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but wanted to point out that the hardwired results of evolution often can't be counteracted simply by explaining to the meat-brain that they are no longer adaptive.
Do you have any evidence of this?
Or, since that is a bit tautological, do you have any evidence that the things we want to change (social interaction fears, for instance) are the unchangable "hardwired results of evolution", and not the malleable program running on top (for want of a better description)?
Let's not forget the converse: Fear that the other person will be creeped out.
I suspect that's not a true answer. You could hypothetically feel pleased when you creep someone out. That's a possible state for a human.
So it may not be "them feeling creeped out" that you avoid, but "you having an obligation to feel bad when you creep someone out", and you avoid that state of feeling bad. Which is slightly different.
Roberts' hypothesis is not about the drinking vegetable oil particularly, it's about the link between flavour intensity, calories and weight gain/loss. He was looking for a way to ingest a sudden high calorie, no taste thing. Flavourless vegetable oil is no-flavour/high-calorie - and so is his previous idea of fructose disolved in water.
A useful followup might be "Just try what?"
Suggestions:
A) Whatever it is you want to try, but are putting off
B) Whatever it is you don't want to do and can't do, but feel like you should be able to in order to be a "proper" adult, or a "real" {your job title}, or an ideal human, or whatever.
It also allows us to anticipate ill consequences which don't happen, and suffer them in advance. Sometimes repeatedly.
(And by "allows us to", I also mean "it often does so automatically").
What government attack vectors against Bitcoin do you deem most likely to work?
From Wikipedia:
In order to prevent double-spending, the network implements some kind of a distributed time server, using the idea of chained proofs of work. Therefore, the whole history of transactions has to be stored inside the database, and in order to reduce the size of this storage, a Merkle tree is used.
So I would transact the heck out of it and make the database huge. IIRC at the moment every user needs a full copy of the database of every transaction, so if the .gov can make a multi-terabyte database a requirement, that would knock it on the head quite hard.
Also, the last time I glanced at the source code it looked quite ropey, and that makes me think it will have lots of exploitable parts lurking for the right skilled people to find and attack.
If you are reading this and want some typing practise:
http://www2.ie.popcap.com/games/free/typershark
It's a "sharks are going to eat you, type the word on the side of them to kill them, get more, faster sharks and longer words as you progress" game.
What do you do with the knowledge of which way North is? Are the motors continuously vibrating or pulsed? When you take it off do you feel the absence (absense?) like an amputation?
Maybe useful - Everyday Looper is an iOS app for recording short looping samples, up to four at a time. That is, you record a sound and it plays it from start to finish over and over in a loop, and you can record another sound up to the same length and play them next to each other, or adjust the volume on them individually.
It's intended for musical use, but might do for what you ask. It is not free, so you might check it out on Youtube to see how it works and why it might be good for quick record-hear-compare feedback.
(iOS / iPhone does have a basic sound recorder in it, as you may know).
keep checking back to the PixelQi site hopefully...
The first batch of Notion Ink Adam tablets have shipped, they have a PixelQi screen and run Android. Can't yet buy one unless you caught the pre-order, but to me that means they've moved out of 'vapourware'.
I do not understand why they do it
I do it (and then correct it, but only when I notice that I've done so) because using an apostrophe to indicate possession is the common case.
Relevant apostrophe comic 1.
You might find this snippet of OKCupid's blog interesting - a correlation between being religious and being unbothered by poor spelling and grammar. It's a graphic because the blog post is long and has no way to link just to that point. Full link.
Still, downvoted because this is not a procedural knowledge gap you think should be filled, it's just ranting and possibly being in the pattern of having a subgroup of people over whom to feel superior.
The trouble is, you can burn a significant amount of energy by physical effort only if you're in a great shape to begin with; otherwise, you can exert yourself for hours and still burn what amounts to (literally) just three or four bites of food.
Why does exercising when unfit burn fewer calories? Is it because you cannot exercise as intensely?
I guess for the topic of this forum, I should ask whether you were objectively looking for forum attitudes either way, or whether you set out to seek negativity and, with confirmation bias, found it?
I was expecting a post questioning who/what is really behind this project to make paperclips invisible.
Are you suggesting that a non-religious person would have no irrational beliefs to tiptoe around? This seems unlikely.
Are you suggesting that if you didn't tiptoe around religious beliefs that would be a problem? Because it seems that religious people are extra-resilient in their beliefs, so that might be less of an issue than you fear.
Are you suggesting that it isn't possible to have a relationship where one person is religious and another atheist without them having to fight about it or lie about it? That your relationships must have zero tolerance and absolute agreement on all points?
There isn't anything in this world to be negative about. What does it benefit anything if I am miserable about suffering? Can we not notice problems and support solving them while also being positive?
Suffering in poor countries doesn't go away just because you are unhappy about it. It doesn't change at all based on how you feel about it, so why not feel happy about the people who have food and optimistic that starvation is solvable, for example?
From reading your whole comment, it seems this:
I simply don't feel that I would be able to be emotionally intimate with a woman who holds an irrational, i.e. religious, worldview.
would be the easiest bit to change to remove the problem from your life.
Does anyone have a knowledge gap preventing them from cooking Alicorn's "easy" soup?
I noticed myself thinking it was so basic that nobody would, but then wondered that such a thought might be completely wrong (given the overall post topic). Maybe there are people daunted by... not knowing how to prepare common vegetables, for instance.
(UK Specific post, not a car person).
tl;dr Find one, optionally pay a company to check it isn't stolen or legally written off, and has no outstanding finance. Agree an amount of money. Sign the vehicle ownership documents, trade those and the car for the money within any applicable laws governing trade in your area. If your car has the required tax and safety certificates, and you have the required license and insurance, drive away, otherwise sort those out next. Cross your fingers and hope it isn't a lemon, but realise that if it is, it is a setback, not the end of the world.
end tl;dr
You decide what you are looking for and/or what you can afford, and search around for ones within your area or however far you are willing to travel. If you are searching yourself then you will look at vehicles on the street with "for sale" signs on them, in local newspapers and advertising boards, on local search sites, or national ones such as Craigslist, Ebay or Autotrader, or at dealers/garages or their websites.
If you are searching with a dealership, you can discuss you requirements with them and they can suggest available cars, possibly distant ones in other garages in their group which they can transport to you. Many official dealerships for car manufacturers run approved used car schemes where they take recent cars (typically 3 years old), service them and then offer better than normal guarantees / warranty extensions, for an extra cost.
When you find one you are interested in, make contact with the seller and arrange to look at the car before buying. It would help here if you know someone you can take along, not just for a second set of eyes looking at the car, but also for a defence against pushy sellers or a second set of eyes checking your behaviour isn't too biased towards/against purchasing. Have a look around in advance in price guides and listings so you know expected prices for that make, model, specification and age. Find a checklist from somewhere online and look for things to check when inspecting a used car, to take with you. You primarily want to make sure it:
- Is what you were expecting and will do what you want or need.
- Has not been crashed seriously.
- Has been basically looked after (serviced regularly).
- Has not been rebranded as a higher model, had any low quality modifications such as nonstandard wheels or engine enhancements which might be dangerous, or indicate the owner drove it hard (and thus wore parts surprisingly heavily), or did crummy repair work which might not last.
- Doesn't surprise you - find out what works and what doesn't.
I don't think they are under any obligation to give you a test drive, and if you do want one you will need to have the usual driving license and insurance cover to do so. I don't know what you are looking for on a test drive beyond a general "does anything feel, look, sound or act wrong or suspicious" and "is it ergonomically OK".
Before buying, you ought to get a vehicle background check (at a cost) to confirm it isn't stolen, written off, financed with money owing, etc., and you may want to pay a mechanic service to give it an inspection. In the UK, The AA can do both - other companies can too.
(Again UK specific) cars more than 3 years old need MOT certificates (meets basic safety requirements) annually, so make sure the car has one or will have by the time you get it. It will need a tax disc (again, annual) before you can drive it, so if it has one in-date that is good. During the trade you will need to complete a form on the vehicle papers which the seller signs to say they are no longer the owner, and you sign to say you are the new owner, and the seller needs to send it to the DVLA to officially make the car no longer their responsibility.
Optional extra: haggling. You may wish to for the sake of saving money, but you don't have to (notice the societal disapproval of people who pay the asking price). Offer them less, or if buying from a dealer, convince them to give you more into the deal such as a tank of fuel, a free service, etc).
More specific advice: http://www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/buying-advice.html
I'm surprised by the amount of cooking posts here so, questioning my own assumptions: is anyone put off doing this because you lack knowledge about preparing vegetables in the "whatever else" class, or picking the "wrong" whatever else foods, or even peeling things/etc.?
I feel silly even asking this ("Don't be so patronising, who wouldn't know how to peel an onion?"), but I'm interested to see if anyone replies.
Over the line as in it made you ill, or as in you refused to eat it?
A premature really powerful Optimization Process is the root of all future evil.
"Please don't hold anything back, and give me the facts" – Wen Jiabao, Chinese Premier (when meeting disgruntled people at the central complaints offices).
Yes, ok.
I was thinking of a group more like "you said your piano teacher suggested practising with a metronome - have you actually done so this week?"
"you've said a priority is learning the piano, yet you aren't keeping track of your practise or recording yourself or making any way to check your progress and get feedback. Have you noticed that is inconsistent with your stated desire?"
"Do you realise how much you are talking about your commute to work compared to it's real impact on your life?"
not
"you really suck at the piano"
"and have you noticed how stupid you are?"
"and how you talk forever about boring things?"
I tend to find focussing on developing strengths to better than focussing on weaknesses.
I don't follow. If you never focus on things you can't do well, you'll never do anything different or build any new abilities.
Piano teacher: You're not keeping time very well, you could benefit from practising playing to a metronome.
wedrifid: I prefer to focus on developing strengths, and I'm really good at playing loudly so I'll just do that, thanks.
?
Makes me wonder if a good way to deal with rationality or akrasia or self-improvement would be the kind of support group where everyone tries to find fault with everyone else. It's so easy to see flaws in others compared to flaws in ourselves, why not use that to our advantage?
Finding the right people to do this who could both handle it and keep it from turning into an insult trading group might be difficult.
Suggested edits for an audience made of stereotypical LessWrongniks:
It's business as usual for a bartender, and one day as he is cleaning his bar an unusual customer walks in dressed in an expensive suit, a beautiful supermodel hanging off each arm and with a limo parked outside. Furthermore, the man has an orange for a head.
The bartender assigns high probability that the man is dressed in a costume of some sort, pretty low probability that he is hallucinating given that nothing else appears odd, low to medium probability that the talking orange-lookalike is a robot creation with a radio link to a real person elsewhere, and negligible probability that his whole understanding of the universe is wrong to the level that genies, magic and talking conscious fruit with biological connections to a human nervous system exists.
He greets the man and serves him a drink.
Alternate middle: "For my first wish I asked for an unlimited fortune. The genie became very quiet and after a minute or two, coins started appearing beside it. Then more and more, I saw the ground, the grass, rocks, all start morphing into coins more and more of them. I pocketed some and ran.
He looks around. "I hope it's not still going", he said with nervous laughter.
Is it established that most would?
Would you be happy to classify that wasp as having "superhuman intelligence"?
Then why accept that a machine which behaves like that wasp is superhumanly intelligent?
See also this bit relating to Christmas Cracker bad jokes:
He [Professor Richard Wiseman] thinks the key to the success of modern cracker jokes is precisely because they're not funny. 'If the joke is good and you tell it and it doesn't get a laugh, it's your problem. If the joke's bad and it doesn't get a laugh, then it's the joke's problem. My theory is that it's a way of not embarrassing people at Christmas.' So they're not jokes at all? 'In a sense, they're just a way of binding people together. Given the diversity around your average dinner table, it would be extraordinarily difficult to come up with a joke that everyone found funny. The kids won't get it, or someone will find it offensive. Even if you did, the delivery would be difficult. Women don't tell jokes to one another, so they're not used to doing it. Blokes do, but it's done in a particular context, not around the family table, and it's quite stressful to try and deliver a funny joke, so it would be a disaster.'
Summary: "A man has an orange for a head. How? Magic."
Is it still funny?
Assuming a person can actually have an orange for a head and that genies exist then this is just a straightforward story explaining how he became wealthy, desirable and fruitheaded. Like asking someone in a suit how come he's wearing a suit and he answers "because I bought one and put it on".
Assuming a person can't actually have an orange for a head, it's just a timewasting surreal story which doesn't go anywhere.
The humour is in the non-answer where an answer is expected, but I don't find a non-answer funny. I do see it as a joke-shaped pattern and start to involuntarily smile at it, but I'm mentally annoyed by it not enhappied by it.
Your post seems to imply that I could fix the problem by unimagining these agents. If that's what you mean, I'm a bit insulted
Not "could" in the sense that it's an ability you have but choose not to use, nor in the sense that you could "if you were a better person", nor in the sense that your illness is imaginary.
Only 'could' in the narrow literal sense that it answers the question "how could neutral modify their behaviour without their cooperation?" - if you aren't really three entities and "you" are the greater whole then you 'could' ignore their lack of cooperation and alter their behaviour by fiat. (Whether you actually could in real life, or if it would be helpful to do so, is another matter).
rest of reply
Interesting. Thank you.
How do you imagine something can spend the rest of eternity counting in an endless while (true) { i++; } loop and yet still refer to it as a superhuman intelligence?
I know people here take a dim view of humans, but that's just ridiculous.
How can Neutral modify their behavior if they won't cooperate?
Do they exist as distinct entities or are they ideas? Neutral can unimagine them. Or, rather, you can unimagine all of them. Dictate them out of your head.
Are you actually three agents? Have you tried being four agents or two? Does that make sense as a question to ask?
Have you tried any other treatment for depression as depression, not as bipolar disorder - e.g. cognitive behavioural therapy?
I don't have faith that Depressed is sincere
Who doesn't have faith that Depressed is sincere?
I do not know of any case where someone has said that they "should have known better" after making a false positive, say, "I knew I shouldn't have used the seat belt on the buss, we did not crash after all".
Possibly the phrase "I needn't have bothered [..] after all"? e.g.:
Your place is delightfully homely and very tastefully decorated with a kitchen that was so well equipped with quality cooking implements that I needn’t have bothered bringing my own!
It's not directly saying they should have known, but it is saying they judged so inaccurately that reality took them by surprise so much it was worth commenting on.
Also the phrase "I don't know what we were worried about" fits a similar template - not a scolding for not knowing, like "should have known" is, but yes an admission of feeling overprepared for something which didn't happen and now questioning the reasons they had earlier.
and frankly their status deserves a penalty
?
I suspect incompetence combined with self-righteousness
Lack of ability combined with wanting to be right? Two things normal people never exhibit which deserve punishment?
Would demonstrating the self-righteousness count as ad hominem?
Would it count as useful? Would it help?
Admittedly, almost no one who is attracted by discussion of sports and celebrity meets community standards for rationality, most of us would find it difficult to include such references
I don't know ... there are plenty of references to people in comments in the style of celebrity fawning, just that they are niche celebrities instead of mainstream ones.
See this summary of rationality quotes - has fantasy author Terry Pratchett really said more rational quotable things than Einstein, Darwin, Descartes, Dennett, Jaynes, Aristotle and Sagan? Or is it just that people like him more?
Well, sort the same list [by karma votes] instead of number of quotes, and Pratchett moves up from 4th to 2nd.
That seems like either evidence that Pratchett and his fictional worlds have more relevance to rationality than the opening post wants to accept, or evidence that Pratchett is treated as a bit of a celebrity around here and your suggestion that people find it hard to throw in celebrity references isn't quite right, it's throwing in the right kind of celebrity references for people who celebrate vastly different properties in people which is hard.
And here I was thinking it was obscure mathematical gibberish that would discourage non-nerdy people from participating. Instead it's mentioning an idea by a famous author that's scaring them off.
;-)
Has that check helped you?
Whether someone learns advanced piano from a book must be at least as much down to whether they know intermediate piano up to the level the book starts at, as to whether the book is a good guide to advanced piano.
But those divisions of ability and knowledge are even less agreed on in self-help, so matching up where you "are" with a book is less easy, and whether someone else matched with any given book might not be of any real help at all.
I never said anything about using force
You (probably) know what I meant, and whether or not you mentioned force specifically - either way doesn't change the gist of the "translation". A weasely objection.
Translation: I haven't managed to convince you therefore you must be punished for your insolent behaviour of not being convinced by my arguments. I cannot walk away from this and leave you being wrong, you must profess to agree with me and if you are not rational enough to understand and accept logical arguments then you will be forced to profess agreement.
Who did you say hasn't learned how to lose?
I'm beginning to think that LW needs some better mechanism for dealing with the phenomenon of commenters who are polite, repetitive, immune to all correction, and consistently wrong about everything. I know people don't like it when I say this sort of thing, but seriously, people like that can lower the perceived quality of a whole website.
Warn, then ban the people involved.
If you decide that refusing to be convinced by evidence while also unable to convincingly counter it, and at the same time continuing to argue is bad form for the LW that you want to create, then stand by that decision and act on it.
I don't know, what particularity impressed you about their foundation?
I used them as a contrast with leaving money to non-alleviating-suffering causes (Trump letting his children inherit it) or speculative-future-suffering causes (It's probably easier to convince someone to leave their money to a charity gets results today rather than one which tries to increase the chance of getting results tomorrow).
It's not really important to my point whether they are an effective charity or not, just that there aren't many single organizations with enough scale to handle Warren Buffet leaving all of several billion dollars to, and there aren't many examples of a Bill-Gates-rich person doing something quite like that.
That sounds pretty sane, but if I look at it from the point of view of "making a longevity breakthrough happen sooner than it otherwise would, over a period of many years", then too few qualified people is not a show stopping problem, it only means that educating and training people so there are more qualified people in the near future is a good next step.
Lots of people making the same discoveries within a short time span is a much more interesting limit.
and a form letter reminder that self-consistency is not a virtue [..] making it clear that this community's respect is contingent on [..]
Is changing professed beliefs to something else without understanding / agreeing with the new position, but just doing it to gain community respect, a virtue?
Tim, and the rest of the class of commenters to which you refer, simply haven't learned how to lose.
Or still isn't convinced that he is wrong by the time you have passed your tolerance of explaining so you give up and decide he must be broken. Your proposed 'solution' is a hack so you can give up on convincing him but still have him act convinced for the benefit of appearances - maybe you are simply expecting far far too short inferential distances?
whether an area of research is saturated
What does this mean? More groups working independently on solving a problem will not increase the probability of a solution being found in a given timeframe?
Isn't the unpleasant part of eugenics the "killing "bad" people" part? In the Howard Families sense, it was more of a cross between an arranged marriage, a marriage of convenience, and surrogate mothering. A choice with a financial incentive, nobody was killed for being too short lived (!) or raped and forced into it.
Yes, I would consider anti-aging research as counting, but I meant to discriminate so that leaving money for nonspecific medical research would not count, and nor would leaving 1 million to longevity and 99 million to universities.
More optimistically, pre-reanimated.
I saw a customer comment on a piano website recently thanking the proprietor for being green by having a digital manual instead of shipping a paper one.
An electronic manual for the electronic piano they just bought with a mechanism made in Germany, processors from Japan, soundboard from France, assembled in China, sold in England and delivered to Wales.
"It's not easy being green" - Mork.