AngryParsley
I think you’re right, but there’s a possible selection effect. The ones who survived but didn’t regret jumping could have successfully committed suicide later. Then they wouldn’t be around for any interviews. Some quick searching doesn’t give me any useful stats about the likelihood of survivors re-attempting.
Back in grade school, I took several real-life IQ tests and usually scored in the high 130′s to low 140′s. I’d heard of Raven’s Progressive Matrices, but this was the first time I’d taken that type of test. It was quite humbling. I got 122 on iqtest.dk. From what I’ve heard in #lesswrong, most people score low on this test.
I opened the test again in a different browser, VPN’d from a different country. It gave the same questions. That means your subsequent tests aren’t valid. You already knew many of the answers. Worse, you knew which questions had stumped you before. You were probably thinking about those questions before you started the test a second or third time.
I wish this post could be bumped to the front page every September 26th.
I’m glad you’re focusing on improving your appearance, but be careful. If they think you’re going to be a one-time customer (Which is likely, since you don’t live here. Yes, people can tell.), the staff have a massive incentive to say you look good. Bring a friend if you want an honest evaluation.
Do you also distrust neurochemistry? Caffeine has a known mechanism of action. It’s not poorly understood like modafinil. Caffeine binds to certain types of adenosine receptors, but it doesn’t activate them. This prevents adenosine from binding to and activating the receptors. Adenosine does a lot of things, but one thing it causes is sleepiness. If you increase the amount of adenosine in someone’s brain, they get sleepy. The amount of adenosine in the brain naturally increases over the day until you fall asleep. So if adenosine makes you slow and sleepy, blocking it should make you sharper and more alert. It’s no surprise that most people report caffeine having that effect on them.
So, there are a bunch of studies. There’s a known mechanism of action. There are lots of caffeine users who can confirm the effects predicted by the studies and the neurochemistry. You can even get firsthand evidence if you try the drug yourself. What more do you want?
I never thought to write a post about it, but I use similar criteria when looking for an apartment. It’s easier to switch apartments than houses, but it’s harder to modify an apartment. This means that many of the criteria for apartments are more specific. Here are some criteria I use that Yvain didn’t mention:
East-facing windows. The sun rising in the morning is great at waking me up and forcing me to keep a normal sleep schedule. Without it I tend to go on a 26-28 hour day.
Noise level. If possible, try to talk to some tenants. Try to gauge their age and propensity to make noise. I love living in an apartment complex full of older people. It’s so quiet.
Top floor. I can’t stand people stomping above me. High-rises usually have better sound insulation, making this less of an issue.
At least a block or two away from major streets. Big streets have more horns honking and are popular routes for emergency vehicles.
Fast internet access. Often, only one ISP is available in an apartment complex.
This list has slowly grown as I’ve moved to different places and been plagued by different annoyances. My current place fulfills most of the criteria, although it’s a little too close to a major street. Firetruck sirens are louder than most emergency vehicles; enough that they break my concentration if I’m not wearing headphones. On the other hand, the Internet connection is particularly fast: symmetrical 100Mbit.
this seems to be of the common subgenre of scif where any new technology must have terrible costs, and when there aren’t any plausible costs, the power of plot will provide them.
Yep. Something tells me this will be similar to caveman science fiction.
“You could trifle with your mind, using activators and redactors from your own thought-shop, and put yourself back into the state of mind you were in before the Curia forced you to experience your victims’ lives.”
“Is this some sort of test or quiz? You know I shall not do that.”
“Why not?”
Ironjoy started to turn away, but then stopped, turned, and answered the question. “If I were now as I was then, I would gladly change my self to remain as I was then; but I am now as I am now. The me that I am now has no desire to be any other me. Isn’t that the fundamental nature of the self?”
-- The Phoenix Exultant by John C. Wright
I don’t mean to offend or sound confrontational. Assuming a large audience, the extra effort required of a writer to punctuate and capitalize is much less than the total extra effort spent by people reading unpunctuated or uncapitalized text.
- 23 Feb 2010 12:14 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on Boo lights: groupthink edition by (
I spent more time figuring out gpg than guessing the password. Now to save everyone else the time and effort.
SPOILER ALERT
The password is http://lesswrong.com/lw/p0/to_spread_science_keep_it_secret/ and the decrypted message is:
As has been discussed elsewhere, Less Wrong is currently fairly unapproachable to newbies. In particular, the learning curve is ridiculously steep. People who have read a few posts are told, in effect, to read the entire archives [TVTropes] before commenting.
Suppose there were a separate discussion area dedicated specifically to those who are just starting out, or perhaps who have taken a few of the first steps down the road. When posting there, it would be considered poor etiquette to expect others to have read later material, like expecting fourth-graders to know trigonometry, or high school graduates to be able to read Feynman diagrams. Ideally there would be a series of tiers of discussion, so that people can learn the material interactively, like in a classroom, rather than doing the equivalent of shutting themselves in a closet with a textbook.
In order to motivate people, of course, we should lock up the higher-level discussion areas behind tests of merit. We should also think of some sort of standard miracles people can do to publicly demonstrate their Level Six superpowers.
Secret discussion areas don’t scale. All you need is one defector (me) and everyone knows the secrets. A newbie area or a “let’s read the sequences” thread would be handy. A delayed RSS feed of the sequences would also be nice.
I think the biggest problem with your proposal is that it’s hard to do a startup with founders who don’t know each other well. The founders and early employees will face long hours, stress, and possibly financial woes. Some background history and an interview aren’t enough to ensure that someone won’t flake. The best co-founders are friends who have worked together previously. As Paul Graham says:
And the relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be.
I’d like to propose a new guideline for rationality quotes:
Please don’t post multiple quotes from the same source.
I enjoy the Alpha Centauri quotes, but I think posting 5 of them at once is going a bit overboard. It dominates the conversation. I’m fine with them all getting posted eventually. If they’re good quotes, they can wait a couple months.
- 18 Jul 2012 9:31 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on Rationality Quotes July 2012 by (
Remember that a lot of people who get life insurance policies cancel them before they die, or fall on hard times and can’t pay the premiums. I’m 24 and healthy. I went the more expensive route and got whole life insurance, so my premiums are $64/month. With Alcor dues I end up spending about a grand per year on cryonics. Did I mention I picked what is basically the most expensive option? (Alcor whole body preservation with whole life insurance). You could easily cut that down to $300/year if you went with CI and term life insurance.
$64 * 12 * 50 = $38,400, which is a bit less than the policy of $200k. If that money were invested every month, it would end up being significantly more than the policy amount.
- 28 Nov 2010 19:15 UTC; 24 points) 's comment on Yes, a blog. by (
- 21 Jan 2010 18:04 UTC; 4 points) 's comment on Normal Cryonics by (
I have a policy with Kansas City Life Insurance:
All these benefits come with a guarantee that your premium won’t change. The basic premium you agree to now will remain the same throughout the life of your policy.
So umm… yeah. That’s how life insurance usually works.
ETA: This is the first time I’ve heard, “life insurance doesn’t work” as an objection to cryonics.
- 21 Jan 2010 7:22 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on Normal Cryonics by (
For #1, “I reacted immediately” and “I reacted when the urgency became evident” are probably the same thing for most people. I heard about the bug 20 minutes after it was announced, from the Cloudflare blog of all places. Not even USN had posted about it. I patched my servers within an hour, and spent the next 5 hours waiting for my CA to respond to my revocation and re-key requests. Apparently they were inundated.
On the bright side, I prepared for security issues like this. I used multi-factor auth for our admin tools and perfect forward secrecy cipher suites for our TLS. Even with our private key, previously recorded traffic cannot be decrypted. And if an attacker got ahold of our passwords, they would still need to steal our YubiKeys to get access to our admin tools.
Hooray for being paranoid about security.
In the Golden Oecumene, modifying minds is commonplace, so people are usually as patient, humble, energetic, etc as they can be. The quote is about changing more basic values. Ironjoy was a sociopath until the Curia punished him.
Have you read much about cryonics? If so, what are your thoughts?
I thought most people chose not to push the fat man because there is no conceivably realistic way that a fat man could stop a train, even one as small as a trolley. Although the thought experiment tells us the fat man will stop the train, our knowledge of trains tells us that nothing stops trains. When I envision this scenario, I can’t help but (realistically) imagine the trolly hitting the fat man, then continuing on and running over the five others.
See also: Ends Don’t Justify Means (Among Humans)
My co-founder and I launched Floobits, a tool for remote pair programming. We’d been soft-launched and were slowly growing through word of mouth, but we hadn’t tried to get publicity or told the world that we’re a Y Combinator startup.
We got coverage on:
Hacker News
TechCrunch
Y Combinator blog
...and a couple other places I’ve forgotten about.
I also wrote an insubstantial post about getting into YC. It doesn’t contain any special hints, just a summary of the journey so far.
Demo day is next week, so maybe I should have waited to post in this thread. :)