Posts

Comments

Comment by Haladdin on New study on choice blindness in moral positions · 2012-09-24T17:28:39.288Z · LW · GW

Online dating. Put up a profile that suggests a certain personality types and interests. In face-to-face meetup, even if you're someone different than was advertised, choice blindness should cover up the fact.

This tactic can also be extended to job resumes presumably.

Comment by Haladdin on New study on choice blindness in moral positions · 2012-09-24T17:15:37.347Z · LW · GW

Confronted with a choice between (a) "the person asking me directions was just spontaneously replaced by somebody different, also asking me directions," and (b) "I just had a brain fart,"

Schizophrenia. Capgras Delusion.

I wonder how schizophrenics would comparatively perform on the study.

Comment by Haladdin on Can we teach Rationality at the University of Reddit? · 2012-08-22T11:23:14.838Z · LW · GW

There has been an interest check in a rationality course Course on logic and critical thinking which garnered significant interest: 261 upvotes at the time of this post. A course in rationality certainly seems to hold the interest of redditors, especially since 200+ upvotes are quite rare outside of the big 30 subreddits.

The original poster of the interest check is websnarf. If anyone is interested in helping him out, PM him, as he stated that he didn't create the syllabus yet

Of course, running a concurrent course is also an option since he seems to be focusing on logic and logical fallacies.

Comment by Haladdin on Notes on the Psychology of Power · 2012-07-29T22:46:35.976Z · LW · GW

I've seen too many comments like yours on Facebook or on Reddit without a hint of irony to think that it's a joke. Or maybe I'm just terribly dull when it comes to differentiating what is and isn't humor.

I suspect it's the latter.

Comment by Haladdin on Notes on the Psychology of Power · 2012-07-29T10:24:54.782Z · LW · GW

Feminism is necessary because of auto-correct feature that suggests closely related words that are used more often?

The word "patriarchy" and its derivatives are used extensively by feminists and feminist scholars. If anything, the fact that the word "patriarchy" pops up more often can indicate that there is more awareness of current and historic gender asymmetry. Also, the word patriarchy is bound to be used more often simply due to historical context.

There are legitimate reasons for the feminist movement to continue. This is not one of them.

Comment by Haladdin on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) · 2012-07-25T06:49:20.998Z · LW · GW

Hi, LessWrong,

I used to entertain myself by reading psychology, and philosophy articles on Wikipedia and following the subsequent links. When I was really interested in a topic though, I used google to further find websites would provide me more information on said topics. Around late 2010, I found that some of my search results led to this very website. Less Wrong proved to be a little too dense for me to enjoy; I needed to fully utilize my cognitive capabilities to even begin to comprehend some of the articles posted here.

Since I was looking for entertainment, I decided to ignore all links to LW for quite a while, but the frequency of LW result coming up in my queries became more and more frequent with time. I finally decided to read some of the posts, and some of the articles (determinism, cryonics, and death related ones) described conclusions I've derived independently. It was quite shocking as I thought of myself as a rather unique thinker. Thinking more about this, I came to a conclusion. Instead of having a "eureka" moment every couple of months to come at the same conclusion people arrived at centuries ago, I decided to optimize my time - compressing the learning/awakening period by reading the sequences instead of attempting to figure out everything myself.

Funnily enough, I detest reading the same articles that I enjoyed reading before now that I've given myself the goal of reading them. I'm sure that the explanation and the solution to this conundrum can be found on this website as well.

Lastly, a note to ciphergoth - I do not identify myself as a rationalist, as the second sentence of this post implies. I found out that labeling myself limits my words, my actions, and more importantly, my thoughts, so I refuse to label myself by my political ideologies, gender, nationality, etc. I even go by a few different names so I can become more detached to my name itself as I found people to be irrationally attached to names as it is nothing but an identifying label. I will use rationalist techniques and tools, and I may even grow to adopt your ideologies, but I will not identify myself as a rationalist. At least until the benefits of applying labels to myself becomes more concrete.

Nice to meet all of you.

Comment by Haladdin on Advice On Getting A Software Job · 2012-07-11T13:51:15.224Z · LW · GW

If I want to become a system administrator instead of a programmer, which of these advises would still apply? Also, is it feasible to become a system administrator if I don't have a bachelor's in a related area of study?