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Comment by acephalus on Do I really not believe in God? Do you? · 2012-12-10T17:28:46.400Z · LW · GW

Asking the question "to whom am I thankful", more than feeling thankfulness, is the superstitious behavior here. If we allow thankfulness to have no object, the conflict is resolved.

You may be thankful to the other driver. You may be thankful to yourself or the relevant parts of your body that helped avoid a worse outcome. You may be thankful to your past self, or your alternative universe self. You may be thanking the laws of physics. Maybe we can just drop the to preposition and be done with that.

As to why you are feeling thankful, I find Antisuji and DaFranker explanations plausible.

As to what should be done about it, I can't identify negative consequences to being thankful. Do you suspect it trains you to for risk or clumsiness?

Comment by acephalus on [LINK] Two Modes of Discourse: Taking everything personally v. debate as sport · 2012-12-10T17:02:27.280Z · LW · GW

the person with the most ethical or empathetic position in the debate can nonetheless end up being silenced.

Can you provide an example?

Comment by acephalus on Recommendations for good audio books? · 2012-09-17T02:20:11.344Z · LW · GW

This may fit better in an Open Thread, since you're not even asking for a specific kind of book.

Edit: since I'm posting here, might as well recommend Confessions of a Conjuror by Derren Brown, narrated by the author. excerpt

Comment by acephalus on Fallacies of reification - the placebo effect · 2012-09-13T22:41:11.561Z · LW · GW

Relevant excerpts on colour and vomit.

And here's a relevant study on Pharmaceutical Packaging Color and Drug Expectancy which has some references.

Comment by acephalus on Random LW-parodying Statement Generator · 2012-09-12T20:08:02.878Z · LW · GW

Absence of sex is evidence of the Least Convenient Possible World.

The thing knows its audience.

Comment by acephalus on Link: Toward Non-Stupid, Non-Blank-Slatey Polyandry · 2012-09-07T08:36:20.840Z · LW · GW

Keep them in the freezer perhaps?

Gum may be better suited for a DNB/Nicotine testing scenario though, if it acts faster.

Comment by acephalus on [META] Karma for last 30 days? · 2012-08-31T12:22:30.901Z · LW · GW

Seems fine now.

*adding keywords to suck in ctrl+f karma: fixed,working,back,patch,works,repaired,restored,okay

Comment by acephalus on What is the evidence in favor of paleo? · 2012-08-27T21:39:12.269Z · LW · GW

You should start the excerpt earlier to explain what is meant by EOC:

The starting point of the heuristic is to pose the evolutionary optimality challenge:

(EOC) If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?

Gwern discusses these on his drug heuristics page.

Comment by acephalus on How to read a book · 2012-06-27T13:28:37.673Z · LW · GW

How is religiosity of the author relevant?

Comment by acephalus on New Singularity.org · 2012-06-19T20:48:43.402Z · LW · GW

Ugly as HELL [1]. I have not actually read any of the text, I will simply list elements I dislike, in the order I saw them. My opinion matters little, I suggest you get some critique from Hacker News [2].

  • logo does not stand out

  • grey buttons have a weird volume, I think the white border causes this

  • RSS logo stands out more than SI logo, I have not seen RSS logos used to denote a blog in years

  • text in search box has a weird white glow, glass effect is ugly, magnifying glass icon is aliased, it changing to orange on hover makes it look like you just learned about complementary colors.

  • text in slideshow is aliased (Win7, Chrome latest)

  • grey android thing in second slideshow panel is creepy

  • big light blue clipart-thingies look childish

  • font on http://singularity.org/what-we-do/ is weird, the letter c looks like e

  • meaningless math symbols in the background make me cringe

My impressions the moment I saw the main page: old, cheap, childish, scammy. I would prefer clean, if not minimalist.

[1] http://helldesign.net/ everything they do is ugly, their own website included

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/ they won't like it

Comment by acephalus on Finding Research Papers · 2012-05-13T19:11:01.258Z · LW · GW

Ask on r/scholar on reddit. All my requests have been filled very fast.

Comment by acephalus on Most transferable skills? · 2012-05-13T08:06:25.741Z · LW · GW

Based on personal experience: dynamic balance acquired in one sport is transferrable to seemingly different sports, in the sense that it makes learning much faster through better feedback.