CO2 as a cause of climate change “pays rent in anticipation”. Phlogiston as a cause of fire doesn’t.
Karma: 41
In this article’s sense, yes—Explain means “try to make something less mysterious”. For example, Newton Explained when devising the laws of physics, and a student who learns them is also doing some Explaining. Worship, on the other hand, means (in here, not in general) “revel in something’s mysteriousness” (e.g. Newton seeing an apple fall from a tree, and saying “I guess phlogiston did it”.) Ignore is the boring but sometimes practical option, saying “Eh, an apple fell from a tree” and leaving it at that.
Are you looking for an explanation or opinions?
Manned spaceships have dozens of fallback plans to keep astronauts safe, even though they don’t anticipate things going wrong.
You might want to cite the “8 hours of TV a day” bit—if you look into houses’ living room windows, you won’t see TVs blaring through anywhere near a third of them. (note: this experiment is not endorsed by the author)
In response to your main question: being unproductive isn’t a good reason to be more unproductive.
The link to Peter de Blanc is dead, try https://web.archive.org/web/20160305092845/http://www.spaceandgames.com/?p=27
1984 (like animal farm) is an analogue to the USSR—Goldstein may represent Leon Trotsky. I’m not entirely sure if Emmanuel Goldstein corresponds to anyone, though—we don’t know a lot about him except that propaganda considers him a traitor.
As a rule of thumb, you should prefer rates (“X commit Y crime 3x more often than normal”) and proportions (“1 in 10,000 X commit Y crime”). Be wary of quantities (“100 X have committed Y crime this year”) and examples (“look at all these stories of X doing Y”).
I’ve heard of the term “History channel effect” to explain why that sort of topic doesn’t get coverage in the news. The idea is that people would rather hear about topics that make them feel well-informed than topics that would actually make them more well-informed.
A small nitpick—tranquilizer darts take at least a few minutes to work (https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zzt5a/eli5_do_tranquilizer_darts_really_take_instant/). The story was amazing though.
This is an absolutely amazing read—somehow it never occurred to me that so many singularities had already happened.
Along with zendo, mao might be a good game for practicing—you and the other mao players are scientists, while the grandmaster is the universe’s laws—you can induce the laws either by observing the other “scientists”, or by testing things out (possibly on accident). Jeffreyssai might say this reeks of competition, though—a possible fix would be to have all the “scientists” working on the same team.
Since that’s hindsight, we’d expect Archimedes to get something that was controversial thousands of years before but widely believed at the time.
[Question] Where should I give spare computing power, as an aspiring rationalist/altruist?
That link is dead, but I found it on another site.
See also: https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood
I’m not sure if we should make this tag apply to all posts of historical interest, or only posts with historical information. Thoughts, anyone?
It seems like this tag is a subset of the other one. I’ve added (very tentative) descriptions for both tags, but don’t know they should be merged or not.
edit made two minutes later: not a subset i guess, since individuals can start projects
Not sure how okay it is to use external sources—if anyone wants to write their own definition, please go ahead.
The link to Meyer’s excerpt has been dead for two years, here’s an archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170801042830/http://csml.som.ohio-state.edu:80/Music829C/hindsight.bias.html