would, if available, fully resolve the question instead of leaving is in a state of uncertainty. You're entitled to arguments, but not (that particular) proof.
There is objective evidence that meditation does something real (EEG studies of Tibetan monks, for example), but the evidence it does something both real and valuable is probably not up to that standard.
Another, smaller, point I'd like to make is that this post is attempting to perform its own meta-analysis, but with a higher quality bar than academic meta analyses. I don't think crowdsourcing the best studies of meditation is likely to work this way. If you are interested in running a project to identify the top studies of meditation, I think you would need to identify all the relevant studies, get individuals who are interested in your project to review them, then collate the results. Just asking "the crowd" for the best studies they happen to have on hand I think is likely to fail regardless of what the evidence is.
As for cutoffs, just look up max healthy forehead temperature, maybe 37.5. More important is to have prominently available hand sanitizer pumps and encourage people to use it before and after the event, and remind them not to touch their faces.
There are several sources of spaghetti code that are possible:
- A complex domain, as you mention, where a complex entangled mess is the most elegant possible solution.
- Resource constraints and temporal tradeoffs. Re-architecting the system after adding each additional functionality is too time expensive, even when a new architecture could simplify the overly complex design. Social forces like "the market" or "grant money" mean it makes more sense to build the feature in the poorly architected way.
- Performance optimizations. If you code needs to fit inside a 64kb ROM, you may be very limited in your ability to structure your code cleanly.
- Lack of requisite skill. A person may not be able to provide a simple design even though one exists, even given infinite time.
If I had to guess, number 2 is the largest source of spaghetti code that Less Wrong readers are likely to encounter. Number 4 may be account for the largest volume of spaghetti code worldwide, because of the incredible amounts of line-of-business code churned out by major outsourcing companies. But even that is a reflection of economic realities. Therefore, one could say that spaghetti code is primarily an economic problem.
Sorry, I could have been clearer. The empirical evidence I was referring to was the existence of human civilization, which should inform priors about the likelihood of other animals being as intelligent.
I think you are referring to a particular type of "scientific evidence" which is a subset of empirical evidence. It's reasonable to ask for that kind of proof, but sometimes it isn't available. I am reminded of Eliezer's classic post You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof.
To be honest, I think the answer is that there is just no truth to this matter. David Chapman might say that "most intelligent" is nebulous, so while there can be some structure, there is no definite answer as to what constitutes "most intelligent." Even when you try to break down the concept further, to "raw innovative capacity" I think you face the same inherent nebulosity.
The database search thing is, according to my understanding, widely misinterpreted. As Wikipedia says:
Although the purpose of Grover's algorithm is usually described as "searching a database", it may be more accurate to describe it as "inverting a function". In fact since the oracle for an unstructured database requires at least linear complexity, the algorithm cannot be used for actual databases.
To actually build Quantum Postgres, you need something that can store an enormous number of qubits, like a hard drive.
Your take is contrarian as I suspect you will admit. There is quite a bit of empirical evidence, and if it turned out that humans were not the most intelligent it would be very surprising. There is probably just enough uncertainty that it's still within the realm of possibility, but only by a small margin.
This sort of existence argument is reasonable for hypothetical supehuman AIs, but real-world human cognition is extremely sensitive to the structure we can find or make up in the world. Sure, just saying "politics" does not provide a clear reference class, so it would be helpful to understand what you want to avoid about politics and engineer around it. My hunch is that avoiding your highly-technical definition of bad discourse that you are using to replace "politics" just leads to a lot of time spent on your politics analysis, with approximately the same topics avoided as a very simple rule of thumb.
I stopped associating or mentioning LW in real life largely because of the political (maybe some parts cultural as well) baggage of several years ago. Not even because I had any particular problem with the debate on the site or the opinions of everyone in aggregate, but because there was just too much stuff to cherry-pick from in our world of guilt by association. Too many mixed signals for people to judge me by.
I was very confused about your proposed setup after reading the wikipedia article on heat exchangers, since I couldn't figure out what thermal masses you proposed exchanging heat between. But I found this article which resolved my confusion.
It is still useful to memorize the flashcards. The terminology provides hooks that will remind you of the conceptual framework later. If you want to practice actually recognizing the design patterns, you could read some of http://aosabook.org/en/index.html and actively try to recognize design patterns. When you want to learn to do something, it's important to practice a task that is as close as possible to what you are trying to learn.
In real life when a software design pattern comes up, it's usually not as something that you determine from the code. More often it's by talking with the author, reading the documentation, or inferring from variable names.
The strategy described in http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html, assuming you have read that, seems to suggest that just using Anki to cover enough of the topic space probably gives you a lot of benefits, even if you aren't doing the mental calculation.
Perhaps the community to ask on mostly doesn't depend on the expertise of the denizens, but your ability to get a response. If so, it matters more whether your question is something that will "hook" the people there, which depends more on the specific topic of the question than on the knowledge required to answer it. For example, if it were about the physics of AI, you'd be likely to get an answer on LessWrong. If it's about academic physics, reddit might be better. If you are using it to write fanfiction, just ask on a fanfiction forum.
It matters quite a bit how hypothetical the scenario is. For example, is it a situation that is actually physically impossible? Does it likely have a specific concrete answer even if you (or anyone) knows it, or will it end up being a matter of interpretation? Would a satisfying answer to the question advance the field of physics or any other field?
Anyway, another option is Twitter. Personally, I'd ask on LessWrong, PhysicsOverflow, or Reddit.
Yes, that seems like a reasonable perspective. I can see why that would be annoying.
I really appreciate that this post was on the front page, because I wouldn't have seen it otherwise and it was interesting. From an external viewer perspective on the "status games" aspect of it, I think the front page post didn't seem like a dominance attempt, but read as an attempt at truth seeking. I also don't think that it put your arguments in a negative light. Your comments here, on the other hand, definitely feel to an outside observer to be more status-oriented. My visceral reaction upon reading your comment above this one, for example, was that you were trying to demote IFS because it sounds like you make a living promoting this other non-IFS approach.
That said, I remember reading many of your posts on the old LessWrong and I have occasionally wondered what you had gotten up to, since you had stopped posting.