I would note that high school math isn’t really “math”. At least I don’t think of it that way. Maybe that’s because I’m a “rare case”: really good at math (though not super good like some people here) − 36 on math ACT, AIME qualifier—and then not at all exceptionally good at college math. It could have been psychological factors: maybe if I studied linear algebra now I’d understand it just fine (in fact, I suspect I would). That’s just the justification for my observation is all.
adamisom
Karma: 286
No. Stop. The only reason necessary is because we want more of that behavior, right?
Why aren’t we pooling our knowledge-resources yet?
.… (wall of references at the end).… I am mystified by this. How the how the heck do you even skim all of that? I think it’s awesome to have all these references, but can somebody enlighten me as to how one can do this?
WOW. This is the only entry that made me think WOW. Probably because I’ve wondered the exact same thing before (except a less strong version of course)....
If this gets upvoted highly, I will update in favor of LessWrong continuing to become more in-group-y, more cutesy, and less attached-to-actual-change-y. It’s becoming so much delicious candy!
Or both: isn’t intelligence correlated with size of social circle?
If so it really could be that the average friend is smarter than the average person.
By the way, I’m a university student, discovered Less Wrong about 6-9 months ago, have read HPMoR and some of the Sequences (&plan to read more).
Lack of curiosity made people lose money to Madoff. This you already know—people did not due their due diligence.
Here’s what Bienes, a partner of Madoff’s who passed clients to him, said to the PBS interviewer for The Madoff Affair (before the 10 minute mark) when asked how he thought Madoff could promise 20%:
Bienes: ‘How do I know? How do you split an atom, I know that you can split them, I don’t know how you do it. How does an airplane fly? I don’t ask.’ ‘Did you ask him?’ ’Never! Why would I ask him? I wouldn’t understand it if he explained it!’
And a minute later: ‘Did you ever think to yourself, this is just too easy, this is too good?’ Bienes: ‘I said ‘I’m a little too lucky. Why am I so fortunate?’ And then I came up with the answer, my wife and I came up with the answer: ‘God wanted us to have this. God gave us this.’ ’
“I’d probably suggest writing a novel first.”
It blows my mind that nobody (?) has written a sci-fi novel on alignment yet.
Which is why I”m still puzzled by a simplistic moral dilemma that just won’t go away for me: are we morally obligated to have children, and as many as we can? Sans using that using energy or money to more efficiently “save” lives, of course. It seems to me we should encourage people to have children, a common thing that many more people will actually do than donate philanthropically, in addition to other philanthropy encouragements.
To quote another user, Scott H Young, “superficial would be the right word to describe most aphorisms, as being merely pointers to a more nuanced set of beliefs”. So I’m sure it just has to do with the fact that of the bundle of qualities aggregately known as “jerks”, some of those qualities are attractive. Check out the blog Hooking Up Smart for more nuanced stuff on the idea of nice men vs jerks.
I loved this, but I’m not here to contribute bland praise. I’m here to point out somebody who does, in fact, behave as an agent as defined by the italicized statement: “reliably do things it believed would fulfill its desires” that continues with “It could change its diet, work out each morning, and maximize its health and physical attractiveness. ” I couldn’t help but think of Scott H Young, a blogger I’ve been following for months. I really look up to that guy. He is effectively a paragon of the model that you can shape your life to live it as you like. (I’m sure he would never say that though.) He actually referenced a Less Wrong article recently, and it’s not the first time he’s done it, which significantly increased my opinion of him. His current “thing” is trying to master the equivalent of a rigorous CS curriculum (using MIT’s requirements) in 12 months. Only those on the Less Wrong community stand a good chance of not thinking that’s pretty audacious.
I’m hoping that this survey reveals that it is incorrect to refer to us LessWrongers as “gentlemen”
… And yes, you may take that either way. After all, there were questions on both our gender and our # of sexual partners.
… Which is fucking awesome. The dude’s been my inspiration for at least two years and I remember reading the announcement on his blog a year ago. In fact, it’s likely that reading his blog lead me to other blogs which lead me to LessWrong. (I don’t remember exactly how I found LessWrong.)
“On the margin, you should consider having more kids. If you were planning to have zero kids, consider having one. If you were planning to have 3 kids, consider 4, etc.” Wait, I thought happiness research indicates that the step from zero to one is a decrease in happiness whereas the step from, say, 3 to 4 would be only a negligible decrease in happiness. So there’s that asymmetry, if I remember one of Caplan’s blog posts correctly.
I messaged Jim on a different platform and he promptly replied:
You can get a zipfile of card images from https://carddb.rationalitycardinality.com/card/export/images
Woot! I haven’t done this before but my plan is to order cheap, fast card sleeves from amazon, and also cheap playing cards, regular-print the card images, and do sleeve ← card-image on top of playing-card (for backing)
There’s also this currently-defunct link to buy a nicer print version than that, maybe the link will be fixed when you read this, idk: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/rationality-cardinality-beta-6
If this comment was written by a bot that produces phrases maximizing the ratio of the number of usages of pleasant-dopamine-buzz-in-group LessWrong language to non-in-group language, it would produce something like this.
I say this even though I really appreciate the comment and think it has genuine insight.
Agreeing that it should have been in Discussion.
I took the survey.
As per ancient tradition (apparently) - give me karma