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A philosophy degree is definitely better than nothing. But I should have used that time to major in something more lucrative.
Majored in philosophy. I don't think I learned much worthwhile and it's makes it harder to get a job.
If anyone wants to teach English in China, my school is hiring. The pay is higher than the market rate and the management is friendly and trustworthy. Must have a Bachelor's degree and a passport from and English speaking country. If you are at all curious, PM me for details.
What vegetarian things can I eat that won't leave me hungry an hour later?
In general girls are also more likely to be aware that language has many lavers of meaning besides communicating facts.
Please say "women" unless you are talking about female humans that have not reached adulthood.
A lot of developers have tried to make this app. I first noticed a version in 2007, back when Facebook had just started with apps.
Edit:* Holy shit, apparently it's worth $30 million.
I've found "machine problem-solving" goes over with laypeople better than "machine intelligence."
This is my first LessWrong discussion post, so constructive criticism is greatly appreciated.
This is above-average quality for a discussion post. I look forward to reading your future posts.
There's at least one predictable value shift I can think of coming from human biology, namely puberty, that a hypothetical prepubescent rationalist should absolutely take into account when planning sufficiently far into the future
Yeah, but you're not going to value what your future self is going to value unless your utility function already includes "increase future self's utility" in it.
Downvoted for creating a new thread. I'll give you back the karma if you delete and repost this in the open thread.
I can think of a few examples but they're all political.
I'm not on this site very much anymore,
:-( Thanks for the time you've spent here. Wishing you luck in whatever you've moved on to.
If you like psychology research say "I'm sure this is much more efficient than the wars or farm subsidies the government was going to use this money on."
If you don't like psychology research say "This is an outrage! We could preventing malaria with that money"
Really? I've never had the guts to tell the server that my meal was "satisfactory".
When the server asks if the meal was good, it usually wasn't good. Most meals are satisfactory or poor.
Life would be better if God existed.
Most sexual relationships are between people who are settling for what they can get.
Dissolve the question.
Note that this is from someone who's never heard of "Cal Newport" or "Scott H. Young" before now, or perhaps just doesn't recognize the names.
They seem to get more respect on LW than average career advice bloggers, so I was hoping someone who was familiar would comment. Nonetheless, I'm upvoting you because it's good to hear an outsider's opinion.
Did I meet you at the Less Wrong meetup in December/January?
Cal Newport and Scott H. Young are collobarating to form a start deliberate practice course by email. Here's an excerpt from on Cal's emails to inquiring people:
The goal of the course is simple: to teach you how to apply the principles of deliberate practice to become a stand out in your job.
Why is this important? The Career Capital Theory I teach in my latest book and on Study Hacks maintains that the skills that make you remarkable are also your leverage for taking control of your working life, and transforming it into a source of passion.
The goal for Scott and I in offering a limited pilot run of the course at this point, is to get feedback from real people in real jobs. Adapting deliberate practice to knowledge work is difficult. We think experiments of this type are the only way to keep advancing our understanding.
The course lasts four weeks and is e-mail based. During each week you will receive three e-mails concluding with a concrete action step to help you solidify what you learned and start applying it to your life immediately.
Here is the curriculum: Week One: Mapping out How Success Actually Works in Your Field Week Two: Hard Facts, Driving Your Career by Metrics Week Three: Designing and Choosing Projects to Build Skills Faster Week Four: Enabling Deep Work
Does this sound like it's worth $100?
Are these life advice threads (like how to get a job in Australia, or how to be poly-amorous) appropriate for Less Wrong? Because if they are, there's a few procedural knowledge gaps I'd like to fill.
Yeah, if we could use these posts to learn about women's experiences instead of constantly doubting everything they say...that would be great.
If you're saving for your own retirement, you might want to consider the risk of dying before you can spend that money. A 25-year old male has an 18.6% chance of dying before he reaches 65, so he should discount his expected return accordingly.
I've never heard of this before but reading the article reminded me of an experience I had in a Pentecostal setting. I was praying for the Holy Spirit to make me speak in tongues. I was very concentrated and prayed a chant over and over. I was lying in my bed and my chest started tingling. It was sort of like how your leg feels when it falls asleep. I also felt physical warmth and muscle relaxation, and lot of pleasure. The tingling spread all over my body and I became paralyzed. But it felt good so I didn't care.
I re-induced it lots of times until I saw a Darren Brown video and concluded that my effect came from a placebo and God wasn't real.After I had been an atheist for a few months, I successfully re-induced it. But the novelty has worn-off and I don't do it anymore.
I was going to do it for honor/karma.
Would it be inappropriate to host a Less Wrong March Madness bracket pool?
Edit: Not going to do it.
No, and Google is failing me. Is there somewhere I can read about it?
If computer hardware improvement slows down, will this hasten or delay AGI?
My naive hypothesis is that if hardware improvement slows, more work will be put into software improvement. Since AGI is a software problem, this will hasten AGI. But this is not an informed opinion.
Please delete this comment and don't bring up the subject again. Or if you must, bring up the subject only in the Politics Open Thread.
General idea: On the follies of letting guilt motivate you.
Story idea: Once upon a time Kay (future superhero) and Pluto (future villain) were union busters. Together they crippled and broke up almost all the unions in the city, often through illegal and unethical means. One day they realized they do something Truly Horrific, and they realize what monsters they are. They quit busting unions, but the damage is done.
~10 years later, Kay is working as a repossession agent, while Pluto has become a community organizer. Pluto has managed to organize the workers at a factory that once had a union. Pluto convinces the workers to go on strike, and he appoints himself ringleader of the newly established (but not legally recognized) union. The factory owners start sweating, and the call Kay for assistance.
Kay refuses, saying that she still feels guilty for the atrocities she committed as a union buster. So the owners turn to Plan B: importing temporary labor from out of state. While this plan isn’t viable in the long-run, the factory owners figure it will scare their original workers into backing down. When the replacement labor arrives, Pluto panics. He fears that his plan to re-establish a union (and cleanse himself of his union-busting sins) is about to go down the drain. That night, he and a few other armed accomplices storm the motel where the out-of-state laborers are staying, and declares them hostages.
The rest of the story is about Kay trying to free the hostages, and Pluto becoming increasingly corrupted by his desire to undo the horrible things he did in the past. Kay becomes a hero not just for rescuing hostages, but because she can resist the temptation for closure.
What's the problem with the "compound interest will make you rich" meme? Is it inflation?
What's the probability of a major war between Japan and China in the next decade?
Any ideas why this is blocked by Trend Micro?
Maybe you should instead donate any leftover money to CFAR, so as to avoid the donor illusion.
He could start a giving war by setting up a fund for AMF and a fund for CFAR. At the end of the year, he could donate a total of 30% of his income to both charities, splitting the fund in proportion to how much each charity raised in the giving war.
Or until he posts his next obviously influenced by transhumanism comic, which shouldn't be too long.
Downvoted for being mean.
Are donations to the Singularity Institute tax deductible in Australia?
- _ozymandias has moved to http://ozyfrantz.com/
You should start a blog.
Hmm, still doesn't work for me. That's odd.
Did they take it down?
Moreover, the objections made about the recent health-care mandate were not made by and large based on gender equality issues.
Sure. My point was that no one was requiring employers to cover vasectomies, so of course no one will get angry about having to provide vasectomy coverage.
Someone started a rumor last decade that a large portion of health insurers cover Viagra but not birth control. It's not true.
So this is an interesting point but actually reinforces the sorts of claims being made by Xachariah, since the amount of objection to vasectomies is much smaller than the amount of objection to birth control, which is consistent with his hypothesis.
If you're thinking about US politics in 2012, most of the "objection to birth control" was objection to Obama's mandate that insurance companies to fully cover birth control for women, but not men.
If a middle-class couple in a first world country decide to create and raise a child, they have done
[pollid:379]
Instead of the whole 'soul' thing, lets go with "Women deserve to be punished for having sex," and that 'life-begins-at-conception' is just a rationalization.
Every pro-lifer I've ever met has shared two characteristics: they don't think women who have abortions should go to jail, and they think that women who have abortions are worse off than women who choose to give birth. That doesn't fit with the pregnancy-as-punishment theory.
(It does however, expose another type of misogyny: they refuse to believe a mature woman in a sound mind could ever choose abortion.)
Possible explanations:
One sex knows something the other sex doesn't:Perhaps since men are treated as the default gender, women understand what it's like to be a man better than men understand what it's like to be a woman.
How to test: Turing test. Create an anonymous panel of 4 male and 1 female economists, and then let a group of males ask them questions. Afterwards, the males vote on which panelist was female. Reverse the test. Whichever sex knows something the other sex doesn't will do a better job at passing the turning test and a spotting one of their own.
Signalling Women and men are expected to have feminine and masculine traits respectively, and one of the ways they can signal having these traits is by supporting certain politics. For example, a woman might endorse social welfare programs to signal that she has compassion (a feminine trait).
How to test: Not sure.
Brain differences: Women and men have slightly different brains. Perhaps the presence of testosterone in men causes them to support riskier free market policies.
How to test Look at intra-sex differences in brains and see if you find any correlations. If, for example, men with lower levels of testosterone are more likely to support liberal policies, and women with higher testosterone support more libertarian policies, that would be evidence that the intersex differences in testosterone could be responsible for the gap.
Self-interest Bias Perhaps women are better off under liberal policies, while men are better under libertarian. Each group is rationalizing reasons support policies that protect their sex.
How to test: See how each sex reacts to a pair of questions, one specifying a female, and one specifying a male. For example "Should waiters be covered by minimum wage laws" verses "Should waitresses be covered by minimum wage laws." If one sex gives the same answer for both these questions, and the other sex gives different answers, that is evidence that the second sex is biased.
Differences between libertarian/liberal movements Perhaps the libertarian subculture isn't welcoming for women. Women become liberals because libertarians creep them out.
How to test Recruit politically inactive women at a local university. Send one group to a libertarian convention, the other to a liberal convention. Ask each about their experiences.
Other explanations/tests?
For starters, write lots of letters to the editor stating that war is always wrong. Don't just attack the easy targets like the Iraq War. Try and write things that will make your average dove say "Well that's going a bit far." (ex, saying the American Revolution was unjustified.)
A rule not ultimately backed by the threat of violence is merely a suggestion.
You can threaten non-violence, like a boycott.