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Browsed the net too much and found this. Time to weaponise dopamine. Anyone got a list of actions/objects/whatever and the amount of dopamine they produce?
Seriously now, why bother looking for the g-spot when you can just stuff two cheeseburgers down there..
First thing first: it's nice.
My (probably irrelevant) issue with it is that.. it kind of nulls all the effort that went into LW2. It's fine to make something as a prototype and eventually replace it, but "alternative" suggests that it exists side-by-side. This kind of double-effort just seems pointless. Why not just make the LW2 site better, rather than make another site and have two sites that do the same thing?
Also, I don't think commenting with your existing account is okay. Did they just hand you over the database? That does violate consent/trust. Why do more people need to know this particular email-password combination? If I can't trust you to NOT hand over my email-password combo to literally everyone then I'll be sending EY an email with a good argument for quantum suicide,'cause seriously, if a damn email address can't be contained we might as well pack it up right now, no chance to win against an AI.
When exactly did that happen? I haven't been here when the site was "highly active" (which I assume when EY was making the sequences posts) but do we have any statistics about it? I could build a small scraper and make a graph for dates and stuff, but somebody with access to the database could do it much better.
I don't remember ever seeing statistics on that.
Confession thread. I've been in love with LessWrong for about 5 years (my first post was this, found on 4chan. Maybe it isn't exceptional but it always had a place in my heart. In fact, it gave me the courage to get my first job when I was scared of being outside) and I've never admitted it. Now that it's about to go boom I can finally confess that, even though I've been a horrible student. Take that, LW2, you'll never be as awesome.
NEWSFLASH: HPMOR chapter 123 released: Something to protect: Less Wrong.
Excellent job. You got bonus points for writing it in Lisp. I assume you've read SICP?
Old site love thread.
Just curious how many people like, and possibly even prefer, the old site.
I'd also like to know if anyone else has terrible experience with site redesigns. They always, for some reason, end up terrible. Likelyhood of bias: 60%.
What do you mean by "logistics"?
How do you move from a superficial relationship (I see you at work) to a more meaningful relationship? (friends)?
CFAR also has a booklist. Eliezer has one too, but says it's deprecated. There's the 'rationality' tag on on Goodreads, and it's up to you to decide if the books listed live up to it.
Is there a reason that members of the community can't game together online? This post on Overwatch provides at least a small amount of evidence that the community would have enough members interested to form teams, and team-building seems to be one of the goals.
That requires that you (in order of importance)
- Have good computer hardware to run the game
- Have good latency to the servers (for me specifically, but statistically I'd imagine there shouldn't be a big one)
- Have good skill at aiming
- Actually spend quite a bit of time learning all the game mechanics
As an ex-gamer I just realized that I can drop the games (still miss them sometimes) and focus on reading a book or do some better activity. Games are incredible fun, but so (at least from what I've been told) are plenty of drugs that you wouldn't want to do, and once you generalize it a little bit games can be seen as a drug themselves.
Many people disagree with the 'gaming is a waste of time' opinion. I wouldn't say totally, but most games focus on being like chocolate versus a salad to your mind.
A new, better way to read the Sequences
Sorry to nitpick but you haven't said in which way it is better than the on-site Sequences or the PDF.
Meta post:
How often does it happen that:
You're reading a book, and it's not particularly interesting, or there's nothing new in it, and you put it down;
You read a book, and after n amount of (days, months, years) you felt that it wasn't as good as you felt it was when reading it.
I've recently felt a "yeah, cool" feeling about books I'm reading and am curious if it happens to other people.
I've tried GEB. Contrary to what a lot of people feel about it, I did not particularly enjoy the book. I didn't finish it, so perhaps I didn't see the grand finale. My assumptions are that GEB was the first time a lot of fans found out about the concepts described in the book, and therefore they like it because of that. From a reductionalist viewpoint, I still haven't found an adequate answer for "What does GEB have that I can't find anywhere else?". Or perhaps, "if we take n amount of people, one group aware of the concepts in GEB and another unaware of it, assuming neither of them read the book, how much would their final rating differ?".
What are some non-flashcard-style memorization techniques? I'm learning a menu as part of my job as a waiter and it feels more like trial and error. My main problem is that I can't remember the stuff at all.
I've come up with a "open answers" system that I don't really know if it can work. Let's say we have x number of things on the system, like item1, item2, item3...item(x). We also have y number of meals (which vary on the number of ingredients) and so you need to fill in the blanks, like this:
Meal 1: _ _ _ _ (underscores should be here but the "you'll never get what you see" comment system hates them)
This has the advantage of being visible which I personally like. It's also pretty simple and doesn't really require reading much beyond "fill in the blanks". It removes the disorder of "x number of things" and instead moves the question to "where should item(x) belong to?".
My only significant issue with this is that it's a trial and error thing - which I personally dislike because that's how I play chess, and most of my games end up in a loss which disappoints me and makes me think trial and error is meh, but hey I'm just one person, let's not get into typical mind fallacy here.
What do you mean?
Why not?
There's just.. nothing attractive about it? What am I supposed to do with it?
If you don't find something convincing, I might give you a better answer if you explain why you don't find it convincing.
Everything, please. I'm not sure how to approach this at all.
How do you know what you know?
Any evidence that is indeed the case? My take is that it's a coincidence.
Depends on the question, but sometimes you can find things with a well-done web search. If you're asking a question that can be answered with a simple web page then people will rightly tell you off. You can try appealing to them and MIGHT get an answer but it could also result in backslash with them treating you as an up-sucker.
It's similar to but not identical to a catch-22 where you can always ask a question, but you MIGHT be looked upon as an idiot or you can look for the answer on your own and MIGHT find it. Emphasis on MIGHT because in a real catch-22 there's no escape route.
That depends on the relationship between the people involved
I should have mentioned this question was inspired by a conversation with a co-worker and their opinion about the way you should pursue relationships with the other sex. Which properly reflects some sort of larger dating advice conspiracy which tells you how to act.
Power balance isn't something to worry about but feel free to object.
Breaking them down into different cultures sounds okay, but is there some other general consensus?
So I asked him, "In the least convenient possible world, the one where everyone was genetically compatible with everyone else and this objection was invalid, what would you do?"
That's a pretty damn convenient world. It's basically like saying "In a world where serious issue X isn't applicable, what would you do?" which might as well be the better question instead of beating around the bush.
Sorry if this was posted before.
Too long. Clearly LW needs a drop-down or something.
Personal question time: any practical difference between 'ask' question: "Would you go to the beach with me?" Versus 'assume' or 'command' statements: "We're going to the beach on Thursday". Would people comply more with the first statement or the second?
If other societal memes vanish/degrade/change with time, why not quotes? Why do they carry an intellectual value despite the fact they're (big number here) years old?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/ -> Also relevant. Some people might agree with one extreme and disagree with the other. Lincoln's advice is probably not going to be useful to someone who is not sure about if the thing they say is foolish. Your own idea is a slippery slope - a fool will quite rightly be told eventually to shut the hell up. Nothing to revel in, and probably best not to reveal, unless you live in HPMORverse or some 5th-level thinking universe (or whatever the right description for 'what's my opponent thinks I think he thinks.." is)
V gubhtug lbh zrnag gung gurer jnf fbzrguvat abg fb tbbq jvgu gur svany pbasebagngvba.
What was so wrong with the ending of HPMoR? rot13 please.
What are your thoughts about virtual courses? I can see something like PDFs being freely available to download and an IRC channel for communication between students/teachers.
Makes it harder to go to a bar and grab some beers but it saves you the whole financial trouble and various other troubles.
I think the idea is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is the main factor is the "less funded" charities. Appeals to emotion are seen as either manipulative or not extraordinary enough. Appeals to intellect (a million is a statistic?) are looked upon as more favorable because you can tell what actually happens.
Many people might disagree with you but I think you have the right idea here. Some people might just disagree with selectivity in the way you interact with others. Does LessWrongers believe that selective interaction is morally or ethically unjust?
What does social justice even stand for these days? It sounds like a noble cause but it's also somewhat unrefined.
I mixed it up with 'featured articles'. Sorry.
How does the promoted thing even work? There's only one article that was written recently (one year ago), two from 2009 and one from 2007. (all sequences)
It was more about ease-of-access to people you wouldn't keep in contact with. Facebook just makes it much easier.
Good point nonetheless.
My impression is that later in life many people remain in touch with their friends from university and rather few with their friends from high school. If I'm right about this, the social advantages of the public school are shortish-term only. (That doesn't make them unimportant.)
Does that hold true now that we have magical facebook?
Wait a sec.. didn't we have a thread like this some time ago?
I've been reading HPMOR for the past week (currently at TSPE aftermath) and I'd like to recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it yet.
The article looks like they're trying to say how awesome their game is.
Any TECHNICAL difference between that and, say, a decent rogue-like algorithm? I have a feeling that it's scaled-up rather than technical up.
Also, couldn't see a GitHub link, so I'm assuming this is proprietary and therefore have no reason to trust whatever they say.
Can you back up "vegitarias are jsut as healthy or even healthier than non vegitarians."?
I couldn't find 'nutrition' here. Was there a reason this part was ignored?
One last thing: what do you think about synthetic meat? I'm curious because I never see it mentioned - it's basically the 'everyone wins' situation.
FRIENDLY EDIT AND WARNING: I have a feeling this might be a sensitive topic so don't feel bad if a few people go at you or something. (Last guy that touched a sensitive issue didn't do well.)
Marriage: Civilization's BIggest Mistake
Something that bothers me about this is the all-too-common idea that kids are unruly and will cause endless destruction. I remember my parents being anxious to leave me alone at home and me thinking "Umm what? What could I do?" and being proud the house didn't look like whatever's left after a direct hit from a nuke.
Why's that?
Established a useful new habit
I wrote a small shell script that takes input and appends it to a text file that logs stuff I did.
I'm writing quite a bit of them lately. None of them are particularly interesting or unique although they do illustrate how great GNU/Linux is. It makes me regret my Windows days. (Anyone interested can read The Linux Command Line.)
I'm also becoming a fan of dwm although I might switch to 2wm soon.
Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
I've started to try some pareto optimisation in my life.
It's a peppermint plant, they're more like a line drawn on paper rather than a tree's branches.
Think of it like ---- and ====.
They're mainly what used to be the plant when I got it, although there's a few stems here and there, the center of the pot is a bunch of dead 'branches'. Most of the new growth occurs at the side, and I want to know that if I take the dead 'branches' out, they'll be new growth in their place.
Those dialogues are usually about M/F relationships, with demographics taken into account.
I've deleted my previous post here but I'd like to point out the relationship elephant in the room.
It's seemingly a never-ending topic and looking at it from aside, it reminds me of an Escher painting - some sort of strange loop where people continuously argue about what's effective in a relationship with only one gender involved.
It could be that seeds are left in the ground. They can just child there for years! Farmers hate that cause it's a weedy phenomenon.
Any reason why it can't be some deep roots? I have a crazy/stupid idea of using that garden to grow something, and roots would be rather troublesome with digging and stuff.
Excellent! Hope it grows well!
It grows EXTREMELY well - absurdly fast, to honest. I'm surprised there's still room for more growth after a year in the same pot.
By the way, what should I do about dead branches? There's a lot of dead branches and I'm not sure what to do with them.
I'll be straight to the point - dating advice considered harmful.
A lot of dating advice is seemingly more on why "X is better" rather than what you should be actually doing. The well is poisoned and nobody is stopping to think why people die a short amount of time after they drink from it.
No belief pays rent in those cultures, and nobody gets evicted for unpaid debt either.
They're often anti-epistemology and their epistemology covers as much as the emperor's clothes, and any instrumental advice they may have is like a smith handing out unsharpened swords to soldiers.
One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.
- Ken Thompson
Let's throw away 1000 words of advice and see what we can get.
I live in a city, so the growing region is by proxy the closest supermarket. My apartment does have an unattended garden but I'm not quite sure what I could do with it. Every spring there's plenty of growth but some dickhead always mows everything down if summer doesn't make everything dry and uhm.. groundy?
I'm assuming they keep coming back because (A) They hate that mowing dickhead (B) They have some pretty darn long roots there. Seeing as plants don't have emotions B is the right option while A is more wishful thinking.
I have a nice pot of peppermint which the ground looks dense like a bus full of people and it still managed to grow some despite how dense the ground looks and summer fighting it with a water drinking competition.
TLDR: What options do you think a city guy has?
so much regional variation that books don't tend to be so useful unless you already have your foot in the game and can interpret them for your regional context.
I'm curios how true this is. As an aspiring min-maxer (I can't tell if this sounds better than aspiring rationalist) one of my main areas of curiousity are how much the supposedly non-determinal aspects of stuff affect a system as a whole.
Assuming a large and very severe difference then I should first get a book that will help me determine how much my climate will affect my plants. Obviously a plant not tolerant of cold or heat will have trouble growing well so knowing the ins and outs can give me a good comparative advantage.
Do you think I'm just thinking too much and I should just RTFM or do you think my cautiousness is justified?
Can you vouch for the book? I've always wanted to try gardening but had no idea where to start.
I can't find it - where IS the rape part?