Beeminder without the deadlines is Beeminder with the weekly rate set to zero.
4hodmt
Karma: 262
Strongly seconding the SSD recomendation. I can’t think of anything else that’s given so much enjoyment for the money. A SSD dramatically increases perceived performance of a computer beyond what you’d expect from benchmarks. Adding extra ram can hide the latency of a mechanical HD by caching, but it does nothing for worst case performance, and worst case performance is highly salient. I’d much rather use a low spec PC with a SSD than a high spec PC with a mechanical HD. Predictably mediocre performance feels faster than high average performance with high variance.
Not taking risks of audio noise exposure seriously. Hearing loss is gradual, and tinnitus often starts as a temporary thing, so it’s very easy to accumulate major damage before you realize it’s a problem.
I do not know if emigration can be attributed to climate change or not, but I do that that Israel produces very large quanties of fresh water by desalination:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Israel
Neighboring countries may not be able to afford this.
For a website by somebody with a successful track record of language learning, have a look at http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/ . As well as a lot of motivation talk (which overlaps LessWrong’s akrasia discussion), it focuses on two very important concepts:
Learning in real context Rather than isolated words, you should look at whole sentences or paragraphs. These should be from real texts or spoken language aimed at native speakers (start with children’s books if you want lower difficulty). Definitions are useful, and Rational_Brony’s advice to look them up in the original language is good, but a definition only tells you what a words means, not the subtleties of when to use it. The best way to learn that is exposure to huge quantities of real context.
Spaced repetition software This dramatically increases your memorization eficacy, and it works very well for language learning. gwern wrote an excellent article about it which you should read if you’re not already familiar with it: http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition
I didn’t see a list of “good” gurus, so I checked all the individual reviews looking for them. I saw only three:
Milton Cudney
Nancy Dunnan
James Gilbaugh
Making web browsing slightly more annoying can be effective in reducing use.
“Happiness” as a concept sounds simple in the same way “a witch did it” sounds simple as an explanation. Most people consider wireheading to be a failure state, and defining “happiness” so as to avoid wireheading is not simple.
I’ve had the exact same experience with AMF.
Cooking by weight is common in the UK, and it’s superior for two reasons: One, it’s more accurate, because it’s unaffected by packing density. Two, it’s quicker, because you can pour all the ingredients directly into one container, zeroing the scales between each one. Cooking by weight is standard for professional baking even in the US.
As somebody who’s also done a lot of mushrooms, the first trip provides comparatively little insight. You’re so busy observing all the novelty that you don’t have much time to think about it. When you’re more familiar with the common effects there’s time for introspection without missing anything interesting.
My first thought was detective/courtroom drama type movies, but these are typically Sherlock Holmes style pseudo-rationality, with lessons you can’t apply to reality.
In general I don’t think movies are good for promoting rationality. The best I can think of are some of the more realistic war movies, eg. Das Boot, Platoon, The Great Escape, which illustrate the “nature doesn’t care” idea, where the characters can do everything perfectly and fail anyway because they were in an impossible situation from the start.
I grew up listening to classical music because of the influence of my parents, and I was heavily involved in the classical music subculture because I shared a house with a music student.
I gradually stopped listening to classic music as I realized I didn’t really enjoy it and I merely associated it with high status. Now I almost exclusively listen to chiptunes and 90s electronic dance music. This music is much simpler than music I previously listened to (I also listened to metal and jazz), but I’ve made a conscious decision to listen to music purely for enjoyment. I now spend far less effort on thinking about music, but I’m equally happy with it, so I think it’s a win.
I stopped using toothpaste a few months ago when I ran out and noticed that brushing with plain water seemed to work just as well (by the feeling of cleanness when I rub my tongue over my teeth). I also drink a lot of tea, so I’m already exposed to quite a bit of fluoride and I’m more concerned about excess than lack of it. I am also somewhat suspicious of the long term effects of antibacterial agents present in most modern toothpastes.
BTW, if you want to search for scientific papers about toothpaste, the word to use is “dentifrice”. One interesting study I found (free full text available):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20657090
“Dentifrice use does not enhance plaque removal when used in conjunction with a toothbrush, and instead, may marginally lessen the brushing effect. The role of a toothbrush appears to be more crucial in the maintenance of oral hygiene.”
As a cheaper alternative to 100% dark chocolate, I drink unsweetened* cocoa made as follows:
Fill kettle, start boiling water
Add 2 teaspoons cocoa powder to mug, stir in a small trickle of cold water to make a paste
Stir in boiling water, filling mug about 2/3rd full
Top up with cold milk (*milk contains sugars so this isn’t technically zero sugar. You could skip the milk if you think it matters, at the cost of worse taste).
Best tasting cocoa powder I’ve found in the UK is Cadbury Bournville. Some supposedly premium brands (eg. Green & Blacks) taste much worse, bland with a slight burnt taste. Color seems to be a good indication of taste—lighter color generally tastes better.
Playing mirror Go is often considered dishonorable. In practice it’s not a major problem because it’s a suboptimal strategy.
Additional assumptions you are making:
The only cost of suicide is physical pain
Humans mature into rational adults immediately after birth
I went to school. That’s a clear example of “repeated stressful challenges”, and it did not produce any satisfaction or happiness.
Contact is about as anti-rationalist as a movie can get. The main character was right in that she really did violate the known laws of physics, but her reasoning was completely wrong. The government’s public arguments were correct because they correctly valued the prior probability that the known laws of physics are correct. The fact that the main character’s conclusion turned out to be correct anyway is then used to promote religious faith. I very much dislike this movie.
To understand musical consonance/dissonance, you must understand that consonance of simple harmonic ratios is an artifact of a much simpler underlying rule. The human hearing system does not analyze frequency ratios of individual notes, it examines the frequency domain clustering of partials of the sound as a whole.
If you listen to two sine waves of near identical frequency they sound consonant. Widen the frequency difference and they become dissonant. Further widen the frequency difference and they become consonant again. This was measured back in 1967 by R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt. The consonance of a musical harmony depends on the separation of the individual partials. We need a “critical bandwidth” of separation between frequencies to clearly distinguish them. You could think of dissonance as the unpleasant feeling of hearing different frequencies but failing to resolve them.
The majority of musical instruments used in Western classical music create sound by vibration constrained at two points, either the ends of a string or the ends of a column of air. Therefore the partials are all integer multiples [2] of the fundamental. It turns out that if these sounds are played together at small integer frequency ratios, the frequency of the partials align such that the quantity of dissonant, smaller than the “critical bandwidth”, frequency differences is at a local minimum.
However, percussion instruments are not constrained in this way, so cultures with a percussion focused musical tradition (eg. Indonesian gamelan music) developed alternative tuning systems better suited to the timbres of their instruments. Early electronic musicians, eg. Wendy Carlos, also noticed how the consonance of different tuning systems depended on the timbre of the notes.
As far as I am aware, the first person to mathematically formalize this relationship, and develop a method to generate arbitrary tuning systems for arbitrary timbres and vice-versa, was William Sethares [3]. He has a great webpage at http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ , with many audio examples. His book “Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale” should be considered the most important book on music theory ever written because it generalizes all previous musical theories, and solves the problem of the exhaustion of harmonic novelty in music without having to resort to unlistenable crap like serialism.
And now we get to the link to the main article, and the reason why Sethare’s work was such a revelation to me. I shared a house with a music student for several years, and I became heavily involved in the classical music subculture. Back then I only knew of the Pythagorean ratio-based concept of harmony. I listened to a great variety of Western classical music, and attended several concerts. As my knowledge increased, I became disillusioned with pre-modern classical music, because each new composition began to sound like a reworking of something I had heard before. Traditional music theory simply didn’t have enough scope for novelty. I studied the works of Harry Partch, who pushed ratio-based music theory about as far as it can go, and I wasted a lot of time attempting to extend his theory, but I never felt I had reached a satisfactory conclusion.
Of course I was exposed to atonal composition via my musician friends, and my initial reaction was the same as almost everybody’s: I hated it. But both the obvious high status of this kind of music and my lack of knowledge of any alternative source of novelty slowly changed my preferences. I started listening to Second Viennese School composers and free jazz. The more I listened the more I liked it, and I gradually turned into an atonal music snob like my musician friends.
And then I left university and lost all contact with them. I forgot all about classical music for several years. When I listened to atonal music again I found I had reverted to my original preference. I’m now very certain the only reason I liked it was social signaling. I declared music to be dead and lost all interest in it.
When I later discovered Sethares’s work it shook my beliefs about music to the core. My whole atonal adventure was built on a mistake. We’re no longer limited by physical instruments and it’s really possible to compose music simultaneously strange and beautiful. I now promote Sethares’s work in the hope that more musicians will adopt it and create sometime great.
[1] R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt, “Tonal Consonance and Critical Bandwidth,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.38, 548-560 (1965). [2] Approximately. Note that octaves on a piano are tuned slightly sharp, because piano strings are not simple mathematical abstractions, but have thickness and other properties such that they don’t produce perfectly harmonic sound. [3] Sethares, W.A. (1993), Local consonance and the relationship between timbre and scale. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 94(1): 1218.