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We don't expect kittens to fight wildcats and win - we merely expect them to try.
--Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
I'm not talking about the mindkilling politics of Starship Troopers today. The quote's about doing the impossible. A while back Kyre posted a link to Minus #37, and without context, it hit me like a knife in the guts. I didn't know that she was a godlike reality-bender. To me she was just a kid who stepped up to take a swing, she was Tiffany Aching.
Did the entire thing weeks ago. Only commenting to log my prediction, I have high confidence that V nz gur bayl Svyvcvab ba YrffJebat.
They give away the fat Sunday edition at the park where I jog. And yeah, I shelved it, read a few pages a week later, then tossed it. I agree, low impact, and paper is low status. Cool people are on the internet.
Yeah, a cousin does proofreader work there, but apparently there's a strong preference for permanent residents. The penalties for illegal work are quite stiff; I'm not that desperate. Well, I'll see what the territory's really like when I get there.
I'm going to Singapore for the holidays, and to check out the job market there. Teaching English could be an option, I speak idiomatic American. Heck, I'd take almost anything there to get out of the Third World. Anybody know the Singapore scene?
Can you recommend similar novels?
How about R. Scott Bakker's Disciple of the Dog and Neuropath? YMMV on his Second Apocalypse books.
Currency is binary, either genuine or counterfeit. Ideas are on a continuum, some less wrong than others. Generally, bad ideas are dangerous because there's some truth or utility to them; few people are seduced by palpable nonsense. Parsing mixed ideas is a big part of rationality, and it's harder than spotting fake money.
We keep the wheel turning slowly and smoothly. Some anonymous Corpsman put it into words a long time ago: "When in doubt, delay the big ones and speed the little ones.''
--Frank Herbert, The Tactful Saboteur
A good heuristic. Barack Obama limits his wardrobe choices, Feynman decides to just always order chocolate ice cream for dessert. Leaves more time and energy for important stuff.
Took a crack at it again, just now worked out how to change directories in a terminal.
I watched Grave of the Fireflies for the first time last night. Cried a bit. And even now, Millions and millions dead. But it doesn't have to be this way. More is possible. Maybe someday, no more kids dying, no more human beings dying. If I need a crusade, that can work.
Traditional rationality tells us that just contributing to society helps move us forward. Transhumanism and LessWrong's about groping, fumbling, toward optimizing how we contribute. Hacks and shortcuts, fixing inefficiencies, so maybe eventually our species will move up the Khardashev scale.
Sorry, hiatus. No haven't been tested recently, and slacked off on the DNB, it starts to feel monotonous, and frustrating, I couldn't break through D3B. I'll try and pick it up again when I figure out how to get it to work on Ubuntu.
I'd consider myself puzzled. Unidientified object, is it a threat, a potential asset, some kind of Black Swan? Might need to do something even without positive identification. Will probably need to do something to get a better read on the thing.
I thought the correct response should be "Is the thing in fact a giant or a windmill?" Rather than considering which way our maps should be biased, what's the actual territory?
I do tech support, and often get responses like "I think so," and I usually respond with "Let's find out."
"You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is."
--Jukka Sarasti, rationalist vampire in Peter Watts's Blindsight. Great book on neuroscience and map != territory.
Dual n-back is a game that's supposed to increase your IQ up to 40%. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_n_back#Dual_n-back
Some think the effect is temporary, long-term studies underway. Still, I wouldn't mind having to practice periodically. I've been at it for a few days, might retry the Mensa test in a while. (I washed out at 113 a few years ago) Download link: http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
It seems to make sense. Instead of getting a faster CPU, a cheap and easy fix is get more RAM. In a brain analogy, I've often thought of the "magic number seven," isn't there any way to up that number, have more working memory? Nicholas Negroponte said something like "Perspective is worth 50 IQ points." I think that's a scope fail, but good perspective, being able to hold more of the problem in your head, might be worth about 30 IQ points.