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Comment by TraderJoe on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 · 2014-02-13T09:46:20.402Z · LW · GW

This is quite far down the page, even though I posted it a few hours ago. Is that an intended effect of the upvoting/downvoting system? (it may well be - I don't understand how the algorithm assigns comment rankings)

Comment by TraderJoe on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 · 2014-02-13T03:25:47.704Z · LW · GW

I have been reviewing FUE hair transplants, and I would like LWers' opinion. I'm actually surprised this isn't covered, as it seems relevant to many users.

As far as I can tell, the downsides are:

  • Mild scarring on the back of the head
  • Doesn’t prevent continued hair loss, so if you get e.g. a bald spot filled in, then you will in a few years have a spot of hair in an oasis
  • Cost
  • Mild pain/hassle in the initial weeks.
  • Possibility of finding a dodgy surgeon

The scarring is basically covered if you have a few two days’ hair growth there and I am fine with that as a long-term solution. he continued hair loss is potentially dealt with by a repeated transplant and more certainly dealt with by getting the initial transplant “all over”, i.e. thickening hair, rather than just moving the hairline forward. But it is the area I am most uncertain about. I should add that I am 29 with male pattern baldness on both sides of my family, Norwood level 4, and have seen hair loss stabilised (I have been taking propecia for the last year).

Ignoring the cost, my questions are:

  • Is anyone aware of any other problems besides these?
  • Do you think this solution works?
  • Any ideas on how to pick the right surgeon (using someone in Singapore most probably)?
Comment by TraderJoe on Baldness · 2014-02-11T06:29:14.862Z · LW · GW
Comment by TraderJoe on Einstein's Superpowers · 2013-03-11T08:42:03.338Z · LW · GW

Why would you need any g to contribute money?

Comment by TraderJoe on Don't Get Offended · 2013-03-07T15:11:18.818Z · LW · GW

Does anyone know how to get offended? I have never experienced the emotion and am interested to know what it feels like.

Comment by TraderJoe on Rationality Quotes March 2013 · 2013-03-06T08:36:42.944Z · LW · GW

Can you add a NSFW disclaimer?

Comment by TraderJoe on MetaMed: Evidence-Based Healthcare · 2013-03-05T10:49:04.615Z · LW · GW

You mean like acupuncture?

Comment by TraderJoe on What information has surprised you most recently? · 2012-12-13T11:03:26.343Z · LW · GW

Gender is much more biologically determined and less socially constructed than I had previously thought. http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/evolutionary-psychology-gender-construction/

Comment by TraderJoe on Replaceability as a virtue · 2012-12-11T16:07:31.796Z · LW · GW

"The graveyards are full of indispensable men"

  • De Gaulle.
Comment by TraderJoe on Meetup : 16/12 London Meetup · 2012-12-10T07:53:00.183Z · LW · GW

Thanks for the advance notice: I only check LW every few days and this will, uncaring universe willing, be my first meetup.

Comment by TraderJoe on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project · 2012-12-05T09:37:41.609Z · LW · GW

And many people who have tried to assassinate Kennedys...

Comment by TraderJoe on Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant · 2012-12-04T09:10:05.668Z · LW · GW

I like this post. Can you think of any pre-20th century philosophers whose works you still hold to be valid/useful today? [or from that list, any pre-21st century...]

Comment by TraderJoe on Meetup : 02/12 London Meetup · 2012-12-03T07:58:30.492Z · LW · GW

Is there any way we could get more notification for these? I could probably have made this, but didn't see this in time.

Comment by TraderJoe on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey · 2012-11-23T13:09:13.680Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey · 2012-11-23T13:06:15.632Z · LW · GW

The most appropriate metric is the one which causes the smallest number of people to have to calculate their answer into another unit of measurement. If LW is mostly American, that may well be imperial.

Comment by TraderJoe on Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate · 2012-11-21T19:58:28.891Z · LW · GW

On the other hand, if you are only half-a-rationalist, you can easily do worse with more knowledge. I recall a lovely experiment which showed that politically opinionated students with more knowledge of the issues reacted less to incongruent evidence, because they had more ammunition with which to counter-argue only incongruent evidence.

What exactly is the problem with this? The more knowledge I have, the smaller a weighting I place on any new piece of data.

Comment by TraderJoe on Traditional Capitalist Values · 2012-11-21T19:49:27.960Z · LW · GW

In countries that are lawful and just, it is the privilege and responsibility of a citizen to pay their low taxes. That said, a good billionaire wouldn't ask to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Since when is this a traditional part of capitalism? Apart from the definitional problems with "a good billionaire", who is it who says that a billionaire who pays 40m in tax and wants to pay less is somehow immoral?

Comment by TraderJoe on How To Lose 100 Karma In 6 Hours -- What Just Happened · 2012-11-06T11:41:46.934Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions · 2012-11-06T10:59:16.779Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey · 2012-11-06T10:42:29.410Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey · 2012-11-06T10:35:27.840Z · LW · GW

Next year the survey should include an option to explain why your IQ is actually higher than was measured.

Comment by TraderJoe on Preventing discussion from being watered down by an "endless September" user influx. · 2012-11-06T08:45:36.709Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Preventing discussion from being watered down by an "endless September" user influx. · 2012-11-05T12:43:43.405Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio · 2012-11-05T10:45:43.074Z · LW · GW

Surely this makes it very tough for a non-trolling user to figure out what was wrong with his post? Few people are going to explain it to him. You need to be familiar with LW jargon before you can expect to write a technical comment and not be downvoted for it, so this would very easily deter a lot of new users. "These guys all downvoted my post and nobody will explain it to me. Jerks. I'll stick to rationalwiki."

Comment by TraderJoe on Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity · 2012-11-05T10:41:01.131Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey · 2012-11-05T10:12:32.913Z · LW · GW

I took the survey before. It. Was. Cool!

Comment by TraderJoe on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey · 2012-11-05T10:11:39.403Z · LW · GW

Taken it. Suggestion [if it's possible to change] - we should add the option to unanswer an answered question. Right now you can change your answer from A to B, but not from A to non-A and non-B.

Comment by TraderJoe on Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity · 2012-11-05T08:15:13.782Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on The Fundamental Question · 2012-11-02T13:03:43.423Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Rationality Lessons Learned from Irrational Adventures in Romance · 2012-11-02T09:31:39.816Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions · 2012-10-23T09:45:49.558Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Raising the forecasting waterline (part 1) · 2012-10-12T07:34:07.408Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Raising the forecasting waterline (part 1) · 2012-10-11T10:44:11.139Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Raising the forecasting waterline (part 1) · 2012-10-11T06:40:41.520Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Raising the forecasting waterline (part 1) · 2012-10-10T17:54:10.647Z · LW · GW

Sure, but how often do you see each of the following sentences in some kind of logic discussion: 2+2=3 2+2=4 2+2=5 2+2=6 2+2=7

I have seen the first and third from time to time, the second more frequently than any other, and virtually never see 2+2 = n for n > 5. Not all statements are shown with equal frequency. My guess is that the percentage of the time when "2+2 = x" is written in contexts where the statement is for a true/false logic proposition rather than an equation x = 4 is more common than all other values put together.

Comment by TraderJoe on Raising the forecasting waterline (part 1) · 2012-10-10T17:49:12.034Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Raising the forecasting waterline (part 1) · 2012-10-10T17:48:05.490Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Raising the forecasting waterline (part 1) · 2012-10-10T10:24:46.758Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event · 2012-10-09T07:04:57.284Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event · 2012-10-09T07:03:32.361Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on You Be the Jury: Survey on a Current Event · 2012-10-09T07:02:07.308Z · LW · GW

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  1. How much you think your opinion will turn out to coincide with mine - hard to define. If your respective answers are 10, 40, 90, how much did we agree? I'll guess that the sum of the three differences between my answers and yours is around sixty percentage points [out of 300 possible].
Comment by TraderJoe on Rationality: Appreciating Cognitive Algorithms · 2012-10-09T06:55:16.841Z · LW · GW

I often add "I believe" to sentences to clarify that I am not certain.

"Did you feed the dog?" "Yes"

and

"Did you feed the dog?" "I believe so"

have different meanings to me. I parse the first as "I am highly confident that I fed the dog" and the second as "I am unable to remember for sure whether I fed the dog, but I am >50% confident I did so."

Comment by TraderJoe on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 · 2012-10-09T06:41:17.398Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 · 2012-10-09T06:40:41.252Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 · 2012-10-04T06:49:39.736Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 · 2012-10-04T06:47:07.264Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 · 2012-10-03T11:29:45.561Z · LW · GW

This doesn't quite answer the question. I would be very happy if my place of work were closed and I could do fun things for two weeks. My objection to working isn't that work is unpleasant; it's that there's a high opportunity cost [all the fun people I could hang out with, the great books I could read, etc]. A better question is "imagine you are asked for your employer to take part in an experiment where you instead have your brain turned off. Your body ages by eight hours, but your brain experiences it as "you step into the office, then step out".

It retains the silliness but solves the opportunity cost problem.

Comment by TraderJoe on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 · 2012-10-03T10:14:21.152Z · LW · GW

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Comment by TraderJoe on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 · 2012-10-03T10:13:18.646Z · LW · GW

What might convince me that Modafinil is a bad thing would be if a lot of people actively disliked the time they spent working. I personally assume most people roughly like or are neutral towards their jobs and mainly want to work shorter hours because it gives them more time for things outside of work, but I'm almost certainly generalizing from the example of me. If Yvain had made this argument I would understand more about where he was coming from and why.

Comment by TraderJoe on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 · 2012-10-03T10:09:23.512Z · LW · GW

Although I'm unsure of the etiquette of posting about personal blogs on other sites, I was also disappointed with the blog post in question. It was the first time that Yvain wrote something I disagreed with after reading his post in full and digesting in. I've often disagreed with him before reading it, but he usually persuades me.

This post seemed to rely on the principle that having more spare time is a positional good, with which I disagree strongly. Essentially, giving everyone another four hours of awake, productive time, is the same as extending your life by four hours for each day you are alive [and you do so in good health - extending the human lifespan from 80 to 95 might or might not be a good thing, but adding years to your healthy, productive life, seems a good thing]

Yvain's claim seems to be that 100% of the extra four hours will be diverted into work, but to me that's a) almost certainly not true [the figure would be more than 0% and less than 100%], b) not a bad thing.

a) It seems very likely that, given that our day is > 0% work and > 0% leisure, an extra four hours a day will add more than 0 hours of leisure.

b) If all med students get more studying done, it's far from obvious that the net result is a bad one. I assume that there is some value to med students' knowledge of medicine [okay, for anatomy courses this might not hold]. If, say, Apple workers work 50% more, then we stand to get better and faster Macs]