Posts
Comments
“I drive an Infiniti. That’s really evil. There are people who just starve to death – that’s all they ever did. There’s people who are like, born and they go ‘Uh, I’m hungry’ then they just die, and that’s all they ever got to do. Meanwhile I’m driving in my car having a great time, and I sleep like a baby.
It’s totally my fault, ’cause I could trade my Infiniti for a [less luxurious] car… and I’d get back like $20,000. And I could save hundreds of people from dying of starvation with that money. And everyday I don’t do it. Everyday I make them die with my car.”
It's called Intrusive Thoughts, and apparently most people have these:
London psychologist Stanley Rachman presented a questionnaire to healthy college students and found that virtually all said they had these thoughts from time to time, including thoughts of sexual violence, sexual punishment, "unnatural" sex acts, painful sexual practices, blasphemous or obscene images, thoughts of harming elderly people or someone close to them, violence against animals or towards children, and impulsive or abusive outbursts or utterances.[6] Such bad thoughts are universal among humans, and have "almost certainly always been a part of the human condition".[7]
A great example of practical advice backed by deep theories, and something that I can apply immediately to my daily life. Great job!
I agree with Manfred, this should be on the main page.
It's the Face of Boe. I'm absolutely certain about this, absolutely positive. Of course I'll probably turn out to be incorrect
Sam Hughes, talking about the first season finale of Doctor Who, differentiating between the subjective feeling of certainty and the actual probability estimate.
Can you give specific examples of articles that are biased? Your comment and it's parent made me curious about wikipedia's quality :)
Upvoted for "Less Wrong".
It's a perfectly good name for a website, and it's a perfectly good name for an institute.
I see it as taking the Outside View on impossibility. Of course, in real life it usually takes more than a few minutes, but in the Whoniverse it is not unreasonable. Also, asking "How impossible?" seems to me like a good question in some cases.
The Doctor: The security protocols are still online and there's no way to override them. It's impossible.
River: How impossible?
The Doctor: A few minutes.
-Doctor Who, Season 5, Episode 5
"I just read a pop-science book by a respected author. One chapter, and much of the thesis, was based around wildly inaccurate data which traced back to ... Wikipedia. To encourage people to be on their toes, I'm not going to say what book or author."
-Randall Munroe, xkcd
Upvoted for making a testable hypotheses, and proposing to test it.