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I think we need to put our money and investment where our mouths are on this. Either Less Wrong (or another centralized discussion platform) are very valuable and worth tens of thousands of dollars in investment and moderation, or they are not that important and not worth it. It seems that every time we have a conversation about Less Wrong and the importance of it, the problem is that we expect everyone to do things on a volunteer basis and things will just magically get going again. It seems like Less Wrong was going great back when there was active and constant investment in it by MIRI and CFAR, and once that investment stopped things collapsed.
Otherwise we are just in a situation like that of Jaguar with the cupholders, where everyone is posting on forums for 10 years about how we need cupholders, but there is no one whose actual, paid job is to get cupholders in the cars.
Donated $200
Donated $100!
We are in study room 251 in Hayden library.
We're at table 22!
Parking is $2 per hour at the bookstore right next to the MU. You usually have to wait a few minutes for a spot, but that's what I'd do.
The 6th. Major kudos for catching that.
Taken!
I successfully held a lotus pose! I put it on a daily to do list that I would have to check off, and I got myself to do it by using the idea of actions as policies. There were a few days where I forgot, but I just accepted that I couldn't do anything about that and continued on. This has led to almost a month of daily stretching for 18 minutes a day. I have previously tried to regularly hold the necessary stretch many times in the past and failed! Now working to make the pose easier and be able to do it both ways. :)
I do. Trying to ensure that interest turns into attendance!
Sorry, just saw this. This location is actually right next to my house, but I have some friends at ASU who also might be coming if your ride doesn't turn out!
I'm working to be able to do a full lotus meditation pose. I have some weird stuff with the way my hips work and am generally inflexible, so this is not trivial for me. There is a certain stretch that several sources online say will allow me to do it if I stick to doing it for 5-6 weeks every day. The problem is that holding the pose isn't easy, and I've tried in the past and been unable to reliably stick to it. I've been using personal TDT in order to get myself to do it every day, even when tired and ready to go to sleep. So far this has worked wonderfully. I'm also realizing that keeping a streak has its own very strong motivational value for some reason. I'm not sure whether this is particular to me or not. Additionally, I've been trying to use as much positive reinforcement as possible. I don't think that has been quite as successful though. I'm going to focus on finding ways to remedy this.
I will be there!
I am actually running a little late myself. Will be there soon.
I'll be there.
I don't have a laptop with a webcam, but hopefully someone will. could you send me your skype name?
I think Jayson Virissimo might have some experience, and I'm pretty sure he'll be there. I edited the event to make it clear that we're meeting in the paradise bakery.
It's done by sequence instead of chronologically. I think it's very good that it's been done that way, and I've already read all those epubs, but it's not precisely what I'm talking about.
I won't be able to make it (out of town for the fourth), but I will refer my friend to this.
Somewhat in this vein, an epub edition of all of Eliezer's posts, or at least this list would be fantastic. The sequences are great, but I know I'd be very interested in going through the posts from the beginning for inspiration. I started by copying and pasting the first 100 or so into a document, but then realized that I didn't really know what I was doing and haven't had the time to learn about electronic publishing methods yet. If anyone does know what they are doing in this area, I enthusiastically offer my help with the project.
Awesome! See you tomorrow.
I know that sense of the word didn't even cross my mind. In fact, I even had to google "ableist". Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Hopefully they can spare a few hours! (unless they really are lame. haha). I look forward to meeting you over the summer!
Where would you be coming from?
Yes! Excited to have another one soon.
Mostly just seeing how many people are in the area, getting to know each other, swapping memes, and in large part figuring out what the agenda should be. Is there anything in particular you'd like to do?
Awesome! See you then!
We'll hopefully have many more!
I believe that if I donate to charity, more will be donated to charity. If I do research in a field, more research will get done in that field. If I start a company, more companies will get started. (All of this in in expectation). This holds even more true for a particularly charity, a particular research program I consider important, or a particular need I think needs to be filled.
Which spill over effect due to your specific involvement will be the largest?
It was absolutely worthwhile. Completely changed my life... all of our lives. In fact, I had one friend who tried to go it alone and who now seriously regrets the decision.
For figuring out what you should be doing, I think that diversity will help greatly. I've had many "heavy," value laden discussions with my friends, and those were made much more productive and insightful by the diverse values we hold. So I think for your goals diversity is going to be very helpful. However, once you figure out what you should be doing, homogeneity has produced the best results for me.
Although I'd like to emphasize that homogeneity can actually help a great deal in working out personal value systems as well. For example, my friend who I am most similar to and I will sometimes intentionally explore different angles of approach to things. It's kind of like being able to live two lives at once and we've learned a great deal from it.
So I guess the general idea is that diversity is good for getting your bearings, but similarity helps you efficiently make your way along that chosen route.
From my experience effectively trying to create a "task-force" out of a highly rational and cohesive group of friends... high homogeneity is going to extremely important if we want to achieve something at a really high level. For example, I have friends who agree with me on everything epistemic (we update the same way), and who have the same general goals as me, but have a slightly different talent set. This results in very different optimal life paths for the each of us, and that makes the "task-force" not really work like a "task-force." As you said, it's just much harder to find a project that fully uses diverse talents.
However, people who are homogeneous can perform at an incredible level. This is because two people who have almost exactly the same knowledge, goals, and talents reinforce each other. For example, an artist who works with a programmer might create a beautiful program, but two programmers who dual code can quite possibly outperform the diverse combination just by the sheer increased excellency of execution. My experience with intellectual pursuits certainly indicates that they work more like this, which I would expect. However, even my logistical, technical and creative experiences which I thought would benefit from diversity also seem to work better when everyone is more homogeneous. The coordination problems of diversity seem to overwhelm the benefits in all but very rare cases.
I think this is because even members of a homogeneous group can begin to specialize and search for outside information that is directly relevant to the task at hand. This is functionally very close to the advantage of having diversity in the group (not quite as good, but close). Then the homogeneity allows them to communicate the new information more effectively to each other, and to better harmonize their specialized actions with each other. These advantages more than close the small gap in knowledge and experience they have when compared to a diverse group in the vast majority of typical situations... or so my experience seems to indicate.
Apparently for this as well. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Yudkowsiah
Do you think they'd be interested in it?
My friend and I had to catch a bus earlier today, and as we were walking, I thought about this specific post and exercise and realized that since we were under a pretty tight time constraint, it made no sense to walk to the bus, and we should instead run because that increased the probability of making the bus on time. We got to the station, and the bus arrived about 3 minutes later. We arrived where we needed to be with one minute to spare. That's a pretty big success in my book.
Out of curiosity, can you elaborate a little on the irrationality with sleep cycles? I feel like I might have a very similar problem.
We're all still students, so odd schedules likely won't be a problem (at least, for us).
EDIT: What times work well for you?
I'm in Phoenix, would be great to try and have one here.
There is the eventual problem that senior professors spend more and more of their time on administrative work / providing guidance to their lab, rather than doing research themselves. But this isn't going to be an issue until you get tenure, which is, if you do a post-doc, something like 10-15 years out from starting graduate school.
This might not even be a significant problem when the time does come around. High fluid intelligence only lasts for so long, and thus using more crystallized intelligence later on in life to guide research efforts rather than directly performing research yourself is not a bad strategy if the goal is to optimize for the actual research results.
At the same time however, you might be able to interact with researchers more effectively. For example, you could spend some of those research weeks visiting selected labs and seminars and finding out what's up. It's true that this would force you to be conscientious about opportunities and networking, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Networks formed with a very distinct purpose are probably going to outperform those that form more accidentally. You wouldn't be as tied down as other researchers, which could give you an edge in getting the ideas and experiences you need for your research, while simultaneously making you more valuable to others when necessary (For example, imagine if one of your important research contacts needs two weeks of solid help on something. You could oblige whereas others with less fluid obligations could not.).